Injury report: Shins

When I first started out I was following an app called 10K Pro. At some point previously it had been free and I downloaded it on a whim. It starts you out running three times a week, which I had scheduled to be Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturday or Sunday, depending on how my weekend was going. The first few weeks, being in February and March, it was much too cold for me to start running outside so I was confined to my moms treadmill in their sun room. It wasn't that terrible really, I set myself up with my iPad and watched My Little Pony or New Girl episodes while I listened to my app tell me when to walk and run. Soon though the app was doing better than me. I think the best I could do on the treadmill was run for 4 minutes straight, and only once per session. The app however kept going. Run for 5 minutes! Run for 8 minutes! .... Are you CRAZY? The app would tell me that my runs should take half an hour or 45 minutes, etc, but they'd end up taking me much longer than that. I was determined to RUN the time it told me to but I had to keep breaking up my run phases with walking breaks in between. I had read that run/walk is a method of Jeff Galloway's anyway so I wasn't too concerned. He's the official trainer of the RunDisney races. You can read more about him here.

These first few weeks of running, I had a bit of pain in my shins. It wasn't debilitating and I kept running through the pain. It was probably a usual soreness from legs that haven't run that much since I saw a skunk trotting towards me down the street one night on Halloween. SKREEEEE I shrieked and ran away the opposite direction, leaving my friend Sam to fend off the skunk on her own.

My solution to this pain was not to stretch, as I should have been doing anyway (and wasn't...), but to buy knee high compression socks. Darn those suckers are expensive! I happened to find some very cute, pink leopard spottened, Nike brand ones in my local Sports Authority. I happily bought them, even though the price seemed extreme to me, and when I got home and opened them up... what's this? They don't fit? How can that be, I got the large ones! They were compression sleeves... for arms. Oops. I kept them anyway, thinking they may come in useful one day when I start running outside. Thankfully this "injury" was short lived. The very next morning after I purchased these ahem, compression socks, my shins felt fine. Yahoo! But the bigger injury was soon to follow...