May Runfessions!
Well, it’s that time of month- thanks to Marcia for opening up her Runfessional once again. Let’s dive right in! Ahem. Remember how we won a stair stepper? The gym at my husband’s school was getting rid of their old equipment, and my husband put his name in a drawing for the stair stepper. I’m actually thinking he was possibly the only one to put his name in for it, but anyway, it is now ours. The problem was, it was a HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS to get it home. First, he naively took my car, a Rav4, to work one day so he could “bring home the stair stepper.” Nope- it was way too big. He ended up renting a U Haul and coercing, er, convincing two coworkers to help him load it in, ride back to our house, and unload it into our garage. And here it is… This does not look like a stair stepper to me! I asked him who called it a “stair stepper” and he said, the athletic director. Really? Let’s look at the control panel. Since when can you adjust the stride length on a stair stepper? This thing is like a weird hybrid between a stair stepper and an eliptical. I tried it out, and… I don’t like it. The only way I would ever use it is out of sheer desperation, like if I’m too injured to run and for some reason can’t do a pool run. So now we have a large piece of exercise equipment in our garage that I’m hoping I’ll never, ever have to use. Speaking of injuries… how’s that foot doing, anyway? Last month I “runfessed” that I was upping my long runs with the help of a little Advil. Since then I’ve stopped taking the Advil, gotten my long runs up to ten miles, and started doing speed work. Obviously my foot is completely healed, right? Not so fast! It still hurts, at certain times of the day. Getting out of bed is… difficult, and if I get up after sitting for a while I have to hobble across the floor. But it hasn’t been hurting at all while I run! Running farther and faster were the two things that made it flare up, so I’m super happy I’m able to manage those now. I’m thinking it’s the orthotics? Whatever- I’m ecstatic. So far this hasn’t been much of a “runfession”- more like an update. But I do have one thing to runfess: the heat here has been terrible. This past Sunday it was already 80 degrees at 6:30 am. And extremely humid. I headed out for my ten mile trail run… I’ve never figured out why Florida has NO SHADE. The sun blazes down like it’s trying to kill you. This run was really, really hard, and I remembered that running on this trail just isn’t fun in the summer. Oh well… I’ll find other places to run for now. So that’s it for this month! Question: does anyone know what the heck that piece of equipment is? Have you ever used one? Do you like it? Thanks for reading!