Liberation

It's good to be running again after a 6 day injury recovery break. Although it was only a short 5K run followed by a 2K plus cool down run, I felt liberated again. It's never easy resisting the urge to lace up and run when you have a wife who is equally fanatical about running. Watching her lace up and going for her runs is sometimes even more painful than the injury I was nursing.

I'm glad that I managed to resist the temptation and let the knee heal. I'm just not as young as I was and trying to pretend that I can just run the pain away is an exercise in futility. To be honest, I was kinda worried there for a bit. The pain that I had in the knee was pretty bad. I've never had knee issues before and this one was pretty serious. I could hardly walk without the knee screaming in pain.

I'm a stubborn person and would refuse to see a doctor but I was more than prepared to go see a specialist if this pain persisted more than two days but thank whatever gods that look out for silly and stubborn runners, the pain healed naturally and taking the legs out for a short stint this evening was pure bliss.

Though my fitness was a little suspect from the long break, the legs held out fine without a single twitch throughout the run. It'll take a few runs for my stamina to get back to normal but otherwise I'm pretty happy with the outcome.

Taking Jamie's and also the wife's advice and rotating my shoe selection to the Brooks Launch (which I haven't run in for close to two or three months now) was a good a idea too. The shoe definitely has much more cushioning and is way forgiving on the legs, especially for someone coming back from an injury. I'll be using the shoe for the next few runs before rotating back to either the GS or the GOrun, both of which are shoes that are close to my heart.

With the SCKLM looming just around the corner, I'm going to take things easy with maybe one more long run this weekend before tapering off for the event. I'm scheduled to run the Team Malaysia Fan Run a week before the SCKLM which I'll treat as a fun run, since it's only 7K. No sense screwing myself up for that run with the SCKLM just the following week. I'm only running it in support of Nithi, a personal friend and race director of the event. The fact that I'm also printing all the bibs and marketing paraphernalia is also another reason why I'm running. Sometimes I do love my job :D

Though I'm a lot more confident of attempting the marathon, the nervousness and 'butterflies in the stomach' feeling are still there nonetheless. As it gets nearer, the more butterflies appear. Though I don't have a target for the race except to finish, I do still have a race strategy all drawn up in my mind and hopefully it'll see me through to the finish in one piece. But all said and done, I'm just going out there to enjoy myself and have fun :D