Running Blues 2: Disney and the Indy Run

When we last visited my running tale, I had just finished my first 5 K, and was wondering what the future held. It was late spring 2008, and the weather was beginning to get warmer, and my milage started to get higher. Not by much, but my weekend runs started getting longer. I did run another 5 K, and improved my time by 2 minutes, but 3.1 miles was beginning to be somewhat easy for me, so I set my sights on a longer run - a marathon. Yes, thats right, not a half, but a full marathon. Somehow my buddy Ben had talked me into running a full marathon on October 18 in Indianapolis with him. Being the relative newbie that I was, I thought this would be no sweat, so we selected a starting date for training and set our sights on Indianapolis. Before our official training began, I was chugging out 7 mile long runs on the weekend with ease, and I welcomed the challege of he Hal Higdon training regimine Ben had suggested. When we started training, things were going great - until I took a long scheduled trip to Walt Disney World. I decided to take that week off of training, and really overdid it touring the parks, even rubbing some nasty blisters on my toes. I tried to do too much too fast, and did not use a touring plan (Len Testa's Unofficial Guide touring plans really do work!), and ended up do a BUNCH of extra walking the first few days of the trip, and I paid for it the rest of the week. Anyway, once I returned from my commando trip in The World, it took me a week to get back to running, and I slowly came to the realization that my full marathon dream was over, I had to knock down to a half, which in the end was a great decision. Over the next 3 weeks, I adjusted my training to fit the half marathon, and before I knew it, started feeling a little pain in my right knee (more on this later). The pain didn't slow me down any, but it seemed that karma was against me, because my Garmin Forerunner died about the same time, so I had to basically run the same routes that I knew the milage to every day, which got really boring. But, the training was going pretty well, and I felt prepared to tackle 13.1 miles. Next time I'll fill you in on the highlights of the race, a great weekend spent with friends, and the aftermath.