Today's Halloween, last day of October. I'm not running so I won't have any more run miles to log and perhaps it's a bit interesting to review the progress since April 21st.
First we'll just put a nice big old graphic image of it:
Those first 10 miles of April were a mixture of running with walking. Mostly walking. After I started walking again following the broken tibia, I worked on building up my walking and when in mid-April I had taken a 2.5 hour walk that went a little over 8 miles, I felt confident enough that the ankle was ready to take on the extra stress of a bit of running.
So early on I just basically worked on converting the walking over into running, starting off with on running on level surfaces, then some uphills too, leaving downhills for the last. Downhill running is the hardest running on the legs.
In late May, I was running the whole time, although the distances for the most part were 3 miles or less. I was very conservative about increasing the load any and wouldn't go up over 10 miles in a single week til the second half of June. It was at the end of June that I had my first run which went over an hour of time.
Most of July still saw me running mostly 3 miles or less at a time, but some longer runs were working their way in and I began doing some more vigorous tempo runs. On July 21st, I ran a 5K in under 30 minutes, which surprised me and made me rather happy.
August I worked on building up some more miles and distances and got my longest run out to a distance of 7.5 miles. August ad some tough running due to the heat and humidity. Still I managed one week where I went 17.5 miles and I looked forward to the expected cooler weather of September.
September proved to be a lot tougher in some ways than I had expected. I ended up giving myself an extra easy recovery week after a 10K race on the 8th of September indicated that I was fatigued too much. In spite of that extra easy week, I still managed to run almost 80 miles with 23.7 miles in the last week and a long run of over 10 miles. I even had 5 runs that lasted more than an hour.
So now we get to October. I had 2 weeks in October that went up over 20 miles, the highest being 26.8 miles where I had a long run of 11.5 miles. 8 of the runs lasted over an hour in length, at this point now unless my legs are really tired I think running an hour as being almost easy and routine.
Now see, it's just been a gradual build of the miles, slowly tacking on a bit more here and a bit more there. I've even given myself a bit more rest as needed than from what I had planned. It just takes time, if you commit to setting aside some time and doing it, you then can reach a point like where I am now.
Sometimes, sometimes when I think on it, it just kind of blows my mind that I can think, "Oh yeah, want to run 7.5 miles this evening after work" and I go out and do it.
It doesn't always happen. Believe me, if you take up an activity, you'll have some bad efforts, ones where you were more fatigued than you realized. But over time, the improvements will accumulate. You just got to be patient.
And I don't know how to describe to you the feeling I had on my last loop of the park yesterday, when a big huge grin showed up on my face at the wonderment of it all.
