How does this work...

For the last week I have tried to limit my running in order to heal me calf / Achilles. This weekend we are doing the Xterra which will require me to run a 4 mile trail run after the swim and the bike.

So today I decided to do a short 5 mile “confidence” run. The purpose of the run would be to just give me some confidence that my calf / Achilles would be “OK”. In preparation, last night I iced my leg for a few hours, I’ve been stretching that area multiple times each day, and this morning I again iced the leg.

So, I start out on my path around a 10/min mile and for the first mile my leg felt ok. I could feel a slight tightness, but nothing that I couldn’t deal with. Just over a mile into the run I needed to pass a gentlemen that was mowing the path and probably picked up my pace just a bit, well that caused my calf / Achilles to tighten right up. Enough that I needed to stop running for a few seconds to let it mellow out just a bit.

I’m very stubborn and was not going to give it up. When I first started running 3 years ago, I would run through leg tightness pain every day. I would just do whatever it took to hubble down the road and get my run in. One of my tricks was to tell myself that my other leg was starting to hurt just a bit – that would cause me to “not” think about the pain and things would loosen up. So, today would be no different – I just kept running.

Well, guess what – it started to go away and by the time I was done with the 5 miles – I only had a very slight tightness and now it feels much better. So, how does that happen – what piece of magic am I missing? Whatever it is – I’ll take it.

So my confidence run did work – just hope it isn’t false confidence…