Happy Coast Guard Day, everyone!!!
Have to honor the Coast Guard’s Anniversary/birthday, since it is the service that gave me so much during my time on Active Duty and I am still very proud of all that they do! 
This morning I had to get up at 3:00 A.M. to drive my step-daughter to the Airport in Portland. After I dropped her off, I drove over to Back Cove to run 3-4 laps around it.
This was at 5:30 A.M., so the sun was just coming up and it was gorgeous. Of course the camera was in the car, so I can’t show you how grand it was – isn’t that the way it works sometimes.
The first lap was more about waking up the body to run and shake some of the kinks out – I haven’t run this early in a LOOOONNNGGG time and auto-pilot was still in control. I just plugged along working on my form, trying to get my hamstrings to loosen up and finish waking up. It seems that since I started running in the Instincts that my hamstrings have started to really bother me a lot.
It is something that I need to keep an eye on and see if it is the higher mileage or if it is the shoes, but I haven’t had any problems with my hamstrings until I started running in the Instincts???
After the first lap, I badly needed to use the gross port-a-potty, that had just been swamped out and spray disinfected, it was still VERY GROSS even after cleaning, but better than it was. When I started back up again, my legs had really tightened up – my hamstrings and knees were bothering a LOT! So I shut it down and went back to the car and stretched/massaged the hell out of my legs to see if I could get them to loosen up.
This took about 15 minutes before my legs felt like they were ready to give it a try again. I started out fairly slowly and picked up the pace as my legs loosened up. Finally about 1.5 miles into the second lap my legs began to loosen up and I was able to run, instead of slog and I stretched them out to see how it felt to run a little faster than normal.
I felt really good the last 1.6 and was probably around a 7:00 pace, which shows how slow I was the first part of this one.
Since there was such a gap in the time between finishing the first lap and starting the second lap (almost 20 minutes), I considered them different runs and put them into the log that way. Seemed to be the right thing to do, but I didn’t do a 3rd or 4th lap, my legs still didn’t didn’t feel quite right enough, to keep going.
I think my body is telling me that it can’t handle the rigors/miles that I need/want to do, to run/race a marathon, not just finish – this year. I will know better Monday, but it ain’t looking good. Especially since I needed to take yesterday off to let the legs rest a little and then today’s performance, really is making me look closely at that goal.
I still have to do the Run Your Thorns Off virtual 5K later today, so I think I will get out my Nike Air Flo’s and see if they bother me. This is something I want to find out, because I would like to use them as my 5K race shoes for a few road races coming up.
