R.I.C.E

and not in the healthy carbohydrate sense of things. But in the Rest. Ice. Compress. Elevate. sense of things.

Yup, that's right. I'm a real runner now; I have my first running injury. (Well, first injury more serious than blisters and sore hip flexors, that is.) I have self-diagnosed (with lots of help from Val) that it's a sprained ligament. We think it's a minor sprain (no actual tear of the ligament) because I don't feel unstable on it.

But, it does mean I need to take at least a couple days (and maybe longer) off of running. Right now it's compressed and elevated. It's been iced and will be again.

Today was supposed to be my 5 mile day. I made it about 4.1 miles, which is kinda impressive (and maybe pretty dumb) given that I started really feeling the pain shortly into the second mile. I thought, though, that I was just irritating it by having a different stride because of running more slowly for the long run day, so I picked up the pace on mile 3. Then when I was done with mile 3, I figured I was most of the way there. But mile 4 was a lot of hills (I ran over to the High Park area to look at some addresses that are advertising apartments) and shortly after the mile 4 point, on a steep downhill, I realized that the pain was real and that the type of pain it was meant that I should stop running not push through. So, I did.

I don't regret not stopping at 2 miles, though. I'll probably never know whether it actually made this minor injury any worse and I do know that I pushed through for another 2 miles when I had a good excuse to stop. And if I'm ever going to make it to 13.2 miles, there is going to need to be a lot of pushing through.

Since today was supposed to be a long run day, it was also supposed to be a slow, conversational pace day, so I didn't worry about my pace at all at any point (which is actually really nice and makes running more enjoyable). But my watch recorded everything for me, so I might as well share:
Mile 1: 12:37 minute mile, 136 bpm heartrate

Mile 2: 13:35 minute mile, 143 bpm (my legs were kinda hurting this mile so I slowed things down to give them a chance to loosen up; on hindsight, i might have hurt my knee at the beginning of this mile when i did a quick direction change when a car i was going to pass behind stopped suddenly.)

Mile 3: 12:23 minute mile, 145 bpm (this is when I increased the pace for a bit to see if it helped my knee)

Mile 4: 13:38 min mile, 151 bpm (hills drove the heartrate up some and also slowed down my pace)