Review needs to be done so you can understand a little as to what caused my left knee to be angry with me over the weekend.

We had running group meet at our house again Saturday morning.  This is a weekly thing now and we have a nice group of people who show up to hit the road 5:30 am every Saturday morning.

Most of these runners do their long run of the week when they come over to our place.  You all know that Wednesday is my long run day.  This works out well so that both MFH (My Favorite Husband) and I are back at the house when people trickle back.  It’d be a real bummer if they came back to nobody home!

Because they need (this last week, 18 miles) a long route, we need to be creative in making a new route each week.  Seeing as we are in the country, it is a challenge not to have a substantial amount of gravel in each week’s run.

Let it be know here, gravel is not my friend.  I LOVE trail running!  Running trails and gravel are not the same thing.  This is something that I’ve tried many times to explain to MFH.  He seems to think (or at least this is the impression I get) that if I like trails I should like gravel as well.

Nope.  I hate running on gravel.  It hurts me.  And it chews up my shoes.

Gravel.  Boo.

Now that we understand that, let’s move on to last Saturday.

Saturday was warm and 100% humidity.  Very, very foggy morning.  It was difficult running weather.  Everybody in the group was struggling.

We had about 3 miles total of gravel on Saturday’s route.  Not a huge amount but with the weather conditions added into the mix.  Not a good combo.

I had also worn an almost completely dead pair of shoes.  I have two good pair of shoes right now.  They have lots of life in them and I didn’t want to destroy them on the gravel.  Hence the dead shoes.

So, you add it up.  Gravel.  Bad weather.  Dead shoes.

Unhappy knee.

It started talking to me at mile 6.  I’ve never had this happen before.  It wasn’t incapacitating or anything.  It was just a brief but very sharp, Ouch!  I didn’t like that.

I reached the turn around for my run, headed home and called it a day.

Sunday, I was supposed to run an easy 4.  My knee was still a little unhappy and I decided that I wasn’t going to mess up my knee over four miles!  I called it a rest day.  Today was a scheduled 10.  A 10 mile tempo run.

This morning it was 75*  89% humidity when I headed out at 4:00 am for my 10 miler.  Seeing as it was so humid, I scratched the tempo run and decided just to run 10 and see if my knee talked to me.

I am very happy to say that my knees were thrilled to be out running today.  If I take too much time off, my body gets upset with me.  The next run is ugly because my body grumbles.  Hahaha!!!  We want the body to be happy, don’t we?

So, everything went peachy this morning.  It was a little slow but that was just due to the humidity.  We are supposed to get a break in the weather sometime this week.  Looking forward to that!  🙂

Thanks everybody for asking.  Glad to be able to give you a happy report!

Came home around 6:00 am and enjoyed a nice cup of coffee for a recovery drink.  Coffee, not just for breakfast anymore!