Progressing

Ran around by headlamp for an hour in Rock Creek this morning.  I've wrapped up my runs of late with the feeling that I could do this for hours on end.  Partly due to the relaxed pace I've been running, but also because it's just so much fun.  Mostly ran today although I'm still taking walking breaks periodically just to check in with the leg, which is better by the day.  I'm back to 100% minimal or barefoot, and I find that with a little extra awareness it is entirely doable and in fact ideal (speaking for myself here).  I was headed in this direction this spring but the pressure to train pushed me to exceed my rate of adaptation.  A little mindfulness and a lack of pressure this time around seems to be going a long way.  Form has been critical and I think this is really an individual process.

Yesterday did the following exercises at the gym: machine single leg press, swiss ball leg curl, standing dumbbell calf raises, dumbbell lunges, dumbbell renegade rows, barbell squat, barbell bench press, and five types of range-of-motion hip excersises on the cable machine.  Similar excersises had been prescribed to me in the past for physical therapy, but instead of performing them lying down (e.g. four-way straight leg raises) these involve a lot more specificity in that you have to support yourself on your non-exercising leg.  They are adapted from this book, which is not very good reading but is a great resource for running-specific strength exercises.  It's also got some pretty thorough analyses of various stride patterns.  The whole gym session took two hours, and I'd hope to trim that by 10 or 20 minutes in the future.  The emphasis of all this is general strength and core/hip stabilization.