A weekend of beer and running

Luckily the beer reference was not all drinking. Saturday my brewing partner, Bryan, andd I brewed a wheat beer at our brewery, aka, his office. It is 5-km from my place to his, so I ran over in the morning and back again in the evening. Easy pace both times. My hips and lower back were feeling a little stiff and uncomfortable even before the running and brewing.

Sunday morning I woke up feeling not exactly on top of the world. There is no doubt that my immune system is a little run down. Cold symptoms are creepingly gettting worse and I have a sore cheek that doesn't seem to have any internal cause, i.e. an mouth ulcer. The only thing I can think is that it is a cyst or something. So far it is not too bad, but it is uncomfortable. I could also tell that I was getting that twinge in my lower back that pulls my torso slightly to one side -- when I looked in the mirror, sure enough, there was a crooked man... And the muscles of my left hip below the pelvis were tender. All this without any good reason because, honestly, I have been scaling back the running intensity and duration.

Still, I wanted to do one last decent length long run. There was an icy wind to torment us, but without that it was a glorious sunny day making the choice of attire a little difficult. I set off and was fine running at long-run pace, 5:20-5:30 min/km. I arrived at the park and met up with Gareth, Jayne and Motozo, and soon afterwards, Colin joined. I ran to about 22 km at easy pace, and that was fine. I then tried picking it up for the last 2-km lap of the park and the 6-km to home. I found it not at all difficult aerobically--I was running for periods at 4:15/km at a heart rate of 143 to 148--less than 80%HRmax, but a bit hard on the left leg/lower back. Finished up with 30 km in 2:37 and average heart rate of 129. Apart from the leg/hip tenderness felt pretty good afterwards. Later my hip was even more tender and continues so today. So it is Ibuprofen and rest for today. Hopefully it will settle down and allow one or two more half-decent workouts, but somehow I think I am now going to be concentrating on trying to straighten out the kinks so I can toe the line feeling strong ten days from now.

After lunch I attended a beer tasting at a friends's apartment. Good food, good beer and good fellow beer-geeky company. Best of all, I didn't get smashed at all. Arrived home feeling quite compus mentus and ended up watching the DVD Be Cool (John Travolta, Uma Thurman) with my two older sons.