Fiesta Five Flags 5k...Plus

April ended with completing 100 running/walking miles this month.  As a matter of fact, I have achieved 449.95 miles year-to-date on my way to reaching 1,000 miles for the year.  I'm thankful I am ahead of the game cause you never know what the future holds as far as being able to get them all in.  Also, I've been doing a 100-Mile Challenge each month since January and have more than accomplished this. 

We have run the Fiesta of Five Flags for years and it just seemed "right" to go to it this year.  Unfortunately, we neither one are up-to-par this year.  So we refocused our minds and did the best we could do.  As most of you know, my right hip has really been a pain...literally.  My plan this race was to run/walk it.  I had thought of withdrawing completely but hated to do that since I really could walk it if I needed to.  I didn't have a "plan" per se' but tried to run as much as I could and when I felt a twinge in my hip I walked a little bit.  This was what I did throughout the race.  I'm so glad that I went through with this.  Feeling like a quitter is quite different than feeling like you did the best you could do THROUGH the problem.  As it turned out, I placed 4th place in my age group of 14 others and only 5 seconds from actually getting an award!  Two ladies in my group received two of the top awards pushing me higher in rank. 

The month of May will present itself doing different things on a regular basis from the past.  For one, I'm going to stop running for two weeks and see if this helps my hip.  If I see progress but not completely pain free, then I will lay off another two weeks.  Hopefully, this will take care of my problem.  I'm thinking I'm having sciatic nerve problems. 

Secondly, I'm going to focus on riding my bike more to give my running legs a break for a while.  Today, I rode 15 miles on the trail system.  I honestly wish I could say I love cycling.  For now, I'm plugging along working on getting my butt use to the seat and not go numb before the ride is up.  I am still learning how to use my gears and there are so many things I need to know about a bike itself including maintenance and repair.

I saw a national bike challenge on Facebook and looked into it.  So in order to keep me on my bike regularly, I joined it.  For anyone that might be interested in doing this, too, here is the site
https://nationalbikechallenge.org/home .  Being realistic, I'm pretty sure I won't be able to keep with riding every day in May but I plan to ride at least one mile as much as I possibly can through the month and adding as many miles as I can through the end of September.  This includes spinning.  I hope by the end of the month, I can actually say that I look forward to riding 10 or 15 miles whenever I choose and that my butt will not hurt any more. 

I'll be looking into swimming soon to give me another cross training workout while my hip heals.  I'm also going to try a Gentle Yoga class. 

Well, that's it for now.  I'm looking forward to better running/racing this fall/winter.  Summer is not my time to run outside anyway so this is a great time to "lay off".  Hope all is going well for you.  Until next time

Run 4 It