Wishing I could run

It's been 9 weeks since my surgery and until the last couple of days I made it through without letting the fact that I can't run get me down. Perhaps that wasn't the hardest thing to do while I was on crutches since running is not the first thing on your mind when you can't even walk. Even after I started walking though, I managed to keep a positive attitude and think of the bigger picture. Any other time I was injured in the past I couldn't get out of my head that as long as I was sidelined I was losing fitness day by day. The most frustrating thing is that there was usually a lot of uncertainty on the period of time I'd need to sit out and that can drive you crazy when you are eager to get back to running. My current situation is somewhat better in that respect since I have a better idea of what the recovery time frame is. This will be my longest break from running ever but knowing that ahead of time at least allowed me to prepare mentally and so far I hadn't though about running much. On Friday evening, though, I went to watch the Stanford invitational and started feeling the need to run again. As I'm getting close to the track I see lots of people running and getting ready for their races, meanwhile the radio starts playing Tom Petty's "Running down a dream", and I can't help but wish I could be racing myself. It hasn't helped that the last couple of days the weather has been sunny and in the 70s (I don't mean to make the Boston people jealous), the kind of weather that makes you hate yourself if you are not outside. Anyway, writing more about this won't help either so I'll move on to what I've been doing this past week...

It was a rather hectic week at work so I didn't do that much. I swam on Tuesday, extending my longest swim to 1500m (it's possible that this is 1500y as I'm not sure if the pool at Club O is 25m or 25y long). On Wednesday I didn't feel like swimming when I got to Club O and thought I'd lift instead. After lifting, though, I decided to go for a swim after all and did a short workout, doing a 150 warm-up, then swimming 200, 150, 100, 50 as fast as I could and finishing off with 100 cool-down. I haven't lifted in a long time but still managed to bench 3 sets of 6 repeats with plates although I was pretty sore the next few days. I didn't do much on any other day of the week as I wound up working late and with the pool closing at 9:30PM I didn't have time for a swim. Next week I'm taking the boot off and hopefully I'll be able to start doing some biking (on the stationary bike at least). I'm definitely more comfortable with swimming now but it would be good to get some cross training variety.