Reality Check?

A mixed week. Good to have run three times (over 15 miles total....) but not feeling very confident that my achilles problems are really over.

After Thursday's faster run it felt fine, but started to stiffen up towards the end of the day. Friday didn't feel very good. By Saturday morning things were fine, but an easy (8:34 pace) 5 miler brought the ache back by the afternoon. Took things very easy Sunday, and by this morning it was all fine again. So I'm not sure whether this is just things straetching out again after some downtime or if my Thursday run has just torn up my achilles again. I'm going to just run easy, easy miles and do some gentle stretching this week and see what happens.

I'm now sleeping with a night splint, which is basically a plastic shell that you strap on your heel. It runs under the foot and up the calf and keeps the foot at 90 degrees. This stops you from stretching, twisting or compressing the achilles tendon while you sleep. It has completely eliminated the morning pain that I had been having the last 3 weeks. I wish I'd bought this a long time ago.

So given my dropoff in fitness and high likelihood that I'm not really recovered, I'm not feeling especially good about the 10k on September 16th, and the half marathon on October 14th now looks awfully close. Guess I'm going to have to take things easy, as I am certainly not looking forward to anymore pool running. I think it's time to focus on getting strong enough for London in April, which means being able to start training for real around Thanksgiving, if I focus on these short term races I'm going to bugger everything up.