Paging Dr. Remoray

Welcome back.  Have a good Christmas? Mine wasn't half bad.

My four day weekend started Saturday morning with a nice snowy/icy run with Vanilla Bryce.  It was my first snowy run ever.  The first winter after I started running I was pretty lazy.  I tried a few tricks from the magazines about getting yourself to run in the winter.  Bought some yak trax that I never used and I also signed up for a race to keep myself motivated.  I signed up for my one and only 10k and ran maybe two or three times in the month leading up to it.  My rationale for not running was A. I just completed a half marathon in October.  What's 6 miles?  B. it was cold.  This race taught me how fast the body loses conditioning.  It was a hilly, cold, exhausting mess but hey they gave away a medal to all finishers.  Silver lining!!

Silver, blue, and black lining to be specific

ANYWAY!

My laziness got the best of me, again, when I wouldn't search for my running socks on Saturday.  I grabbed the first pair I could find and they just so happened to have holes in them around the heel.  Off we go!

Started off OK until we reached the end of the street near the club house.  My entire complex is on a hill so this took some maneuverability and grace to go down.  Mission accomplished (we survived)!  Fast forward to the last mile of the three mile run.  Cue the foot pain.  Turns out the hole in my sock traveled up the back of my foot and my shoe wanted to scrape against my bare foot.  So it did.  Finished another half mile or so and limped my way back to my place.  Weep womp.  Also, throughout the three(ish) miles I learned that my newts don't have the best tread.  I think I may actually use those yak trax!!

After the run I noticed something unsettling.  Before I show you what I'm talking about I have a confession to make.  I have flat feet and I'm slightly overweight.  Because of these two things I require a stability shoe.  What this means is my ankles bend inward when I run so the extra cushioning in a stability shoe helps prevent injury.  This is called over pronating (you can't say you never learned anything from me!).   Now to the pictures:

old pair #1 New Balance

old pair #2 Nike

Current pair.  You can barely see it but it's there!

It's only on my right shoe but now I'm afraid to run on my new shoes.  I'd like to fix the issue before it gets any worse.  My plan is to get a runner evaluation from a local physical therapy place.  I've heard good things about it and you also get a discount for a local specialty running store.  Score!

Now that we have all this running talk out of the way I also went to a wedding on Saturday with my beautiful wife.  Good times had by all and a lot of inside jokes coming out of it.  Side note: between the wedding ceremony and reception we hit up the local big named grocery chain and they had the Christmas story on DVD.  I mention this because I had just been talking about it with the misses over the weekend and there it was.  Didn't think twice.  Had to get it.

Sunday I was left alone all day.  I'm not a home body.  I felt like I was going crazy.  Because I'm a glutton for punishment I turned on the Browns game.  I thought it would offer me an escape from my boredom.  A couple minutes into the game I crashed back to reality and started channel surfing (which is more like channel wake boarding when you're like me and don't have cable) until I found a replay of the Ironman world championship.  I was sucked in!  I'm far away from completing an Ironman but it's going to happen (November 2015).  Watching the special motivated me like no other.  Starting Christmas eve I was going to start doing some cross training!  Yeah!  Motivation!

I didn't do it.... I was really tired.  My youngest, Addison, wasn't down with the whole "sleep" thing the night before and I was plum tuckered out from pouting about not getting any sleep myself.  Plus excuses excuses, excuses excuses (excuses).

Monday was Christmas eve and for the first time since I was in middle school I had trouble falling asleep.  Another first was that it wasn't because I was excited to get gifts.  This was the first Christmas my oldest, Savannah, had an idea of what was going on.  A couple weeks back she started talking about Santa out-of-the-blue.  We hadn't planned on doing the Santa thing but she's just so gosh darn cute we couldn't leave her hangin'!  She wrote a letter to him and he even wrote one back!  When she get's old enough we'll still do Santa but tell her more of the back story behind it.

Back to Christmas eve!  Finally fell asleep and the next morning I woke everyone up at 8 (I had been up since 6 and I just couldn't wait any longer).  Savannah walked down the stairs and said "PRESENTS!".  The look on her face was priceless.  Some wrapping paper here, some toys here, clothes over there, and we were done.  My lovely wife bought me a Nike running hoodie and other stuff that really doesn't have any bearing on a running blog.  Unless you want to tie running along with the Walking Dead and avoiding being eaten by zombies.  That's your prerogative.  Ultimate compliment I received from my bride was her asking me "who helped you pick out the jewelry?".  I did it all by myself.  Looked through the choices, saw stuff I thought she would like, and wouldn't you know it?  She liked it!  I even bought her a dress that she wore that day!!  And she says I have no sense of style.  Pfft!

Thanks for reading everybody.  If I don't post again before 2013 I hope you all have a joyous, and safe, new year!

P.S.  If any doctors out there read this (pause for laughter) leave a comment telling me what I can do about my shoe problem.

Thanks again!