More running, achilles issues, bionic ankle
Last week after some runs, I had some a pretty sore achilles in my left leg (same as broken ankle). I had to walk the last nearly mile of our Dillard scouting run. So, I decided to go see the physical therapist (Hannah) again. She got to work on it, and then luckily I had two days of business travel with no running, followed by a weekend of no running, but a road ride and some PT, push-ups, etc. That seems to have worked it out mostly. I ran Monday, and only on the very last descent of the steep Willamette section of Ridgeline did it even vaguely start to re-occur (but very mildly).
Today I went in for PT again, and after Hannah did some work on it, she then applied this, uh, well, bio-electric type of stimulator thing:
That stayed on for about 6 hours, which is how long the battery in it lasts, at which time you simply take it off. Here's hoping it helped.
At this point, the scouting we've done for Ridgeline Ramble is essentially complete. I realized that the last segment or two of the first 10k is going to be brutal. I haven't run it, but I believe it's essentially the full uphill from the bottom of the Fox Hollow Ridgeline chunk that is nearest Fox Hollow Road. That is preceeded by a bunch of downhill on pavement. Not going to be my favorite section, that's for sure, but oh well. I'm still really looking forward to it. I've never done a trail running race (and not really any running races, last one was back in college), so should be interesting.
Finally, I've really been getting the itch to do some truly longer runs, like 2+ hours. I know I'm not supposed to just jump from having only done 1 hour runs up that much, but dang I'm interested to see how that'd be. I really want to go down and run Brice Creek, but I want to run a long while given it's a good hour drive to get there. I expect it's going to be tougher terrain than I think, as it's a fair bit of little ups and downs, some roots, etc. I'd like to aim to do this in June, so we'll see. I'll chill and of course not plan to go up to the waterfall, that'll have to wait until I can be doing 20k distances.
