Injury

Injuries are not fun. A lot of times athletes wonder how they even got to the point of injury. One minute your running your best times ever and the next day something hurts. This is exactly what happened in my case. I was feeling great, running some of the best times in my career and one day I went for a run and my calf started hurting. It was a familiar hurt, I felt it about 2 years ago while training for my first marathon. My first thought was, not again, last time I was not able to run for 5 weeks. What did I do to hurt myself this time? The answer to that question may never be answered but there does seem to be a pattern. Up to the point of injury I had been training hard and fast to increase my speed. I had a 10K coming up and my goal was to go under 40 minutes. Things were looking real promising. In my training I was doing a lot of speed work and not very many LSD (Long Slow Distance) runs. I think that my body was not quite ready for the jump in speed and that I was on the brink of injury for a while. Last time I had this injury I had increased not only my speed but my volume not to mention that I was running more a week than I had ever run in my life. Anyway, this is probably typical of most athletes. The ones I know are impatient and overconfident sometimes. We try to push our limits not only in racing but in training and often ignore our bodies tell tale signs of needing rest.
So again, just like last time, I have learned some valuable lessons:

1. Listen to your body. It knows when it is over trained.
2. Be patient with gains. They never come as fast as you want them to but they do come.
3. Have a recovery plan and be religious about it.

As a side note: I did run my fastest 10K although it was 1 minute over my goal. 41 minutes is not too shabby I think.