I woke up at 3:20 AM so that I could watch the sun rise while running 18 miles of amazingly beautiful Southern Utah landscape! What a way to start the day! Elijah and I ran 5 minutes and walked one. We finished in 3:07:48, and that was while running injured at a snail's pace. At that rate, I will easily finish in the marathon in 4:30 - 20 minutes LESS than my previous time! Yay! My visit to the podiatrist was interesting - he said I had a strained tendon, told me my new shoes were probably the cause of the problem, and gave me a brace to wear to support the arch until it healed. So I got two NEW pairs of shoes, put on the brace and my new asics, and drove out to run the marathon trail. It was probably a dumb thing to do, having never tried out either the shoes OR the brace, but... My arch hurt so much the whole time, but I kept telling myself that I wasn't doing any damage, so I would just have to deal with the pain. By the last four miles, I was mostly numb, but my 1/2 mile walk at the end was pretty painful. The funny thing is, once I took the brace OFF, my tendon wasn't any more tender than it had been before! So I guess it worked. Hooray! I was just SO glad to be able to run again. :-) | 