Vacation over

In honor of a holiday built on eating, napping, and watching football, Leah and I ran very little this last week. Sure, it's sad to see the mileage graph take a dip, but in this case it was sort of necessary.

I think after the marathon, when we were ready to start running again, we were so excited to not have to train (i.e. we could run for fun) that we had energy to burn. All of our runs were fast - faster than we had ever run. This was great fun, but it ended up being pretty hard on the legs. By the week before Thanksgiving, when we had finally made it up to around 30 miles per week, my shins had begun to hurt...a lot. And it wasn't just that they were sore, it was that they felt like all the strength had gone out of them. Also, they weren't just sore while I ran; it hurt to walk as well. Leah was having the same problem.

Shin pain is evil. It isn't like it is impossible to run, but it is definitely not fun. The insidious ache sucks the motivation right out of you. The question of "why am I doing this" comes screaming to the forefront. So, to put it simply, this is something that needed to go away.

I guess the first thing that is always recommended when the ol' legs start to hurt is rest, and so rest we did. We took Thursday, Friday, and Saturday off and cut our Sunday run down to ~5 miles. Hopefully this rest will help a bit and the shin-ache will go away. It is one thing to run through pain when there is a marathon on the way...it is quite another thing to do it when you are just trying to run for fun in the off-season.