Back on track?

After taking the whole week off of running, and attempting to take care of my leg as best I could, things were feeling great yesterday. And, as today happened to be a scheduled run with the Galloway group (and the first one where we are to be put in our pace groups), I thought I would give it a try. You know -- keep things pretty light, don't work too hard, be on the lookout for pain and whatnot. The bottom line is that it mostly worked.

I got to the start about 10 minutes before we were scheduled to begin, and found my pace group. Somehow, since my times last week were so good, I ended up in a faster group than I would have thought. I got put into the 11 min/mile pace group, running with a 4/1 run/walk ratio. And I was thinking that would be OK -- it's about what I've been running during the week, so how bad can it be, right? And the run itself wasn't that bad (I'll get to that in a second), but I got a little intimidated when I heard "we're pacing two minutes slower than the actual race pace".

Say what?

They want me to run NINE minute miles through TWENTY-SIX miles? That's faster than my fastest ever 5K pace!

Oh, boy.

But, I figured that I would give it a shot and see what I could do -- and besides, we had already started the run, so it was a little late to grab another group. And so I went. The scheduled run was 4 miles. And it felt OK. My shin felt a little sore after about two miles, but it mostly went away by the end of the run. It was either that, or I was distracted by my sucking for air at the end and didn't notice my leg hurting. But after a couple miles, we also realized that we hadn't found the turnoff to start heading back to start... so we went another way. It turned out that we didn't go too much farter than we were scheduled to go -- we ended up at 4.62 miles... in 48:20. Average pace was 10:27. And I didn't want to kill myself at the end. My body may have tried to die on its own... but it wasn't voluntary.

It is now a few hours past the run, and I'm attempting to take care of things. I iced my leg when I got home, and am definitely taking it easy. It still doesn't hurt that bad, but I think it has now hurt long enough that it's time to see the doc. I'll be making an appointment tomorrow, and we'll see where things go from there.

Gee, I hope they won't have to amputate.