When I got back from Arizona, I decided that I would try to rehab my IT Bands. They hurt the worst going downhill, so I thought maybe staying flat – on the pavement trails around my house – would help.  Over the course of a few weeks, I did 6 flat runs. I would do stretches on the trail every 1/2 -1 mile for 20-30 seconds on each side. It actually worked pretty well and by the 6th run I was feeling very little to no IT Band pain!  Hooray! And, it was actually fun to pound the pavement and work on my speed and pace.  I posted some of my fastest paces ever. Concurrent with this was the New Year and I decided to make a resolution.  I wanted to run 500 miles this year.  This motivated me for these 3 weeks to keep on getting out there and clocking miles and was probably my most runningest (not a word, I know) month ever.

Jan. 1: 5.2 miles @ 9:10 min/mile

Jan. 4: 6.2 miles @ 8:48 min/mile

Jan. 9: 4.2 miles @ 9:35 min/mile

Jan. 11: 3.7 miles @ 9:03 min/mile

Jan 15: 5.0 miles @ 9:34 min/mile (with MVH)

At this point, my left peroneal ankle tendon began hurting.  That’s right – the right ankle was feeling fine, but now my left ankle started hurting. I think it was, again, from doing a few runs on uneven snow. Stupidly, I ran through the pain a few days later and blasted out a PR for a 10k.  I was excited about that, but woke up the next morning in extreme pain – totally limping around.

Jan 20: 6.3 miles @9:02 min/mile (10k PR)