The last half of my marathon recovery week was spent in Miami and wasn’t quite as light as I’d planned. I took an extra rest day Thursday but ran almost 40 miles the next three days.
Friday morning, I headed out on a run towards Key Biscayne. The bridge was a little farther away than I thought and I ended up running almost 11 miles. I was feeling good and my pace picked up every mile. By the time I finished, I was running sub-7’s.
Yesterday brought two short runs, both relaxed and fairly easy. An increasing pain in my right knee has me worried, though. That pain got even worse during today’s (warm) mid-afternoon 15 miler, and is still pretty bad now as I write this from the plane. I need to get serious about icing and exercises as soon as I get home.
Mostly, the reason for the extra miles was just that it felt good. I was enjoying the new scenery and burning off all the beer from the weekend made the mornings much easier to handle.
But I have to admit I was chasing numbers a bit too. I wanted to hit 200 for November (I did — 205.9) and put myself in position to rally and hit 2,000 for the year (I’m at 1850.2 now and so should make it, barring knee issues.) I’m going to listen closely to the knee and back off if need be, but I’d really like to finish 2009 strong and hit the mileage goal.
Good luck with the knee, you know what to do. Congrats on the numbers! Very nice mileage for you.
200 for the month is strong! Running in Florida is so much different than New York or Colorado. I also ran there last weekend and felt great as well.