Adventures with an Average Ironmom

What’s the number one rule in injury prevention? Listen to your body. There’s a difference between being sore from an increase in exercise and feeling the onset of a potential injury. When your body is giving you red flags, you’d better listen to it, especially when increasing volume, intensity or time/distance of exercise. That’s exactly what I had this weekend. A Red flag. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday I had three solid run/walks, and was into my Run Disney Springtime Virtual Challenge Weekend. Friday night I felt a weird pain in my right foot that persisted into the morning…like the bone was out of place or something. I haven’t experienced anything like it before, and I wasn’t sure I should run on it. And while it wasn’t that bad, I could imagine that if there was something slightly wrong I could probably make it worse, and maybe make it really worse if I tried to run on it. I waited to do my 10k until later in the day Saturday, and finally made the call to wait until Sunday to con...

 The Tuesday workout plan is 10k Tempo Runs. Because I've been mostly walking, I want to gradually up my game with running to avoid injuries while having a fun system to follow to keep things fresh. So my plan for the next few weeks is to go from a one hour interval run on Tuesdays, to a sub 60 min Tempo Run by my first race day in Florida, which is 266 days away. Intervals are repeating increments of a faster and slower pace. You can make the intervals the same or varied (fartlek), and have a casual tracking system like a rate of perceived effort or use a timer for more precise tracking. This morning I used the speed bumps on my Pine Trees run. I ran to one, walked to the next for one hour. I like a place to do intervals or tempo runs that has a slight incline but that's not too hilly.  You can really use anything to run between. I might use the light posts on a road or the highway, trees on the Ane K or even painted parking stall lines at Home Depot or Costco when I need to ...

  Today feels like a great day for a new adventure. And I’d like to take you along with me on this one. It’s an adventure of truly Ironmom proportion. A fitness endeavor that will take months of preparation, facing fears and achieving lifelong dreams. In 275 days I will toe the starting line of the first race in a seven race challenge. I’m not sure I will be able to do it. But I sure am going to try. I’ve had the dream of doing a RunDisney live event since childhood. I would rip RunDisney ads out of magazines as inspiration to one day wear a costume and run through the park. Tinker Bell. Princesses. Mickey and the Gang.  For years I have participated in Run Disney Virtual races from here in Kona, not having the time or priority to check this one off my bucket list. Not to mention how hard it is to even get into these races these days. For a while, the live races were suspended during the pandemic, which is why the Virtual races became so popular. This year, both Orlando and An...