On Friday after Thanksgiving I decided to go run, my knee was feeling fine and I thought it would be okay. Well, about a mile and a half through the run my knee started bothering me again. I thought it wasn't too bad and I would just do 3 miles instead of the 4-6 I was thinking about. Well, the 2nd mile I ended up walking quite a bit, but I was thinking that it's not that bad, I can totally push through the pain. I ran most of mile 3, and as soon as I got home had bad cramps and pain in the back of my thigh and knee. It was awful.
The worst part about it was that I knew the pain was not the type of pain that you can "suck up." I knew it was a "bad" pain and I kept going. The rest of Friday afternoon was not good for me. I iced, I took ibuprofen, I rested, I cried and it hurt.
On Saturday it was feeling better, but I knew I shouldn't run on it. I don't know if I've mentioned, but over the summer I had the idea of running with a neighbor's dog. The dog is a large one (I think he's a lab) and they never take him out. They never walk him and he's very untrained. I learned very quickly that I can't run with him until I train him a little (or a lot). Well, with marathon training and hip issues, and running when I could, I had no time (or didn't make time) to take the dog for a walk.
Also, every time I would take the dog out he pulled soooo hard and it was impossible to do anything with him. At the Turkey Trot with my sister she gave me her dog's old choke collar. Her dog was never good at walking and pulled constantly, and they trained him from a puppy.
(I'm glad I don't have a large audience that reads this because I know that choke collars are not nice, and the reason they're effective is the pain they give when the dog pulls. Like I said, my sister trained her dog from a puppy and tried everything else before resorting to a choke collar. Hank is not my dog and his owners don't take the time or the energy to train him properly, and I don't want to make the time either because he's not my dog. My hope is that the he's a fast learner, he's only 1 or 1 1/2 yrs old, and I'll be able to walk him without the choke collar eventually. I also hope that a choke collar walk is better than no walk at all, which is how his owners have dealt with his constant pulling.)
So on Saturday I decided I was going to walk Hank (the neighbor's dog) and use the choke collar from my sister. He did great. He still pulls more than I would like, but it was his very first time. Actually, now that I'm writing this, I'm pretty sure I walked him on Thanksgiving day after our dinner. That walk wasn't very long, we went around the neighborhood, and since he was doing so good, I did a little extra. Saturday I decided to go for a much longer walk. We went 3 miles, and he did amazing. He's much better on trails where there is no traffic or other distractions.
Yesterday I went to the gym and ran, and my knee/leg felt fine. Today it is still fine, but I can tell it's not 100% still. I don't know why the treadmill is so much easier on the leg. Yesterday I played with the incline quite a bit to see if that was causing the pain, but it didn't do anything. I may try a run outside tomorrow and see, but stop at the first twinge of pain. I don't know how this is going to affect training and running a half marathon on Dec. 31st. I hope that all of my marathon training isn't gone and I can quickly get up to the mileage needed for a half marathon, but it continues to be an issue. This half marathon may end up being a run/walk thing.
(This half marathon is the end of the Washington Marathon/Half Marathon series I've been doing all year. I have to run it in order to get the medal for running all the others.)
Also! I almost forgot . . . my son has wanted a tattoo since he was 8 years old (that's when I got my first), and when he turned 18 he has constantly asked for a tattoo for a present. I haven't done it, I've been hesitant because he's young and it's permanent, but he's going to do it sooner or later. Well, a month or 2 ago I had the idea of getting a mother/son tattoo and asked him if he'd be interested. He said he was, but we had no ideas on what to get.
Then about a month ago I was talking to someone about it and they said to find something that means something to both of us. We don't have anything specific that means something to us both, but the more I thought about it, I came up with something, even though I thought he wouldn't be interested.
So I had the idea of getting that "song" as a tattoo and asked him, thinking he probably wouldn't like it. But he loved it. The problem has been our conflicting schedules. He's often at work when I get home at night, and he often works afternoons on the weekend and the tattoo place doesn't open until 12pm.
Well, the Friday after Thanksgiving I told him we were going to do a mother/son thing after he got off work. We went to the tattoo place to talk to them about it. I told him that we probably wouldn't be able to get the tattoo that day, but we could maybe come back on Saturday (he had the day off). Well, we were told that one of the artists had some time so could do it for us, but then we took too long picking out a font and making adjustments so we couldn't do it then. He was pretty disappointed after thinking he'd get it. And she doesn't work on Saturdays. But she had an opening on Tuesday evening and he didn't work. So we made an appt.
And on Tuesday . . .
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