Weak week

It's been a week with not much to say, but I suppose I can come up with a few words for a Monday morning. Most important, we finally turned the daylight corner; as of Saturday we started picking up minutes in the morning to compliment the lengthening of daylight we've been getting in afternoons. This phenomenon starts out slowly, with less than twenty morning minutes gained in January, but by next month the process really starts to speed up. All good news, although this year the geniuses in congress extended daylight savings time, so we'll lose an hour of the dawn's early light late in March.

Of course, with the lengthening of daylight we eventually get warm weather. What a concept, eh? Here in the northeast, we are already experiencing record warmth, and the ground is not only free from snow cover, but absent of frost as well. This is a pretty big deal, as now the earth is free to absorb the rays of brilliant January sunshine, making the nights less frigid and further reducing the chances of snow. We are far from out of the woods, but with only seven weeks until March, things are looking pretty decent. We will almost certainly see some snow, but the odds of persistent cover and weeks of freezing our asses off get lower every day.

So yeah, it's come to writing about the weather, which is what we do when we have nothing else to say. Last week I did a good tempo run on Wednesday, and then even got out on the road bike for an hour in the afternoon. I've been having some wierd tingling in my left calf on some of my runs, and even when just sitting around or walking. Thursday and Friday it was troubling me. The symptoms mirrored chronic compartmental syndrome, but this still seemed unlikely, and I suspected plain old overuse. I skipped the Friday run, and instead went to an appointment with my massage therapist. She found an extremely tight peroneus (aka fibularis) and proceeded to torture out the tension, as well as give me some tips on how to stretch and pamper this for a while.

Saturday I felt quite a bit better, and as most of you know, we were basking in 70 degree temperatures around here. I was feeling pretty cooked from work though, so rather than get out for a ridiculously long ride like many of you did, I lay about in a vegetative state for much of the morning. I finally dragged myself out on the cross bike in the late afternoon, but since it had rained a bit the night before, I confined my route to the roads around town. I must have seen a dozen other riders, a few of whom even passed my on the road. I'm old, but that still doesn't happen too often, but hey, I was just cruising around on my cross bike. I rode for an hour and a half, and probably would have done more if it weren't for the darkness.

Sunday I rode the rollers for a few minutes to warm up before stretching. I have an old pair of PVC Kreitlers, and they are significantly warped. I rumbled along for a few minutes until I couldn't take the vibration anymore. Made me feel all funny in the chamois... After an especially long stretch, I tried on my new Saucony Grid Triumph Pro IV road shoes and went out to run. This time I stuck to the pavement to keep the stabilizing load on the fibularis light. After a 2.5 mile warm up, I did one piece of tempo for two miles, the first of which was uphill, at a 7:20 pace. Following these two was an easy mile at 8:30. I was on the NRT 5 miler course, so I knew where all the splits were. When I got to the finish I decided to go around again, and I blitzed the flat first two miles at 6:40. This time I went slow on the uphill mile, then finished the last two again at 7:20. My pacing leaves a bit to be desired, but after running home slowly, the final product was 11.4 miles in 1:28, and average of 7:43 or so. My calf was fine, although both ankles are pretty tight from the new shoes and running on pavement. I expected this, and one of the reasons I ran the roads was to get ready for next weekend's Raynham 15K. The weather is supposed to start turning colder, so here is hoping the precipitation expected next weekend isn't the frozen kind. Thanks for reading.