Week 20

Ran for half an hour NON-STOP last Saturday at 10 min/mile and the knee felt good afterwards!

Watch out world, for I am back! (At least for running) This means I can put in at least a quality 9 miles a week. I told the physical therapist yesterday that I am looking to do 20 miles a week and she said "whoa." Heh.

Put in a good workout at the PT office though yesterday. Straight leg and side leg lifts at 11lbs felt good, can probably jump to 12 lbs soon. Switched the leg press up to 5 plates (from 4), using one leg, and that almost killed me. Barely finished it, it was funny walking afterwards for a minute or two. I expect to have sore quads this evening. Hamstring curls up to 3.5 plates from 3.

Did some jumps that felt a bit funny in the knee. Definitely need to keep doing those and get the knee used to jumping. This is important, as I will be getting back to dancing.

Week 19

I haven't updated for a while, but only because things are progressing fine.

I am still attending PT twice a week, though that will be scaled down to 1 visit a week in two weeks. I've been doing whatever PT exercises I can at my work gym by myself on Fridays, and that will switch to Wednesdays and Fridays once the PT visits go to 1 a week.

This week at the PT, we started on some light straight-up jumps and side-to-side jumps. This is to get my body used to the jumping and impact sensation. Running is doing a bunch of that already anyway though.

My running is not progressing quite as fast and took a bit of a setback over New Year's. I went up to 8 minutes running, 2 minutes walking, but perhaps it was a bit too fast, or a bit too early. I also decided to try to lose weight over Christmas and New Year's, which was a bad idea.

So, I ate too little (had a net calorie loss) and ran anyway, didn't quite get enough sleep, and so my body did not recover well. This malnourishment surely contributed to my knee feeling beat up on Sunday Jan 3rd, where I had to cut my run to just 0.7 miles, because my knee hurt. So I skipped my run on Tuesday and went back to running on Thursday.

This time I am keeping it to a 10 min/mile pace, strict, until I can consistently do 30-minute 10 min/mile runs without pain the next day.

Today will be another 8/2 run.

I also decided to try to switch from logging my running at runningahead.com to the Daily Mile instead. I like the social aspect of it. It's not quite as sophisticated as RunningAhead, but I don't need to be quite so anal in logging my runs anyway. Also, the DailyMile has Garmin import coming soon, so by the time I'm out running on the street, I'll be able to upload my Garmin 305's GPS data to the site. Here is my profile: http://www.dailymile.com/people/astral303

I also looked at my recovery schedule and I technically have only 1.5 months left until I am fully recovered. Yay!