A Minor Setback

The past few months have been really hard on my body. My training for the upcoming marathon next month has taken its toll on my legs. And now my IT band is acting up. But its nothing severe, if anything, it could be worse. I am actually surprised that my body has been holding up the past few months as I have been increasing my weekly mileage and doing more hill repeats. Last week I started to feel some tightness in my right leg and started to do more stretching to help ease it out. But after a 10 mile run the following day, I felt the pain in my IT band and knew it was time to take a short break and let my body heal. Experience has taught me that it is best to listen to your body than to keep running it into the ground and risk a even worse injury. And this is not my first experience with IT Band Syndrome, so I know what I must do to get through it and get back to my training. And quite honestly, I am not even disappointed or mad that this happened. This small break from running is most likely going to be for the best in the long run. It will allow me to also take a mental break from the daily grind of marathon training and refocus myself. As of typing this entry, It has been currently three days off from running and today will most likely be the last depending on how I feel tomorrow. But as I stated before, I am impressed with how much of a beating my body has taken to this point and has kept going. I have great expectations for this marathon, but I wont let it be the end of the world if I don't perform up to my expectations on race day. There will always be others marathons in the future. So I am going to continue to take it one day at a time and focus on the small goals that will eventually lead up to the bigger one. One of the best lessons that running has taught me is that its not enough to just train hard, you also need to train smart!