Briefly (for Now)

I remain very busy.

For starters, I think that I have finally decided on a good working structure for this website, so I have begun the process of designing and installing a proper navigation menu for it.  This endeavor takes time on its own, and it has forced me to streamline and redesign the footer for all of the site’s major webpages.  This process has, of course, taken even more time.

On top of that, I have come to the conclusion that I will have to redesign the layout for this very blog that you are reading right now.  When I first put the blog online, I did not intend to use it, because I frequently blog for Wilson Komen on his Coach Kiprunning blog, and as I never hesitate to admit, I am not a very disciplined, or a very good, blogger.  Therefore, I figured that I would publish just a few posts and that I would eschew the standard blog layout—narrow publishing columns and sidebars with all kinds of widgets—for a clean flat layout like what you see here.  I went that way because I don’t tend to like the way many blogs look.

Then, I discovered that I needed ankle surgery, and so I did actually start using this blog, and now I have discovered that it actually isn’t very user friendly because it does not make use of the navigation tools that people need to, well, read a blog.

That project, redesigning this blogspace, will take even more time, once the other navigation project is completed.

And so here we are with a brief running update: I am now running three times a week on a track.  This is excellent.

My ankle still does not fully move, though, and I am at this point officially worried that the days of full dorsiflexion are behind me.  I would have thought—perhaps wrongly—that months and months of ankle strengthening and flexibility work, combined with increasing amounts of force on the joint would have banged it back into shape.  That doesn’t appear to have happened yet, and the result is that my right foot still feels very stiff and is sometimes fairly sore when I take my first strides.

What’s ironic about this is that the progression from the treadmill to the track was prescribed to me because the track is a softer and more even surface than the average roadway, bike path, or sidewalk.  Fair enough.  The problem is that I ran track in high school.  I am a former track runner.  It is impossible for me to get on to a track and not to brace myself for fast hard running because I have probably run somewhere just shy of thousands of quarter mile repeats in my life.

That’s, like, what I do on a track.

These days, whenever I lead off, no matter how gingerly, I do so with purpose, and that always makes the ankle ache a little.

We’ll see what happens, I guess.  I’ll be on the road again in 2-3 weeks.  More to come.

7/1/19—first day running outside (on a track) since 9/17/18

–July 5, 2019