Faster and faster

While trying to come off an injury, lessons in patience and restraint are hard learned.

Yesterday I ran for 5 miles on the track at 10 minutes per mile because i was keeping my heart rate below 80% in order to not over train. That went ok, after all I was trying to recover from a beating of a massage therapy session two days ago..

Today's planned run I was worried about because the leg was a little tight during the day....

I got to the track, stretched and then ran a quick quarter mile (1:59/8 minute pace), walked one. Ran another quick quarter mile (1:46/7 minute pace), walked another. I continued this way for 3 miles and finished with my quarter mile split at 1:39/6:40 minute mile pace! I've not run this fast before - even during interval training (which is what this morphed into unexpectedly).

I stretched on the walks and did a number of strengthening plyometrics while walking.

At the end I stretched a ton. I felt great.

Got home and got the evening routine started after gobbling down somewhere around 1,000 calories to recover.

Then I sat down on a chair with my right leg (previous trouble leg) at an acute angle from the chair to the floor.......

All was well until i stretched a bit after getting up... The tightness was incredible - I thought I was going to break something..

I'll be slowing down again after passing the rolling pin over my IT Band 20 or 30 times tonight....

I'm thinking I might swim tomorrow... Mike Phelps' Olympic performance in the pool is inspiring me :)

Either way, I'm getting a bit faster while also improving the decrease in the number of heart beats per second when i finish exercising (measured as the change in beats per minute between the end of the exercise and 2 minutes later). Currently I am trending a drop of around 42 beats per minute. It's a really good way of measuring fitness level. The beats per minute dropped in a short period of time indicates your recovery rate from difficult exercise.

Enough about that technical silliness.

Assuming all goes well and injuries stay away, this is all great news to anyone following along.

Stay tuned!