On Sunday, I did something a little stupid in the name of fun. Well, that's if your idea of fun is not only running yourself into metabolic oblivion, but also beating your legs to a pulp over 13 hard miles after not having run that amount, cumulative, over the previous 5 weeks. Not what I was planning when I agreed to pace my friend through what was supposed to be around a 73min half marathon. One of us was able to achieve said goal; the other was left walking for the final 15minutes. The only good news, and I'm stretching here, is that it wasn't the calf strain that halted my efforts at just short of the 6mi mark, but a distinct lack of fitness. I guess the daily cross-training was woefully inefficient in helping maintain fitness.

It's hard to tell what is actually muscle and what is simply a knotted mass of injured tissue, but the good news is that the calf is no worse than it was before the "race," which is not to say that it's better, because it still has a huge knot that no amount of effort on my end can relax, but just the fact that I was able to run is somewhat concerting, if only in the short term. I'm going to try and run on it again tomorrow on a far more sensible easy 5 miler. I'll take it day-by-day from there. New York is out of the question for 2009, which in retrospect is actually ok because I was kidding myself that I would be ready in time to run as fast as I wanted to, healthy or not. The smarter way to do this is certainly to start out small by racing a half in the Spring, figure out a way to stay healthy over the summer, and have a full 6 months to build the strength necessary to handle Marathon training over a 12week period. It's not what I was hoping to be doing in August 2009, but just being able to run again, at any pace, will make me really content.

In the mean time, I have a mini-vacation to plan, some friends to watch at World Champs, and a perfectly good pool that I am once again become far too well acquainted with.