In January, I signed up for the #RagnarTraining 30-day challenge and, again, I found it hard to complete the challenge as intended (I suppose that’s why it’s called a challenge!). Since injuring my knee the week of Thanksgiving, I haven’t played any soccer, so while I’ve been running a couple of times a week, I don’t have a consistent schedule of athletic activities right now. So what that ended up meaning was that I only made it through 23 days of exercise in the month of January, instead of the full 30, but it made me appreciate the difficulty of having to plan something every day, as opposed to my normal plan of just show up when the sports league tells me to!
As part of the challenge, we were supposed to submit pictures of our activities through Facebook or Instagram and I posted all of my here but I didn’t take one everyday because I was typically going out at the same time and going on the same route every time too, so it was hard to think of a new way to take pictures. I did get one of mine featured on the Ragnar Facebook promo though! The picture in the upper left corner was a beautiful sunset I captured last Monday – one of the few post-work times when I got to see something different. As you can see from the other pictures, everyone had their own activities from cycling, running outside or on a treadmill, working out with friends and dealing with all of the snow the rest of the country has been hit with recently.
I only did one race in January and while I know I was undertrained, I was a little surprised at how long it took me to fully recovery from that race. For two days after the race, my calves were killing me (woo hills!) and my weekly run for the following two weeks were also more painful than usual as my calves tried to bounce back. Since dropping down to the half marathon for DC, I had started contemplating going with Raleigh as my back-up marathon for this spring, but I’ve still been having issues with my knee, so 8.5 weeks after my initial injury, I went to a sports medicine doctor and while she said she’s pretty confident it’s not my ACL (yay!), she’s concerned that it might be a meniscus tear… so last week I got to do my first-ever MRI. It really wasn’t that bad – since it was just my knee, I didn’t have to have my head in the machine and with the earplugs they gave me, the noise kind of made it feel like I was in a washing machine. Honestly, I probably could have fallen asleep with the noise and vibration, but the one thing they told me was “don’t move your knee” so I was afraid if I did start to fall asleep, I would twitch myself awake! I’m still waiting on the results of the MRI, so hopefully by the end of this week I’ll have a better idea of what I’m looking at. But, at this point, I’m just ready to have an answer as to what I’m going to need to do to get back to feeling 100%… I’m a planner and I’ve been struggling to force myself not to sign up for anything else before I get an answer on my knee.
Resolution Updates
Walk the dogs for at least 20 minutes, 5 days a week – the dogs have loved going for walks after work and certainly look forward to it now. I haven’t quite met this goal yet and ideally I’d like to start walking them before work instead of after, but it was a good start!
16 / 31 days totaling 37 miles & 10.5 hours
Drink more water – my iDrated app suggests 78 oz. a day, but I’m starting with trying to hit at least 50% every day
23 / 31 days drinking at least 39 oz. of water, including a current 18-day streak
I also have an idea in the back of my head that I want to try to hit 2,015 miles this year, counting all of my steps through my Fitbit. My highest total mileage since I’ve started tracking my steps is 1,553 miles in 2013. To reach 2,015 in 2015 that means about 5.5 miles per day. For January, I’ve hit 140 miles, which means I’m a little behind that goal, but over the course of the year, my average daily mileage has only increased to 5.6 miles per day.
How did your first month of 2015 go?