A Weekend of Basketball, Chruch Volleyball, and Running

1.Basketball in Champaign

I shot my first basketball game this weekend. We travelled up to Champaign to cover the American versus Illini game on Saturday. It was a long day and once I finish the photos, you can read about it on my Off the Street Photography blog. For now, here’s one of the pics that I posted.

2.Church Volleyball

This weekend was our annual church Christmas party and volleyball tournament. It’s a fun time for all of us to get together and fellowship and have some friendly competition. My wife and I are in a home group for newly weds. Sadly most of the group is much younger than we are seeing as we got married a little later in our lives. I made a reference to Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell and one of the guys in the group responded with “who is that?” My jaw hit the floor! He said the show was before his time. I’m not even that old!

We played against several different home groups and got knocked out in the second round. It was still lots of fun and very great to have some competitive fellowship with friends!

3.Running

This week was week 2 in my current training regimen for running. It has been so long since I have run consistently that I have to start off so very slow. In looking for some program to aid me in starting super slow, I stumbled upon Personal Running Trainer.

The program starts off by having you train to run a mile then moves you into running a 5K, then a 10K, then a Half-Marathon, then a Marathon. I like this program so much better than Couch to 5K because it really makes certain that you don’t over do it and injure yourself. I tried Couch to 5K and felt like it was too much too fast. So after finding Personal Running Trainer program I started at the beginning and am moving into week three.

Here is the training schedule:

4 Weeks to 1 Mile Training Program by Personal Running Trainer.com

.	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3
Week 1	45 seconds of running followed by 2 minutes of walking, repeat x4	45 seconds of running followed by 2 minutes of walking, repeat x4	45 seconds of running followed by 2 minutes of walking, repeat x4
Week 2	90 seconds of running followed by 90 seconds of walking, repeat x4	90 seconds of running followed by 90 seconds of walking, repeat x4	90 seconds of running followed by 90 seconds of walking, repeat x4
Week 3	2 min. 15 sec. of running followed by 45 seconds of walking, repeat x4	2 min. 15 sec. of running followed by 45 seconds of walking, repeat x4	2 min. 15 sec. of running followed by 45 seconds of walking, repeat x4
Week 4	4 min. 30 sec. of running followed by 45 seconds of walking, repeat x2	6 minutes of running followed by 45 second walk and finishing with 3 min. run	10 minute run

I’m rather nervous about moving up to week three as all through week two, my legs have been hurting while I run. I asked my sister, who finished her first half-marathon about a month ago, about pain while starting out and she said that she basically ran through the pain. “You hurt for about a month and then you just stop hurting…” or as I interpret it, you get used to it. This is where my problem occurs. I’m so reluctant to push through the pain because when I was in my last year of college (the class part of college) I ran cross country and went from running maybe a mile to running from 3-5 miles a day and increasing speed too! I ended the season with an 8K time of 37:37 and bilateral stress fractures to both my shins which turned into compartment syndrome and required surgery. I’ve been struggling to get back into running ever since then, the surgery was in 2010. So needless to say that whenever I have any pain in the shin area, and I have this week, I am very afraid that I am headed back down that injury road again.

I’ve been reading several blogs about pain and injury prevention and I found several things out. Pain is your body’s way of being uncomfortable and when you are uncomfortable you grow stronger. I’m not talking about the-worst-pain-you’ve-ever-had kinda pain. I’m talking about the I-haven’t-done-this-in-a-while-or-ever-so-my-body-doesn’t-like-to-have-to-move-this-much-or-this-hard-and-it-hurts kinda pain. I also learned that running hurts. It’s hard on the body and starting a running program hurts. Did I mention that running hurts? You just have to get used to pain.

I’ll still admit that even though I know these things and have read the articles, which you can find Here | Running Pain Hurts So Good and Here | Running’s Dirty Little Secret, pushing through the pain and moving forward is hard. It’s really hard, more mentally than it is physically. There are some things that I have a high pain tolerance for and others that I don’t. In this case I can push through the physical pain, but mentally not worrying that I will end up like I did in college is probably the hardest thing to get over and the single thing keeping me from succeeding in running.

This is where I am and I intend to get over this hurdle. I’ll leave you with a couple of pics from my last two runs. Thanks for reading, until next time!