Back On The Pavement Again!

   Yesterday, for the first time in about six weeks and only the second time in the last two months or so, I got out and ran.
   Although the residual healing still has a way to go, the Efudex face treatments I'd been undergoing have come to a conclusion and so now I am able to return to running as well as the gym. If you actually want to see what the treatment and healing process looked like you can make a quick trip to my other blog, "Neanderings", and take a boo at the "Man On Fire" postings--there's a bunch of them!
   I had no real goal or plan with the running I did yesterday, other than for the fact that I knew there would likely be a fair amount of walking involved and I had given myself permission to do this.
  

What my legs actually look like...

The running was difficult.
   More than anything, I quickly developed this pain in my chest I wasn't used to. This began less than a kilometer into the run and briefly gave me cause for concern. You always want to pay attention to chest pains and I made a pretty constant assessment of it as I ran. After awhile I put it down to more of a lung issue than anything. I attributed the discomfort I was having to the fact that I'd lost a lot of the meagre supply of cardio I'd previously built up and that I was also now running in the cold, rather than the superheated temps I'd experienced over the summer. I remember having an issue in this area last fall when the weather turned cold and this felt very much the same.
   I also seemed to be having unfamiliar stride issues---my feet felt as though they were pounding down on the sidewalk. This then would shake the whole rest of my body. Nothing felt really comfortable yesterday! And to top it off, there was this niggling little pain on the inside of my left knee that I'd never felt before.
   Eventually the chest pain and the striding issues and the knee pain seemed to more or less resolve themselves and the running became a little more comfortable. I still decided to curtail the running sooner than I'd planned--I'd set out on a 5k route in my neighbourhood but decided to take the short way home, changing it into a 3 and a half k run.

Is this in my future?

   All in all, though, it was good to get out again and work up a sweat. It had been awhile! Really not sure what my running plans are for the foreseeable future, there are no races on the horizon. I have a 2014 goal of running a 10k somewhere so I know that I'm soon going to have to start upping the mileage. It also feels as if I'm starting from scratch but that's okay! Just good to be out and running again!