Monday, September 10, 2012

Pullups, Puppies & Pain

I'll start with some news that you may be most interested in: the well-being of my 1-yr old lab Apollo. In my previous post, I mentioned that he was having some physical problems (being barely able to walk, being very lethargic and not eating). We rushed him to the animal hospital. They could only speculate on why he was acting as he was. He had his blood drawn (which came back clean) then went on pain meds for a few days. The meds helped a little. He improved slightly, but was still sluggish. This past Saturday, he started showing signs of life, so I shut down the meds. Yesterday, he was bouncing off the walls and seemed to be his old self (miraculously), so I'm hoping we're out of the woods. We had to take him for a walk for the first time in over a week just to burn off some of his pent-up energy. I still have no idea what his problem was. I'll walk him a few more times before I take him for a short run.

Just a quick update on one of my goofy little PR quests. Three weeks ago, I set a new PR for pushups in a week (1005). Last week, I decided to try the same thing with pullups. My old PR was 273. I managed to crank out 305* last week...and "boy, are my arms tired!" I know I won't be able to set these little PR's indefinitely, but these are the sorts of things that motivate me to train.

Now, regarding the 'pain' portion of the blog post title. I ran with my running club on Saturday for the first time in ages. I managed 6 miles on a relatively hilly course. As you may know, hills don't play nice with my heel. However, this run went well. I kept up (for me, currently) a solid pace (8:07) and only had some slight heel discomfort.

Two days later...today...I ran 5 miles, with all miles easy except mile 3 (7:29). My heel was still angry about Saturday's jaunt and made it clear about halfway through the run. In hindsight, this should have been a shorter, easy day.

I'm running a local 5k this coming weekend. I don't expect a fast time (gee, I've never said THAT before), but as always, I do plan on putting forth the effort. I'll do an easy run on Wednesday, then shut it down until Saturday's race.


*Real pullups. Slow up and down. Not those cheating, kipping things the Crossfitters do.

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