Training, Week of 7/10

This report will be a little unusual... to start with, I took not one rest day, but two, ending my streak at 49 days (a personal record).  Only running 5 days in a week makes it difficult to continue increasing mileage over 7-day weeks, so I also had a somewhat drastic decrease in mileage, to 41.2 miles in 5:02:12 (7:20/mile average).  It was a week where I learned a lot about running as a part of the "real world" though, so I don't mind the decrease in mileage.

The first rest day came on the 4th of July.  The road race that I normally participate in (a downhill mile) was canceled due to construction on the course and so I planned to get up and run before the parade.  I got up in time but couldn't get myself out the door and so I took the whole day off.  The second came on Friday where I got caught late at work and then again in traffic and didn't get home until very late.  This pretty much killed my motivation to run.  I should perhaps have had a little more willpower on one of these days but hopefully I'm back on track due to a decent weekend of running (7.55 and 15.75).  I have already mentioned the Thursday Night Track Workout that I experienced and the long run this weekend was pretty decent.  I got out a bit before 10 and stayed to the shade so I didn't get into any dehydration/over-heating trouble.  When I pulled my sock off, however, I noticed this:

Unfortunately, those are my feet and there was some pretty serious bleeding from the second-smallest toe.  I don't know what the deal is because my shoes weren't rubbing on it.  In fact, I wasn't even aware this was a problem until I took my shoes off.  The funny part of the story was that this picture was very difficult to take.  Due to the whiteness of my feet, I had to turn the flash off or the reflection off my skin caused the picture to be washed out.

This upcoming week is going to be challenging: I have a couple long days at work coming up and then I'm returning home this weekend to visit my parents.  Hopefully I'll be able to make time for running and stay focused on getting back into the 55-65 mile range.

-Lane