Flirting with my injury

Its been a funny couple of weeks running wise.

I'm running my first ultra in July so it's starting to seem quite close, and I've been trying to step up the amount of training I'm doing. I've probably not been doing too much extra mileage, but I've been doing it in bigger runs. I'd also taken to doing some of my shorter runs over my local hill, with some barnstormingly fast descending - by my standards anyway.

At the end of May I did three runs of 18 miles in the space of 10 days, and my body pushed back suggesting this was a bit much.

I've always had a few issue with my right hip, and this is an injury I've flirted with over the years, thankfully without it ever blossoming into a long term relationship. It seemed to view my three long runs in quite quick succession as an invitation to take things to the next level, and quite cheekily induced its friend my right knee to join in.

I'm not used to experiencing pain when I'm running to the extent I want to stop, so took this as a sign I needed to ease back. I don't really know what is wrong with me. Dr internet seems to keep talking about something called an IT band, but running too much doesn't seem to help and running sensibly seems to keep things under control.

So I had the best part of a week off, and have run only slowly and steadily since then. The key focus is that I need to do a long (30 miles(ish)) run soon as prep for my ultra. In all honesty I'm not sure that physically I need it, but I've had it planned in and I think my confidence on the day will suffer if I haven't done at least one marathon + length run.

So nice and slow running with resolutions to do lots more stretching and to work on my core strength seem to be helping. I listened to a podcast last week in which Marco Consani sagely remarked that no-one stretches when things are going well - I emphasised with this.

Had a lovely run in the sunshine on Tuesday evening complete with baby llama, although I feared for the worst when I saw a buzzard near the start (not a good omen previously) I felt OK so hopefully moving in the right direction.