No, It's Not Soft

Softball is a strangely named sport. Though it is a ball, that sumbitch (that's Southern for ... well, I think you know) ain't soft! Tonight I return to this bizarrely named endeavor after three weeks out with my ankle injury. I am certainly not 100%, but I do feel as if, since last Friday, each day has brought improvement. Prior to that, most days seemed to be similar to the one that preceded it. I have a serious ankle brace to wear during the games (metal posts on both sides of my ankle; it will certainly not sprain tonight!), so hopefully I'll come out of tonight no worse than I started!

I followed last Tuesday's return to running with a little running Saturday morning; I joined the HoustonFIT StayFIT 5k training program for their workout at the Lamar High School track. Though the StayFIT'ers were doing a SERIOUS workout (4 repeats of 1 mile hard, by some short distance easy), I was on much shorter leash. I did their 10 minute warm-up (about one mile) with little issue. Then, I started running slow loops of the track with the hope of doing two miles continuously. Unfortunately, my foot began to ache and my stride broke down after 1.5 miles. I told myself that if my stride failed, at least at this early stage of my recovery, I should stop running as I would be at too high a risk for re-injury or a sympathy injury in the other leg. Though my total distance was a little disappointing, I did cover the first mile in under 10 minutes, so the speed was OK.

Next up in my sloooow road to recovery is a run tomorrow morning at Memorial. I think the goal will again be to bang out two continuous miles along with a goal of running more total that my previous two outings. I will feel much better about the world when I can run three continuous miles as I can do as Houston based runners should be able to do, run one loop of Memorial of Rice University.

The foot doesn't look too bad, so no pictures for you this time. Hopefully after softball, that will still be the case.