Taking body part inventory

Today was a dose of reality after yesterday's half marathon. Nothing like waves after waves of muscle soreness and tightness to help you relive with vividly painful realism the previous day's events.

So yesterday I provided a recap of the day's events for the half marathon. I never mentioned the previous day's events that led me to some serious stressing-out.

My in-laws were in town for my daughter's birthday so we all decided to go shopping and visit the shopping mall Santa, hit the nearby Chuck E. Cheese and go out for dinner.

We hit the Grapevine Mills mall which is a massive outlet mall. While we're waiting for Santa to arrive, we start walking around. Stupid me forgot to bring proper walking shoes and I was in my Chuck Taylor Converse low-tops for ENTIRE DAY. Now these shoes are nothing more than a layer of rubber with a canvas shell. Minimal padding at best. They look cool, but they're not really good walking shoes if you don't already have good arches. Anyway we walked and walked...did the Santa thing...then walked some more until the noon hour when we hit CEC. I was basically on my feet for about 3+ hours in those stupid canvas shoes. My feet were killing me, my sore calf was sorer, whine whine whine. I was also starting to get stressed out that all the walking on these crappy shoes were going to have an effect on my run the next day.

So I got the chance to sit down and take a load off my feet at CEC. We were there for a couple of hours and then headed back to the hotel for a nice nap.

After the nap, we headed out for dinner with basically no destination...on a Friday night....in downtown Dallas....at 6pm....for 7 people. It really wasn't going to happen.

We ended up trying to get into Maggiano's at this shopping mall not too far from the hotel, but at that hour, they weren't taking any more reservations, nor any parties with more than 4 people.

So, we walked...and walked....and walked some more around this mall. My feet were taking another pounding (yes I only packed 1 pair of shoes other than the runners for my HM the next day). I was getting stressed out again because of all the pounding again as I could feel the soreness creeping in to my feet. We finally found a TGI Friday's that was able to seat us in 10 minutes. Thankfully they also have a pretty varied menu and I found a chicken and pasta dish that would be a good pre-race dinner for a long run the next day.

The night ended rather uneventfully but I was pretty darned stressed with all the walking I did that day, and I had no idea how my feet and legs would react even with a night's sleep.

Thankfully everything felt pretty fresh the next day.

Fast forward to today, my ankle is still pretty frickin' sore, and I'm inclined to blame some of that on the unnecessary walking on Saturday. It's not noticeably swollen, but the lack of mobility in that area makes me think something ain't right. Oh yes, I have the obligatory soreness in my quads. I'm pretty much walking so gingerly it looks like I can't bend at the knees.

I've been trying to figure what I can do as far as running is concerned for this week. If everything feels right, and if my ankle pain is gone, I might do a mile or two near the end of the week, and maybe another couple of miles on Sunday.

In between now and the end of the year I'll have to think of what my runner plans will be for 2009.

Oh yeah, one last milestone for this year that's possible is that I'm about 15 miles short of 400 miles for the year. That's about a mile a day. It's a milestone that would be a nice cherry on top of the year, but I'm not going to risk a proper recovery period to hit that milestone.