Greetings! This is yet another experiment that I am going to indulge myself into and it may be a disaster shortly. Ok, so as stated in the description, this is going to be a continuous run-on of my thoughts, failures and break-throughs of brewing beer and running. This post will pertain to running. I am truly dedicated to solving my shortcomings of running so hopefully, I do make progress and it can be tracked here. In order to bolster the purpose of this blog, a little history is needed. I ran track in middle school, then went 5 years without running. During sophomore year of college, I ran in short spurts, always knowing that I would pick up my running later but still very distracted from true progress due to extremely consistent shin splints. As college continued, my running binges got slightly longer (up to 3 months) consisting of slowing burning out 10-20 miles a week at around 8:30 per mile. I ran an occasional 5k or 10k, racking up around 10 recreational races over the 4 years. During my last year, my roommate and I decided to punish ourselves with our first marathon. The plague of shin splints prevented me from training properly and I only put in a good 30 days of training, which of course proved to be disastrous come race day. Starting at mile 22, I was doing more of a dance than a run because of horrendous cramps. I hobbled across the finish line at 4 hours and 16 minutes completely unable to walk to the car. Moral of the story is that I have always loved running and placed it high on my priority list however I have been shunted away from my goals constantly because of shin splints. Now, there are a lot of different descriptions that are used for the term "shin splints" and my description is as follows: after about 10 minutes of jogging (or if I started off too fast), my anterior tibialis (that muscle that runs along your "shin" bone) would swell up and burning like the fires of Mordor. After months of this specific pain, part 2 would appear: a more medial pain (check out the picture). The crazy thing is that after 30-45 minutes of enduring the pain, it would usually disappear and I could finally get in a good cardio workout instead of an injured doggy limp. Therefore, I was in and out of running shoe stores, constantly quizzing my father and visiting a physical therapist to find a cure for my shin splints. The quest had begun...
