Hal Higdon Novice 1: Day 1

So today is the official start to my half marathon training.  That's right.  We are 12 weeks out from the St. Jude Half in December!  Oh my goodness!  I'm fighting a knee injury right now.  I ran a little under 4 on the treadmill, aka Satan's Sidewalk, Friday and suffered for it this whole weekend.  Every step I took was accompanied by a loud and painful crack on the outside of my left knee.  So this morning I dug out my old knee brace and ran with it today.

I'm doing Hal Higdon's Novice 1 Half Marathon Training schedule with a slight bump so that my long runs are on Saturday instead of Sunday.  And since I'm an overgrown kindergartner I spent this morning making myself a little stick chart so that I wouldn't miss any runs.  What?  You know you'd do anything for a sticker too.  Plus, we're still kind of potty training the little Princess around here so I have tons of sticker packs hanging out around the house.

So today's run was 3 miles.  I don't know why it was so intimidating but it was.  I'm not sure if it's because I know that this 3 will eventually work up to 13.1 or if I was just nervous about my knee.  The weather has also been a little funky so I wasn't sure if it was going to be burning hot and I'd be forced to run on the treadmill so I packed both the outside running gear (garmin and ipod) and inside running gear (iPad).  Luckily we are still enjoying some nice in the 80s weather so I hit it outside.

Someone recently told me that trail running was better for your knees.  That someone needs to be found and smacked in the face.  I set out for a little bit of trail running in the park behind the Y based off this advice.  But it was killer!  The grass was tall, the ground was pitted, and there were giant limbs that blew out of the trees over the weekend's storm that had to be leapt over.  At times I was terrified my ankle was going to break.  The plus side was that the loop around the park was about a mile so at least my first mile went quickly as fear was my constant companion.  Ha!  For the second mile I did my standard loop around the Y but coming in I was doing battle in my head and decided that I should out and back my last mile to give myself some variety.

Tomorrow is supposed to be 2 mile run or cross training.  I have been enjoying a Zumba class on Tuesday but with a lot of lateral movements I'm wondering if that's been contributing to my knee pain.  Will have to ask the almighty Google about that...

Today: 3 miles in 31:22