Week??; The Reluctant Yogini

I haven't posted a training update in over a month.  I've considered myself injured since the end of July which is a bad place to be when you are marathon training.  I started a pretty time consuming course of treatment with a chiropractor.  It is a long story but we eventually targeted tight hip flexors pinching on my femoral nerve as the source of all my woes.  My leg would hurt when walking and also the first 3-4 miles of any run.  If I made it past that point, it would loosen up and I would feel stellar.

What a conundrum -- the longer I ran the better I felt if I could only muscle through the beginning pain.  I was in a strange land, walking the line of the injured and the non-injured.  One one hand, I couldn't do any specific pace work or speed work.  I couldn't walk without pain for most of the day.  But on the other hand, I could knock out 20 miles and end feeling super.

Are you injured when you can run 20 miles?  I felt bad whining about my hip when so many people can't run at all with their injuries.  But at the same time I've been training at a sub-par level, merely keeping my mileage and endurance base up.  It wasn't nearly as satisfying as the type of running I enjoyed the beginning of the summer.

I was getting pretty disenchanted with the lack of progress my leg was making after tri-weekly chiro visits for a month.  I think my doctor was starting to sense we had hit a wall.  She had been suggesting I attend a hot yoga class and I would mentally brush it off as there was no way you were getting me into a yoga class.  I guess she had played her last card because she gave me some tough love and more or less forced me to take a class.

Soure:  Lululemon.com

That's right.  I went to a yoga class.

Last week Thursday I went to my first class.  Naomi was my yoga buddy and almost literally had to hold my hand our first class together.  I was so nervous!  I didn't want to go to yoga.  I didn't think it would help and quite frankly I almost didn't want it to help.  I didn't want to like the yoga and I certainly had no plans to do this on a regular basis.

I didn't die during the class.  Can't say I loved that first session but I did enjoy it and wasn't averse to attending again.  On Friday I went for a run, came home, and tweeted this:

In eight days I went to six Bikram yoga sessions and my leg went from 40% improved to 95% improved.

If I only knew then what I know now.

On top of that, I actually like and dare say have a major crush on Bikram yoga.  I'm planning on incorporating it into my normal routine and hopefully it will get my leg back to 100% very soon.  More importantly, I hope it balances me out a bit to prevent injuries down the road.

So here we are the day before my 29th marathon.  This is not going to be the race I hoped it would be.  My training was going so well a few months ago that I was tinkering with the idea of trying to PR.  That isn't happening.  My original plan for Half Moon Bay was to at least set an aggressive time goal (perhaps a 4:10) to gauge where I was as we got closer to Two Cities in November.  That isn't happening, either.  I'm going to go out comfortably and take whatever my legs give me.  I'm mainly hoping for a pain free run.