Listen to Your Body

So last week I finally got back into my running streak. I ran 6 days. Not long, 2-4 miles and then one long run which came out to about 5 miles total. It was great, I was feeling great....until that last long run. Went running in my old sneakers, I knew I needed some new sneakers but I've been putting it off due to the whole not wanting to spend money thing. I figured I'm fine, it's really not that far and I've been doing really well with my strength training program as well. About three miles in I was still feeling pretty good, I was making decent time (I'm not very fast to begin with), my tunes were shuffling in a pleasing order, and my Zombies app was making things more interesting. About 3.5 miles my hip started to ache a little, no big deal... I'll be fine. Then, as I was coming up the mountain, my knee and ankle started to ache too. Well, I'm almost home, so I pushed through, not that I had a choice, no one was home to come get me if I needed them to. I finished the run did a mediocre stretch and hit the showers, didn't think anything of it. The next day my hip is still aching and my knee feels out of whack... so I decided to stretch everything out trying to see where that ache was coming from. It's been a week since that last run, I've run once since then. I don't think I injured anything, probably just stressed things but I learned my lesson. I will never again run in old sneakers, nor will I increase my mileage so quickly again. I found some help at the NEHRSA conference that I attended this past week in figuring out where some imbalances may lay (my tibialis anterior) and am making the strides to fix the problem. My message to all you folks.... don't push through pain, read and learn about your activity of choice, and pay attention to what your body is telling you. Now, when I say don't push through pain, I'm talking about a deep ache or a white hot flash of pain. Burning in your muscles while performing an exercise is normal and it means that you're working them but there is a huge difference when there's something wrong. Hopefully you'll just have to take my word for it rather than experience it for yourself. But if you do experience it, take the time to heal and rehabilitate, don't just keep on keeping on through the pain you'll only make it worse.