The Life and Times of the Watters Family

Preliminary Training - Stage 6 - Day 2

Today was rough. I wasn’t motivated AT ALL this morning. Stayed up a little too late last night and I’ve just been having a crappy week. My left knee is in a brace already and now my right shin hurts right around an old injury from when I was a kid.

When I was about eight years old I was walking (running?) my dog down the street and a friend was sitting on his bicycle. Being the genius that I was, I thought it might be a good idea to hurdle (or attempt to anyway) the back tire of his bike while running at top speed. Unfortunately, for my shin anyway, I overestimated my leaping ability by a bit and ended up catching my shin on the improvised foot pegs that he’d made. Now, when I say “improvised foot pegs” what I really mean is a bolt that stuck out about 3 or 4 inches on either side of the rear axle. And when I say “caught my shin” I mean that this bolt actually penetrated my shin, cut through the muscle and took a chunk out of the bone. Now, for whatever reason, I never received any medical attention for this wound. Oh sure, my mom or dad put some kind of bandage on it for the 4 or 5 weeks it took for it to heal, but no stitches or anything like that. And now, when I run, it hurts terribly.

Anyway, needless to say, today wasn’t much fun. I kept my spirits up by making up cadences (which I will not repeat here) and ended up finishing pretty strong and in decent spirits despite the pain in my shin. I will say one thing for all of this training. It sure makes time fly. Seems like it wasn’t that long ago that I was just walking my route, but it’s really only been about a month. One down, a little over five to go.

Description	10 min jog/5 min walk
Distance	3.0 miles
Time	32 minutes

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