Happy New Year!

At the end of 2010 heading into 2011 one of the goals I set out for myself for the year was to run 1000 miles. It seemed like an easily attainable goal, all I had to do was run 84 miles a month. Thats just shy of 20 miles a week, or 5 runs of 4 miles a week. Sure I can do that, especially when you consider weekend long runs are going to be at minimum 10 miles. Or so I thought. Throw in pneumonia that doesn't let you run for a month and a half, time off for random pains that you don't want to turn into full blow injuries and then only six runs in the month following the Chicago Marathon Catastrophe and suddenly you find yourself with one week left in the year and needing 26.5 miles to make it to 1000. Even that doesn't sound hard at all since my plan for the last run of the year is a 16  miler leaving ten miles for the rest of the week. Thats 6 days to run 10 miles! No problem  Problem. Sunday morning, Christmas day I set out to run a nice easy 7 miles as recovery from the previous days 15 mile run. Right out of the door I could tell it was going to be a struggle. I managed a mere mile and a half before some pretty harsh pain in my right hip caused me to call it quits for the day. NBD right? still 5 days left not counting saturday's long run. I decided to take monday off and see how the ole hip felt Tuesday. A little rest never hurt. Tuesday arrive and it was still sore walking from time to time and definitely stiff if I sat for any period of time. I decided I'd spin at the gym for 40 minutes to take the impact out of the equation and hoped it would be alright. Wednesday it was feeling better but I figured I could do 5 mile runs on Thursday and Friday and still be okay so I let it rest Wednesday again. I decided the treadmill would lessen the impact on the joints so I knocked out the first of my planned back to back 5 milers on the oh so boring treadmill. Seriously. Boring. I don't know how people run on those things regularly. I had headphones on and a tv with the Notre Dame Bowl game (a dissapointment BTW) and I was still more ADD than a kid in a circus tent. During the run I wouldn't say I was it was hurting but I could tell it wasn't right. I suppose it is still considered pain then but on a scale of 1-10 it would be a 1. Friday arrived and I was still sore. I realized that hitting a 1000 miles isn't as important as if I do more damage then good so I took Friday off and decided Saturdays 16 miles wasn't going to happen, I'd have to downgrade the mileage a bit. I went into Saturdays run planning on 8 and seeing how things felt. No signs of pain 4 miles into the out and back course and I decided to push it to 5 giving me 10 for the day. I got to 5 and with no pain still I was convinced to go out another mile and tack on 12 for the day. Darn peer pressure. The route we took Saturday I'm pretty sure hit almost every hill in the area and some of them were quite steep! This wasn't bad for the way out but the last hill in the last mile I sure did feel that hip pain! On the plus side though it was the only time I felt it. I iced it and popped som ibuprofen when I got home from the post run breakfast (I love breakfast). It was a little stiff all night but not really painful so that was good. Especially since I was planning on a fun run, no pressure half marathon this morning :-)

One of the more fun events on the running calendar is the One One Run. It happens every year on New years day 1/1 at 1 o'clock. A nice way to run off the hangover from ringing in the new year and it starts late enough that you don't have to drag ass out of bed uber early. The run is a 2.2 mile loop through a park that you can either do one loop or two. Being the ambitious runners the EPIC CREW is someone decided we needed to go farther and turn it into a full and half marathon using the 4.4 mile double loop as the end of our runs. It was named the Polar Bear Run or PBR for short which appropriately ended with us drinking ice cold cans of PBR :-) I had an issue with one of the zippers on the bottom of my tights this morning that caused me to arrive late so I ended up running most of the 8.7 mile pre One One  by myself which thankfully wasn't too bad because I remembered my ipod. It was a great run and the hip didn't feel too bad but holy cow was it windy and cold!!!!! The run consisted of an out and back course. The out wasn't bad because the wind was at our backs, but the return was brutal. The wind and sleet was right in your face for at least 2 miles. I found myself looking sideways rather frequently to keep my eyeballs from icing over! Being late actually worked out in my favor because I got back less than 5 minutes before the One One started and I didn't have to stand around for 15 minutes like the punctual people did haha suckers. After finishing the fun run in 1:43:05 I sucked down my can of PBR muy rapido! It was cold standing outside and I didn't want to turn into an ice statue.

Enjoying a cold PBR with a few of the CREW



The PBR tale as told by Garmin



So I came up 9.5 miles short of 1000 in the 2011 calendar year....but.... last year I didn't run on new years day SO that means with todays PBR half that I did break 1000 miles in the last 365 days! I'll take that as close enough for a win! I can do that because it's my Blog and I checked with the only board member (myself) and I said it counts. Even though this year I barely made it to 1000 I've decided my first goal for 2012 is to double that number and shoot for 2000! I've been working on eating a healthier diet which will hopefully give my immune system a leg up and I'm going to work on not hurting myself by overtraining and getting a stupid injury. that being said I'll take a few days off in a row this week and hopefully this hip thing will be sorted out. I'm a guy and we don't like going to the Dr so I'm gonna avoid that if I can but I suppose if the rest this week doesn't help then next week I'll get in and have it looked at. Can't hit 2000 if I start off broken.  Hope you all had a wonderfull New Years! Here's to 2012 and the good times to come!

Oh and I'm still working on a post to list my other goals for the year and my next over due race recap will be shorter than the last for sure. I'll regale you all with the tale of my first 25k, the 5/3 River Bank Run.