Time flies when you're living life!

I'd like to think I have a good excuse for having been gone - and technically, I suppose I do - but it's really not so hard to pull myself out of my life to put a note here. For that, I am truly sorry.

So where have I been? Well. I'll tell you.

A few days before my last post, I met a man. A lovely man, found on a dating website, who seemed just my type. As it turned out, he was just my type, a geeky runner who had faced (and triumphed over) some of the same obstacles I have, including this fitness mountain. It clicked.

I won't keep you in suspense: We're getting married in September. (To each other!)

That's where I've been!

With that, let's get back to the running!

Progress has been spotty. My new-found social life has left me less motivated to push myself at the gym, and it was so much easier to just eat my way through the holidays. This malaise has put me in dire straits on the scale; it's still moving in the right direction, mostly, but it's been slow.

I'm currently sitting at 174. Six months, twelve pounds, for a total of 64 lbs lost. I'll take it, and gladly, but with the hope that I'll regain some of that fervor with which I lost the first fifty pounds.

Well, after the wedding. The dress was ordered last month, and a small part of me is very worried about having just wasted a tremendous amount of money on something that may end up being too big in six months. Yikes.

I faced a handful of layups from running, which were frustrating, at best. In late September, I came up with runner's knee, a particularly painful condition where the patella essentially scrapes over the end of the femur. Typically, the kneecap sits in a little groove at the end of the femur, and when the quads contract, the patella glides in that groove. When the hips aren't working right, or when the leg muscles are imbalanced, the patella deviates from that groove.

It hurts. A lot.

So I took time off, easing myself back into running a few weeks later. I got myself together for a Thanksgiving 5K and posted my best time to date, averaging less than 11:00/mile. It was a wicked hard run, I was demoralized early when it seemed to be taking an eternity to reach the turn-around. (And I was right; it wasn't an evenly-divided out-and-back. The turn-around was at the two-mile mark. Woe!)

Leading up to the holidays, I lost momentum, and was excited to get back down to business when a kitchen accident dealt me another injury. ...Okay, I dropped a whisk on my big toe. But it was a very heavy whisk, and it cracked right on my toe-knuckle. I walked with a limp for over a week.

I hopped back on the treadmill in early January, planning to buckle down and prepare for my first race of the year, a 7K on March 16. A little intermittent pain in the bad knee, but nothing horrible. I could work with this, I thought.

A week later, during a boot camp I'd signed up for, I got a little too aggressive with my movements. I leaped with the class, landed with my feet too wide, and my knee slid apart.

I didn't see a doctor, which I probably should have, but I'd been through it before. Sprained calf, sore MCL, etc etc. Iced for several days, wrapped well for a few weeks, eased back into slowly jogging three weeks after the injury.

And that, my friends, gave me just enough time to try and pull off Saturday's race. I managed to claw my way back to where I was in November, and I finished my 7K in 50:09, just nine seconds off my goal. I managed a pace of around 11:09 per mile; if not for the string of injuries, I'm confident I would have been well under 11:00/mi, but that's life.

To be honest, though, part of me is grateful for the reset. I'd been getting very caught up on speed, trying to whittle down my mile time, trying to pound faster, and I'd never really settled into the rhythm of running for endurance. This time around, I took a completely new approach, forcing myself to run slower, more often. And you know what I discovered? That I could run longer.

It should have been a "Duh" moment, but it was more of a light bulb moment. When I thought I was running slowly before, I really wasn't. I was still pushing. I wasn't finding my pace, letting my feet spin and simply carry me. This time, I'm discovering more about the beauty of running, and I'm enjoying it more.

So there we have it. My life in the past six months. The good, the bad, and the ouchy. Now that I'm back to running (and finding my rhythm), I hope to be back to blogging much more often.

Next up: A revisit of my first trail 5K, in May, and a foray into the world of 10Ks. Fingers firmly crossed!