Saturday November 10, 2007

4 miles 30min Peets Hill
This was a weird run. Ran over to Peets Hill and then took the nice little singletrack spur down to Church street and then back to the house. It's the first run I've done that wasn't exclusively grass, and I could tell. I'm pretty positive now that my stress fracture is healthy and ready to be really run on, but my left foot sure was protesting in other ways today. Just lots of general acheing in the outer metatarsals/ankle and even some sharp pains. By the end of the run I was definitely a little bit worried, but I think it's going to be OK.

This same exact sort of thing happened to me two years ago. I took five weeks or so off for a stress reaction in my left foot and when I started back up the reaction was fine but my ankle/plantar fascia ended up causing some problems for a while. I hope it's all just part of getting back into it.

After some breakfast I drove up to the M trailhead (felt guilty about that) and hiked to the top of the peak just south of Baldy and back in about 3 hours with plenty of view-gazing at the stunning Absarokas over in Paradise Valley, the Gallatins, and the Spanish Peaks. There are so many mountains around here---Bozeman would be a great place to be in the summer time. But, then I think, if I'm going to pick where I get to be in the summer I would absolutely pick the San Juans or Upper Arkansas River Valley in Colorado before Montana; mostly because of the higher altitude in Colorado. I'm such an altitude snob anymore when it comes to running. I remember commenting to Kyle this summer that it didn't seem like I was really training if I was under 5000' elevation. Obviously, that's not true.

Anyhow, the hike was very positive for the metatarsal, but not so positive for the ankle thing going on in that foot. I think the stress fracture is definitely healed. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out. Either way, I think I'm going to go back to the grass surface for tomorrow's run.