Oh, My Aching Legs

Did seven extremely creaky miles yesterday. The hard half marathon effort on Sunday left me pretty sore for this run, so the goal was to basically just get the legs moving and hopefully finish the run feeling better than when I started. I'm not sure if I felt better when I was finished, but I didn't feel any worse, so I guess you could say it was mission accomplished. It seems that my legs kind of go into a numb state when they're extremely sore they were for this one. They aren't real happy with what's going on, but they're too sore to really object too much.

This morning I did 17 miles on the way into work. This actually was a surprisingly good run. My legs are still sore, but for whatever reason, it didn't really affect the run much. My pace stayed under 7 for the entire run and I was actually getting stronger as the run progressed. I can't say that it felt great, but I never got to the point where I just wanted to stop, so I guess that's a positive. Since I spent a good portion of last month whining about the weather, I will say that lately the weather has been pretty close to perfect. In the morning, we have been in the upper 60's/lower 70's with no humidity, so that definitely helped today.

As for the half-marathon, I'm still going over it all in my head. The last two years, I ran a small half-marathon by my house just before the Chicago Marathon and finished both years in the 1:17's. The guy who won it the last two years ran in the low 1:15's both years. I remember thinking last year, that there wasn't much I could do to ever really compete with him. I was just resigned to the fact that he was faster than me. That isn't true anymore. I'm really having a hard time getting my head around it actually. Hopefully, this is just beginning.