OFF TO A GOOD START

As usual, I go 2 weeks without blogging and I have a ton of things on my mind. First, an update on the foot. It feels A LOT better, but still not 100%. The Dr. said to transition back to normal shoes once I’m pain free. I’ve done that even though I’m about 98% pain free. I still can’t push off of my big toe. I go back on the 11th for (hopefully) a last evaluation and maybe even a follow-up x-ray.

Not running in July or August doesn’t really bother me. Not being able to run in October really sucks. The good news is that I’ve been able to roller ski without much pain – again, I can’t fully extend my right leg because of the strain on my right big toe.

Typically, I think of skiing in terms of hours spent skiing, rather than miles or kilometers. During the 2009-2010 winter I roller skied about 10 hours before the snow arrived and another 40 hours on snow. The result was a 2:53 Birkie. Last winter I didn’t bother roller skiing at all and then I only spent 23 hours on snow. The result was a 3:25 Birkie. This season, with my foot injury, I’ve already been able to roller ski for 12 hours. So the ski season is off to a good start. Speaking of, I signed up for the Birkie last night - all $115 of it.

I’ve been hyping Lauren Fleshman’s website a lot lately. Sometimes it’s hard to explain why you like something. Luckily, Lauren did it for me in her recent interview with Runner’s World.

RW: Your blog has more of a two-way street going than most athlete blogs do. You have a lot of respondents and you address a lot of the content to them. What's the overall purpose of the blog, and have you learned things from the comments and queries?

LF: Definitely. I think most athlete web presences are very unidirectional. They're more like, "Here's what I've done, here's information about me," and it's generally to promote yourself and get sponsors and things like that. I just felt if I was going to do a blog, I wanted to add value and create content that people could get something out of on a fairly regular basis. I waited until I knew how to do that. I didn't have a website the first six years of my professional running career. And just the name of my website alone, asklauren fleshman.com instead of laurenfleshman.com, is meant to signify that there's a two-way street. You're going to get something out of it and I'm going to get something out of it. This is a communication. It started as an experiment. I didn't know what would really happen, but it's gone really well. For me to get feedback from athletes across the world is so cool, it's such a gift. And I'm really excited to do that, because running is a pretty lonely sport sometimes.

Another thing is to provide information on the successes and failures that I've had, in the hopes that other people don't have to go through the same thing but can learn from my mistakes so they can skip over those sand traps. And the last thing is to connect the recreational running community that's more interested in marathons and half-marathons and road races with the track community because most people have no idea what we do and we hardly exist in the collective consciousness. I think our sport needs to reach out to those marathoners who do love to run but don't understand track, and I'd like to be a connecting point for them. I think on all those accounts, I'm happy with where it's going and I'm going to keep working on it and see where it goes.

She gets it!

Unfortunately, she’s planning on running NYC this weekend and experienced some sharp knee pain within the last week. Hopefully, it’s one of those phantom injuries that we’ve all probably dealt with.

Quote of the Day;

“If I boiled it down, my major objectives are to provide something of value for the running community, to inspire young athletes–female athletes in particular–to grow their relationship with running in a deeper way, to let it into their life.” – Lauren Fleshman