Posts Tagged ‘running after injury’

It was
scary
thrilling
joyous
a little odd
fuckin’ amazing

4 x (5min run/ 2min walk).   Much to my surprise, I didn’t feel clumsy, creaky or slow and aside from the huge novelty factor of “OMG, I’m running!”, I felt like me.  I stopped to stretch the quad out during the walk portions (I feel like I should still baby those muscles) but it was amazing to run without a wince in sight.  It’d been so long.

What was really interesting is that yesterday I checked out Daniels’ Running Formula to get a hint of how much I could expect my paces to have deteriorated.  The great Doc has a handy chart of factors by which to multiply your pre-layoff VDOT to get your ballpark current VDOT.  It’s based on the amount of time you took off, whether you cross-trained, even weight gain if that’s an issue.  For my situation, the multiplier is .931 which brings my VDOT from 49.6 down to 46.17.

In layman terms: before the layoff I was in 1:32:10 Half shape, now I’m in 1:38:10 shape.  That comes out to about a 30sec/mi hit.  I always run by effort anyway, but it was fascinating to see how close it was, around 9min/mi.  I would have expected it to be more like 9:30-10:00 so this was a sweet surprise.

As for the next few days, tomorrow I’ll do a continuous run of 3 miles and if that feels good, I’ll repeat it on Saturday, then Sunday will be a day of rest.  This works out perfectly because I have quite a weekend ahead.  It’s the Philadelphia Marathon and a group of dear internet friends will be here, some to race and some to cheer.

The racers will be Chris (my pal who just moved to the area) along with Ron, Mere and Nick (he’s the only one I haven’t met yet, can’t wait).  Then Amy, Stevi and Chris will be my houseguests/fellow drunkards/cheering partners.  So expect some fun photos when next I post.

Have a great weekend everybody, thank you so much for all the support during my whiny time, and to everyone else running Philly (I know there’s a bunch of you), Good Luck!