Back To Running and Into The Cold
I've been looking forward to today for pretty much two weeks now. Today is the day I got back to running after giving my hamstring some time to heal up and it went about as well as I could have hoped. I got a nice 3 miler in this morning as the sun was coming up and was almost entirely pain free, which is more than I can say for any other run that I've done in over a month, so it certainly feels good to start getting back into some run training.
To try and avoid further issues, I'm going to gradually get back into my previous routine of 5 runs per week and instead start with 3 or maybe 4 if I don't feel like I'm doing any physical damage. The challenge is going to be keeping up with the lifting that I have been doing in my weeks off from running because I'm making a little progress and want to keep that going. I don't feel like quite back at 100%, but I'm a sight closer to it than I was two weeks ago when I could barely finish a 3 mile run due to pain in my right leg.
As I said earlier, I was running as the sun came up today and I started several minutes before daybreak so the temperature wasn't exactly ideal being around 37-40 degrees. It wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting though. I knew I was going to be in for a chilly morning when I was planning to get up early for a run and that mental preparation was probably the most difficult part of the process.
I've found that if I layer my shirts and wear gloves and a hat, I'm quite comfortable even if I'm still in shorts, especially after the first mile and I've got the blood pumping a bit. The biggest part of that for me is definitely the gloves though because my hands are always the first thing to get cold and there's no good way to warm them back up, at least relative to the legs and torso which will naturally get warmed up with the run. I also found out the hard way that putting cold gloves on already cold hands is probably about the worst thing you can do short of carrying around some ice in your hands.
At any rate, today was encouraging both from a physical comfort level and from assuring myself that cold weather is no reason to avoid running, even in the dark, early morning. Tomorrow, I plan to have a post up that was inspired by a blog post that a friend of mine made while he's studying abroad in China and is related to an idea I've been kicking around for a bit. Also, this weekend I am going to post the things that you will probably forget to take to a race - or at least things that I forgot and you may not think about as much. As always, thanks for taking the time to read Run and Drum!