16 days away - Pittsburgh Marathon!

The journey has been long and the road has been tough, May 4th, is coming soon, Pittsburgh Marathon is soon to be here! 

This has been an interesting training season. Because I came off of my high of 4 marathons last year, 3 of them in the fall, I felt like I didn't need to train as hard. Instead of starting with everyone else in January and running in that bitter cold I decided to stay in the warm gym until the beginning of February. Once February rolled around, I already felt behind all of my peers. I had some catching up to do, but I was confident it could be done. All this winter I ran about once a week, usually on the weekends with Steel City Road Runners. never anything over 10, just a nice run to keep limber and see my running friends. 

This season has also been rough because my work schedule sucks and I work 2nd shift all the time, so miss every group run pretty much. :( Luckily I have a friend, Amy, who was off Fridays a lot, as I was so we did a lot of long runs together, which was great. Long runs are always, always, always better with friends. Over the past 2 months I got in 2 -20 milers, which was great, never had I done that in a racing season, but it led to unwanted problems. Around mile 15 for both runs, I began getting bad calf pain, my calves felt like lead. On the latest 20 mile run, I was in so much pain at 19, I had to stop, sit down on a rock and massage the hell out of my calves. I thought it was lactic acid, but it's not, because I don't why very well what that is. LOL. Us runners tend to think we know it all and all there is to know about running and injuries. After some further research and some help from friends it has come to my attention that I have been slacking! Slacking in icing, foam rolling, using enough electrolytes, and slowing down on my 'slow runs'. Hopefully increasing these practices will lead me to a successful finish in Pittsburgh on the 4th!