Taking A Break From "Running For The Sake of Running"

I haven’t trained from a running perspective with any regularity since about early October. Even then I was limping to the start line of the Portland Half Marathon with an injury that started when I ran Ragnar last year (July, 2012). Now I did get in quite a few runs on the “Australian Walkabout”. My goal was to average about 8-10 miles a week, and I hit about 8.5 miles. Those runs were generally more about the scenery than the pace, although it’s fair to say that about 4 or 5 stand out as me testing myself and my fitness while we were away.

To put things in perspective, it wasn’t as though Marc and I weren’t active on our "Australian Walkabout". On the contrary, Marc swam a bunch, I ran over 120 miles and we hiked/walked 340 miles over the course of 3.5 months. That’s not too shabby. Oh, and we kayaked, biked and visited almost every Crossfit in Australia. Well, almost....

Since we have been back, I have been fortunate to be able to resume my 3-4x/week Crossfit regimen plus I have been running about once a week for about 3-4 miles at a relatively easy pace. This is pretty positive since I had to deal with a pesky broken hand and subsequent surgery when we returned from our trip.  With the hand/wrist precluding me from doing any extended running, I decided to get that injury that I mentioned above fixed. Fortunately it is getting better but we still have a long way to go.

The general fitness work is going to come in handy since I found out on Friday that I was randomly selected to run a very popular ½ (and HILLY!) marathon this fall. It should be a fun time as I will be running with at least one good friend and I know a bunch of other folks participating in it.

So now ‘running for the sake of running’ is going to take a back seat. It was fun for the past 9+ months, but time to get back at it, "get my run on" with my buddies, join my TN Multisports mates for track workouts and be more thoughtful about how Crossfit and running intersect as they are both important to me.

I did a track workout about 10 days ago, which was a start, and then yesterday morning, I doubled-up – 5 mile run and then hit Crossfit after for a workout of 18+ minutes. I definitely felt pretty beat after, but I was pleased that my leg/hip seemed ok during both workouts and post. I see more stretching as part of my future.

BTW someone posted a great article on Twitter about newbies and Crossfit. What I liked about it the most was she talked about doing whatever keeps you going back for more physical activity. If Crossfit isn’t your thing, find something that is, makes you smile when you’re done and are going to be motivated to come back to.