Well, it looks like I may have turned a corner with my achilles issue. We had our annual family vacation in Wildwood, NJ this past week where I decided to test the tendon a bit, and I'm happy to announce that it passed with flying colors.
I managed to cover 10 miles every morning for 7 straight days. There are no hills in the Wildwood area of Jersey, but each run consisted of 5 miles of beach running, about 1.5 miles of boardwalk running and the rest was on paved bike paths and streets. So the achilles received a sampling of three different surfaces each day amd it held up just fine. The average pace ranged from 7:25 to 7:48. The tendon still doesn't feel 100%, but it's quickly getting to that point.
The testing continued this morning as I hit the Meshomasic Forest with O'Toole, Sattler and Byram. This was the first time that the achilles has encountered hills in quite a while. But again, it held up fine for 8.8 miles at a sluggish but trail-appropriate pace of 10:10. Once again, we got ourselves hopelessly lost in the forest. But it wasn't nearly as bad as last time; we weren't forced to flag down any cars on Route 2 this time, I didn't have any terrific wipe-outs and Sattler only dropped a half-dozen f-bombs this time (in stark contrast to the last time we got lost).
It was great to run with the the guys again. We spent most of the run debating the building of cell phone towers in South G'Bury and enjoyed watching an amemic O'Toole acting like a goof ball, which was thoroughly amusing until he got us lost. Unfortunately, the team has very underwhelming fall racing plans. With the great exception of Byram tackling a mind-numbing 50-mile trail race next month, none of us have any racing ambitions until the Santa's Run in December. Ah well! That's what happens when you get old and injury-ridden; you focus on very long-range planning!
Comments