Jack had a play date today with Otis and came home limping.  Jack is 10 years old now and turning gray around his nose.  He’s good for about fifteen minutes of rough housing and then he’s done.  Boy can I relate.

Ironically, I felt really good on my two runs this week.  Must be a combination of not running every day and keeping the distance under 8 miles.  Over 8 and I’m still sore and tired the next day.  Six or less and I’m refreshed as soon as I shower.  And I’m not feeling any hints of injury.  The silver lining of winter maintenance is recovery.

Talking to my running buddies at the Super Bowl party, seems like everyone is injured in one way or another.  Bunch of old men.  They are all trying to prepare for Moab in March, some of them will run Steamboat in June.  They are also mostly doing a core class at the Rec Center.  I can tell they’re beat up from it now, but that will pay benefits at Moab for them.  Keith commented when I said I was in good shape that he didn’t think I ever get injured.  Not true I replied.  My feet and ankles are where my body fails me.  Which is better than the knees, but still, it can take me out.  I get up in the middle of the night typically to let Jack out – the old dog can’t hold it all night anymore which is another thing we have in common – and I’m limping because my ankles won’t work.  I have to warm them up with a dozen or so steps.

A high percentage of my search term stats (queries for words that lead to hits on my blog) are for injury related topics.  One of my absolute top searches is for “Strassburg Sock”.  It’s almost as popular as “runner porn”.  And I get a good number of searches for “plantar fasciitis”.  Makes sense that people would be willing to read my simple, matter-of-fact stories to learn about injury recovery experiences.  When I search for running topics, I generally google for course descriptions.  But my blog stats are much more in favor of injury and recovery stories over race and course descriptions.  I wonder what Jack would blog about if he could.  On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.