Two steps forward, one step back

After my sports massage Wednesday, I was of course very interested to see how my hip would feel during runs.

I went on a short run Thursday, not quite 24 hours after the massage, and the hip felt much better, though I could still feel it at times. 

But Friday, even though I was working harder (it was hill day), I rarely felt the hip tenderness at all. When I did, I would shorten my stride, and it seemed to go away entirely. Woo-hoo!

On Sunday, Cory and I did a seven-mile run, starting with five mostly flat miles from our apartment up Polk Boulevard and back, then concluding with two miles along 28th Street.

Mostly I felt great during that run. The back of my right knee did have some twinges during the five-mile portion, which concerned me a little bit. 

The good news was that it went away; the bad news was that it was replaced with hip twinges during the 28th Street portion. I'm chalking that up to fatigue. 

So all in all, a very successful half-week ... which, unfortunately, I almost completely undid on Monday.

Monday was insanely nice, weatherwise: high of 84 degrees, low humidity, mostly sunny. All of that, plus the minimal soreness I had after the previous day's long run, meant I threw caution to the wind and went for a shakeout three-miler.

Wrong choice. It wasn't a bad run, but it was an unexpected challenge that I'm still feeling a little sore from. I felt worse after that three-miler than I did after Sunday's seven-miler.

I shouldn't have run at all — should've found some other way to enjoy the weather — and if I did have to run, I should've stuck to a route I knew to be flat, no matter how many times I've already run that route.

Oh well. I'll look at it from Cory's perspective: that I seized a good chance to "shock" my system with a weather change (which of course was what happened on race day in 2013).