Backing Off--just a bit

It seems that these past few weeks things aren't going as I had hoped. I was planning on running 3k daily, Monday through Friday and a long run on Saturday--but that was not to be. I've got a pain in my left ankle, last time it was my right ankle and it took several weeks to heal. However, this time I'm pretty sure that the problem was caused not by running, but when I accidentally hit my foot on the bed frame on Monday evening. Trying to be a hero and running too hard on Tuesday only made it worse.

Three kilometers per day, total distance this week: 12k. About average for this month.

               HR           Pace                Cadence

Monday    -   157    6:50 min/km  11:00 min/mi    84

Tuesday   -   160    6:37 min/km  10:39 min/mi    88

Wednesday -   156    7:29 min/km  12:03 min/mi    85

Thursday  -   151    8:05 min/km  13:01 min/mi    80

I took it easy on Wednesday. The pain subsided after about a kilometer warm up and I almost talked myself into training through it instead of taking any rest days. Perhaps stress has something to do with this injury because after a relaxing good phone conversation with my wife on Thursday morning I really felt pretty good, though I took it extra easy to prevent making things worse.

Since Friday was a day off work I decided to wait until later in the day to do the run, but after walking to the market I realized that I'd better take the day off and forget about doing a long run on Saturday.

So this shouldn't be as bad as when my right ankle hurt last month and I don't think it is a running injury this time, but I'm going to back off on my workouts--just a bit because I don't want to just stop and rest. One strategy that might work is to run every other day and see if things get better or worse.

An interesting observation is that the Polar RS800sd measured all of the runs this week 2.9k instead of 3k. Not a big deal, but I'm running the same course so to keep things consistent I'm calculating my times for 3k.

I guess that in the big picture it doesn't really matter too much if my training distance is off my 0.1k as long as I'm getting in a good workout. I'm currently not preparing for a race, unless you consider getting my cholesterol count down a sort of a race. What is starting to bother me though is that I'm running around in circles every morning in order to stay healthy enough to sit in front of a computer in a dark room the rest of the day.

Five weeks to go on this job and I'll be home.