Which do you want first?  Well the Good News is that I went to the doctor on Monday and she cleared me to run.

The Bad News is that she wasn’t like, “you are healed” but more like, “give it a try and see what happens”.  Well after 2 runs totaling 3.5 miles the verdict is that my knee swelled a little and is hot to the touch so there is still something wrong.  Ugh.

I ran 2 miles with Brad at Fort Snelling’s Pike Island coincidentally on National Running Day.  My knee felt stiff, but it didn’t really hurt.  I didn’t notice anything abnormal when I got home, but we also biked pretty hard from Snelling to home.

On Saturday, a program I run had a booth at the Midtown Farmer’s Market.  I have to help set it up and tear down, but a student and their parent are in charge of running the actual booth, so I decided to run home after helping setup and then we went back later to tear down.  It was a 1.5 and most of it was on the Greenway’s dirt trail.  I felt fine on the run; my knee actually felt a little better than on Wednesday. But after wards it felt a little more swollen and was quite noticeably hot.  So that’s not good.

On Tuesday I did my first ever open water swim.  A few co-workers are triathletes and are going to do weekly swims at Lake Nokomis.  I didn’t have anything else to do, so I went with and had a good time.  Open water swimming is so much different than pool swimming.  It felt really weird at first and even though I could touch (my hand actually hit the bottom once or twice) it was still a little scary feeling at times.

On Sunday, my friend Brad was running the Minneapolis Marathon.  Brad also just had a baby on Tuesday morning and was extremely exhausted.  He decided at Mile 18 to drop out of the race.  I can’t imagine how getting very little sleep would impact your marathon performance.  Great job Brad!  I had a lot of fun riding around on my bike cheering him and other runners on for the race.  I ended up knowing 4-5 other people out there.  I wore my Team World Vision jersey and one of the racers was wearing his and talked to me a bit.  His name is Jesse and he ran a 5:07 even though he tore his meniscus (again) before the halfway mark.  At mile 18 he said, “I’m going to finish, even if I crawl.”  After Brad dropped out, I decided to not ride back downtown to the finish, but met my wife at Lake Calhoun.

On the ride there I got into a small pack of bikes and we were nailing 20 mph for 4-5 miles.  It felt good.  I ended up with 35 miles for the day. Crazy!

This week’s stats are:

Running – 3.5 miles

Biking – 71 miles

Swimming – 450 meters

This week’s One Post is Running with Music in my Ears!

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