I slept in a bit, and felt good and pain-free taking a few steps in the hotel room, but still felt enough discomfort in my left hamstring and groun to know this run could get cut short. Still, I drove up to Big Bear and statred out on a run of indeterminate length.
And I got about 1000 feet away from my car before a gradual ache began to emerge from the spot where my left hamstring meets the glute, right around where the original issue emerged earlier this week. So I turned right back around, finished a jog back to the car, and called it off right then and there to get coffee.
The hamstring doesn’t feel too bad at all now, with no sitting pain really other than a bit of stiffness. And that’s probably because I made a point to cut it abruptly short.
So I’m going to relax and take it easy today, and just shut down all serious training for at least seven days. I will still go to the gym and lightly cross train plus strength train as usual. The blood flow of movement and the flow-through of workout hormones can only help the healing process. But no running, while I stick to the spin bike and elliptical, on which I’ve felt no pain or other distress while using. I have a low-maintenance kilometer route at work for break walks, and I’ll just walk on breaks.
I’ll continue with psoas/iliacus stretches and other anterior hip training, as imbalances there could be key contributors to the hamstring and glute problem. But other than light stretching I’ll take it easy on the lower body for now, and see if rest can heal up enough for that to benefit more than exacerbate any soreness.
I had been supplementing extra with the Tissue Rejuvenator to see if its joint-healing properties could spur recovery (I usually take just one cap each night as maintenance), but hadn’t seen much progress. So I’ll scale back supplements to their normal levels as well.
With 14 weeks still remaining until Indy and having trained quite a bit up to this point, I’m not worried about being set back if I need to take a week or two off and spend another week or two ramping back up. There’s plenty of time and if things go as intended then I might not even notice this happened by November.
But obviously with national news rumblings about Coronavirus restrictions being restored in the U.S. due to the Delta variant, the possibility remains that Indy could down the road get cancelled or deferred, meaning it won’t matter whether or not my training is set back. It would be the 3rd marathon and the umpteenth race I’ve had cancelled out from under me during training, and it wouldn’t bother me any more than any of those did. It’s the reality of the situation and there’s a lot more to life, plus I still will have build fitness from training anyway… which is the idea to some extent.
I’m going to relax today, commute back into Vegas tomorrow, and take things from there.