My left foot

As endearing as the Academy Award wining film My Left Foot is... (just go with me on this one Daniel Day Lewis is amazing) it is also currently the biggest thing impeding my running.

Last Sunday Tyson and I went for a 9 mile run from Congress Park through Cherry Creek North around Washington Park and then back to Cheesman Park. The run as a whole was pretty good, I felt strong throughout the whole thing. That night I was wearing my cowboy boots when I noticed that my left foot was feeling sore on the outside, as if the tendons in my foot are super tight.

As is my way of handling these sorts of things, I ignored it because I AM GOING TO RUN THE MARATHON IF THIS KILLS ME!

So I ran on Monday around Cheesman Park and at first everything was great. This is how it always works in the movies, everything is totally fine, the adorable family is taking their vacation in a small town in the south and out of nowhere their guest home is terrorized by a flesh-eating ghost who in reality is only looking for a glass of milk but he is such a scary ghost that no one is willing to actually listen to what he is saying! So there I was, perfectly happy on my small town vacation of a run when the scary ghost came out of nowhere and was basically stabbing me through the bottom of my foot!

I told Tyson about it and he told me to take it easy so I did until approximately yesterday morning because I signed up for the Turkey Trot 4 mile race at Wash Park. Tyson ended up running it with me which was great because he pushed me to run faster and also because he could take a look at my foot when I was done to see what was going on.

After the race Tyson looked at my foot and is convinced that nothing is really wrong with it.

So this morning I got ready to go on my run, and plotted out a relatively short path of 6 miles since I knew my foot had been hurting. I made it a whopping 1.5 miles before I had to stop. It felt like I was running on sharp rocks with no shoes on.

Sub-optimal to say the least.

Holy cow, I ran 30 miles this week!

So the past few weeks, my life seems to be completely consumed by running. It's all I do. If I am not at work, sleeping, or eating (see previous post)I am running, or talking about running, or thinking about how far I'm going to be running and what trail I will take. It's really kind of sad.

But there is a silver lining, and that comes from the obsessive-compulsive, data-driven mind of Tyson, who has had me track where I'm running and how long it takes me to go over the past two months. So to start, this is what the spreadsheet looked like:



Notice how short each of my runs were.

Now fast forward to this week when I hit, wait for it, 200 miles!



And that is interesting at all, to me at least, but it doesn't have any flash to make you wonder what is going to happen next! I feel like I could use a Hollywood special effects team to make this running blog more interesting, because I fear I have built up this excitement in my mind and you're going to see the next picture and you're going to be "Really? I scrolled all the way down the page for this?! Do you know how many muscles I had to use to control my mouse in such a fashion so as to allow me to see what was coming next and all I got was this picture? Seriously?!?"

Well, here goes:



This chart shows how far I've run so far, and how much time I have left before the big race!

I know, I know, not that exciting, but it is a really good motivator for me to have something for me to look at that says, "you have to run far this week, because you don't want that line to point down!"

Thanks to Tyson for the obsessive-compulsive, data-driven spreadsheet!