perspective

It's all about perspective.
I have been a little bummed lately. At the end of September, I started training for this half marathon (the race is this Saturday, December 12th) and have loved my training. I had been feeling great and running better than I ever thought I could. Then a week and a half ago I start having IT band issues and I am so frustrated. I want to go into this race feeling like I'm at the top of my game. I know that this is not the Olympic trials and I am not some world-class athlete, but when I compete in something I want to know that I am doing the best that I can do. So after a tough week of running, where I was in some pain during my runs and absolutely hobbling around after, I was nervous about my longer run today. I am caught between wanting to follow my training plan to the letter to ensure that I am ready... and not wanting to push myself because I don't want this injury to force me out of Saturday's race. So I planned to do six miles, but thought I'd push it to eight if I felt up to it.
But I live in a hilly area and completely forgot that my PT suggested I find a flat course for this run until I was already running the first of many hills. See, the hills hurt. I mean, running hills rarely feels awesome, but with my ITB/hip pain the hills can be killer. So as I was in the midst of the half-mile climb to leave my neighborhood, I quickly nixed the eight-mile plan. My run was okay. I felt decent enough, but with every stride my hip hurt from the time my foot hit the ground until I pushed off again. Around mile five I started to feel disappointed that I was hurting and that my pace was pretty slow (I thought I was doing 10+ minute miles) when running had recently been such a great experience for me.
I'll admit I was about to start a little pity party when I remembered a blog post that read recently, which I had written in January of this year. In this post I was bemoaning the fact that I couldn't run a mile. One mile. See, I had made good running progress last fall after recovering from my broken ankle, but I got pneumonia for the holidays and running was out of the question for a while. How's that for a little perspective? I couldn't run a mile, and less than a year later I'm banging out six miles and feeling bad about my ten-minute mile pace? Not for long. I realized that while dealing with an injury so close to my race isn't ideal, it's out of my control. Things don't always go our way. All I can do is go into that race on Saturday and do my best; injured or not.

I finished my six and a half mile run with an overall pace of 9:54 per mile. So much for the pity party.