I am back!

As some of you know, this has been a very trying and probably most difficult training cycle in my relatively short running career. I have this bad habit of completely stopping after a big race. This happened again after my last marathon in the fall of 2006. In the summer of 2007, I tore my hamstring water skiing which set me back even further. After about 10 lbs of extra weight and lethargy set in, I decided that I needed that running jones back. This meant signing up for another marathon and a new goal to motivate me to get out of bed and on the trails. I chose to do St George and set a lofty goal for myself, a 10 min PR. I started to run some again in mid April and joined Team Apex in May. The training went really well and felt stronger and faster every week for about 6 weeks. In late June and early July, I started to feel poorly. My hip was killing me and I had no aerobic capacity, a classic case of "overtraining". In retrospect, I think it was a combination of my work schedule, lack of sleep and too many hard workouts too soon. My hip was so bad that I couldn't walk down the stairs at my house withoug pain and holding on to the rail. At this point, I was pretty low and feeling sorry for myself. I came very close to shutting it down completely after a bad short 5 mile run that I could not finish. Fortunately, with the support of my wife, brother and PT, I kept going. I lost a good 4 solid weeks of traing and had a lot of doubts about being able to run the race in Oct. I got a bit of confidence back at the Payette lake run, when I was only 4 mins off my PR and felt like I had some left in the tank when I finished. Then came a bad run in Vegas last weekend. It was hot and hilly and I barely finished and at a very slow pace. Yesterday was a great run and it gave me a great deal of confidence for the race. Murali and I ran together at a good pace. I ran 20 miles wit the first 15 miles at about 9 min pace and the last 5 miles were at 8:01, 8:20, 7:40, 7:48, 7:43. I felt great! It's good to be back!