LIAR!

Ok, so I lied. It was beautiful outside when I got home from work tonight and I was feeling great, so I decided to do a short and easy run focusing on keeping my heart rate as close to 146 BPM as possible (my recovery ceiling). You'd be surprised how difficult it is to run at 70% or less of your heart rate reserve. I had to slow to a walk several times when it went over 150 BPM just to bring it back down!

I went 2.5 miles in 28:25 (pretty slow, but remember that I walked several times), and my average HR was 147 - almost perfect! My knee felt pretty good, though there were some occasional twinges of pain. If I focused on my form I was able to run mostly pain free, so I'm pretty sure the problem is being caused either by my running form, my shoes, my weight (185), or some combination of the three. I really need to get a new pair of shoes and start rotating them in. I'll try to do so within the next week or so. I'm also working on losing some more weight. I'd love to be down to 175 by the date of the Madison Half Marathon, which is only 5.5 weeks away. That's just under 2 lbs/week, which is very do-able at least for the first 5-6 lbs.

We'll see how I feel tomorrow and Saturday. Perhaps I'll just do another easy run but add a couple more miles to it if I'm feeling good on Saturday or Sunday. I could really stand to get on the bike a few times in the next week as well, so I'm really hoping I wake up without any knee pain tomorrow.