Injury

Running plans

Well hello hello and welcome to WEDNESDAY! —-> I just typed that and it sounded so overly perky and annoying that I decided to keep it as my intro haha. Sorry 😉 [I do talk like that in real life occasionally-eek]

I feel as if I haven’t talked much about running on my blog lately and I guess it was for a reason. I didn’t really have any plans for completing a race. I have still been running (20-35 mile weeks) and I’ve been trying to work out a racing schedule. Yeah, it’s been fun. I was looking into running a 20 mile race in February, an 30k in March, various 5k’s/10k’s in April and a marathon in June. 

Mostly, I want to run a marathon, so that is what i’m going to focus on! DUH. If I follow a 18 week training plan, that mean’s i’ll start training for the June 2nd marathon in the last week of January. I want to follow the training plan as closely as possible and some of the winter races i’m looking into just don’t match up with the plan/milage. You win some, you lose some (literally…).

The toughest part about running in January-June is the crazy Pittsburgh winter/spring weather for long runs!

So it looks like I am going to be running a half in March (like I did last year.)I’ll also be running a lot of 5k’s/10k’s in April and a marathon in June. That is the plan, if I don’t get injured!

As my road racing season gets closer I will be posting a more exact schedule of all the races i’ll be doing. For now I will leave you with my 2011 year end report from Daily Mile. 

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How do you deal with the inclement weather for long runs?!

Pondering my nutrition

As I said in my last post, I enjoyed a good 7 mile run Monday night but I woke up feeling pretty awful yesterday. My joints were achy and my stomach hurt the whole day. I might know the culprit:

It was so good though.

I find that I can have about 1 serving of dairy a day and then I feel like crap if I have any more. This makes me sad because I love cheese, ice cream, yogurt, milkshakes etc. but I don’t know if it is worth the pain.

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Another nutrition issue I was pondering was vegetarianism. I feel that once I quit eating meat, limited dairy and eggs, I started to see an increase in injuries and a decrease in overall health. Some days I wake up and feel lethargic despite getting adequate rest, eating enough, and even decreasing exercise. I am wondering if this is due to not getting certain nutrients from animal products.

I have been a vegetarian in the past (circa freshman year of high school) and I actually became really sick because my body wasn’t absorbing protein.

(Little freshman me looking tired)

I guess what I have been thinking about is that vegetarianism and veganism might not be for everyone. This makes me sad because I am a vegetarian for moral reasons. But if not eating animal products is harming my health then I guess I will have to put aside moral beliefs.

 I scheduled a doctor appointment for August 9th to address these issues and to get blood drawn to see if I am missing any nutrients, especially ones derived from animal products. I’m not sure if being a vegetarian would cause any of the issues I am dealing with because I always make sure to get enough vitamin D, protein, fat, carbs, calcium, etc.

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What do you think of vegetarianism and health? 

Any suggestions for me? (I promise I already eat enough every day)