Thirty

I'm going to gloss over the face that I haven't posted in over a week...
Last week was pretty epic.  I ran three times!  A first since starting this little adventure.  I'm pretty proud. 

Last week I was lamenting that my knees hurt.  Now, achy knees is something I'm relatively familiar with, my knees weren't the greatest when I was running in high school.  I remember the exercises that the doctor told me to do (I'm not doing them often, but I remember them), I'm icing and I'm taking Ibuprofen.  I also googled just to see if there was any more up to date information out there that would help me out.  Runner's Knee is pretty common, and I feel, totally manageable.  I found that I should probably lay off the hills a bit.  This made me sad. Since I'm only running one mile I found as many hills as humanly possible to run.  My morning route had two, the route around my office was 3/4 uphill, and since I can't seem to get my high school coach out of my head, I'm not walking up (or down) those hills. I also read that strengthening my quads will help, since the pain I'm feeling is above my knee.

So, last Friday I laced up my shoes, and jumped in the car to run on a FLAT paved trail near my house.  Honestly, this hurt a little.  Not only did the drive take longer then my run but I couldn't loop in the trail, i had to do an up and back.  So I saw a lot of the same people on the way back that I saw on my way out.  Do they know that I only ran a mile?  Are they judging me?  Do I care?  They don't know me, what I'm doing or where I am in my running career.  Still, mildly embarrassing. At any rate, my knees didn't hurt nearly as bad after that run as they have on previous runs, so, looks like I'll be finding more flat routes.

I'm quitting Curves today.  Did I tell you that I was a member of Curves?  I have nothing against them as a whole, I think it's a friendly, safe, non-intimidating place for women to work out.  But if I'm really going to get in on this running thing I really need gym equipment that I can use to focus on muscle groups - like legs and arms and where I can jump on a treadmill when it's too crappy out to run.  And I apparently need to work on my quads a bit.  I'm rejoining 02 Fitness soon.

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting anything about any strength training.  Well, you're right.  I'm avoiding it.  I simply don't want to.  So there.  I've been lying to myself by saying that I need to ease back into running and let my body rest.  Ummm... but I'm only going to get stronger, better, faster by working at it.  I'm scared. 

In other news:  I turned 30 this past Monday!! *Gasp*  I'm not handling it very gracefully.