Hello!

If you're still here and reading, hello! Sorry for the extended absence. I haven't had much to write about on a blog primarily devoted to running, seeing as I haven't run in 19 days. That's my longest bout of not running in quite a while, and it's going to continue for another month.

I was officially diagnosed with a stress fracture in my right leg about 3 weeks ago, and I've been in a very attractive boot since then. My orthopedist said no running, cycling, or swimming, in the interest of healing as quickly as possible. Admittedly, nothing feels quick about this. I have one more week in the boot. Once I'm out of it, I have a week to go before I can begin cycling and swimming. Two weeks of cross-training and I can start running again. Slowly. That's going to take a lot of discipline to not add the miles too quickly.

I've been trying to figure out how I got here, as a stress fracture is typically an injury of overuse. I was adding my miles gradually and really wasn't changing the frequency of my runs, so the only culprit left is speed. I didn't know speed could be a culprit, but it makes sense. I really didn't do any legitimate speedwork, but I was running faster miles. Plus, those sub-8:00 miles I would bust out at the end of some of my runs may not have been all that great for me. Who knew? (Well, I'm sure plenty of people knew, but I wasn't one of them.)

To add insult to injury, literally, I have been unable to find a buyer for my marathon bib, which leaves me out $95. I went from having two potential buyers to none, which is rather disappointing. This makes for the second race I've paid for and not run in the last year -- that's not cool, especially since I'm in grad school. I'd like to run the Baltimore Marathon in the Fall, so I think I just have to close my eyes, bite the bullet and sign up, because running a marathon is one of my goals for 2012; and I'm not going to give up this easily. Even if I can't eat for a month because my grocery money pays a race fee! (Ok - that's a total exaggeration, obviously. Don't worry!) Another goal was to finish the year with 1,000 miles under my belt shoes, so I'm very anxious to get back to running. I don't know if I can cover the 1,000 while recovering from an injury, but I'm sure going to try.

The goal now is to train smarter, not necessarily harder, which means I'll be incorporating more strength-training into my regime. For now, though, I can only dream about running, which I do, regularly.