Injury Update: 5+ Mile Run!

I've been making good, consistent, slow progress since December. On December 20th of last year, I had my first "straight through" run without planned walk breaks - before that, I started back running by doing (run 3:00, walk 2:00) x2, and then I progressed to (run 8:00, walk 2:00) x2. My first "straight through" run in December was 17 minutes. The next week was 20 minutes, and the next was 23.

I took a (probably much needed) break from running in mid-January when I went to Israel for 10 days: there I swam in the Israman Triathlon in the Red Sea, did a LOT of walking, but didn't go running. After that, I picked it back up, and here's what the last 6 weeks looked like:

• Week of 1/20: 2 runs of 23 mins, and a 3rd "test run" at the end of the week of 29 mins.
• Week of 1/27: 3 runs of 25-29 mins.
• Week of 2/3: 3 runs of 30-31 mins.
• Week of 2/10: REST WEEK: 2 runs of 20 and 30 mins.
• Week of 2/17: 2 runs of 30 and 33 mins. (And a swim meet.)
• Week of 2/10: 3 runs of 32-33 mins.
• TODAY (start of week of 3/3): 1 run of 36 mins for my FIRST RUN OVER 5 MILES!!

That's right! Today I went 5.33 miles in 35:56! (Then I did a 0.33 mile cool down for a total of 5.66 miles covered.) My legs felt good!

Here are 3 final injury thoughts:

• I'm trying to run "loose." I think I really tense up when I try to have good, quick footstrikes, and I'm trying to avoid that. It's helped my hip. (I think.)

• I think of all the strange things that COULD be hurting me, the biggest is actually doing some of the eccentric quad exercises that I first started doing back in September or October. They helped me get a LOT stronger a LOT quicker, which helped my legs pull things back into their correct placement. But now, I think spending over 10 minutes doing slow quad moves (2 seconds up, then 8 seconds down for each rep) is tugging on my hip somehow. I don't get sore from running, but I get achy and I feel like I need a DEEEEEP massage in the evenings after doing those exercises. I need to re-evaluate those exercises.

• Finally, I've been really trying to stretch good, including a lot of hip flexor exercises. I just tweeted this a few hours ago:

Oops.

Here's to being smart and adding on mileage nice and slowly! I hope this progress keeps up. I can be over 45 minutes by the end of this month, and then I can start thinking about some speed work for the late spring multisport races!