T.G.I. Saturday!!

I know T.G.I.F. is the standard, but obviously I missed Friday. In fact, the whole week has been insane! Boredom, please. I'll take boredom.

First off, thank you Jenn for the lovely blog award!!

And also thank you for your lovely comments about my profile picture. I happen to be rather fond of it myself (and I still think the DMV ought to let me use it for my next drivers license photo).

There are rules and passing on things and stuff as far as the Beautiful Blogger Award is concerned, and I'll get to that early next week. Saturday is The Dead Zone as far as blogging is concerned. And I want Jenn's generosity to get more than a Saturday hit :)

Meanwhile (because whining is fun regardless of the day/week issue), Couch-to-5K is kicking my butt this time around. Or my knees, to be more precise. Primarily the right one, although the left knee has also shared its displeasure with me. I was fine last week, joint-wise. It was strictly muscle pain I was dealing with and that was pretty much gone by the time I did W1D2 on Thursday that week. But this week? Erm... no.

The run went well on Tuesday night. I'm not a huge fan of running in general, but I am very interested to see what I can make my body do (in forty years it's about damn time), plus the company of so many other people similarly huffing and puffing themselves around our trail cannot be appreciated enough. My SIL didn't make it this week because she's recovering from some nasty cold bug, but it's a really friendly group of co-sufferers/journey-ers, so I wasn't bereft.

Come Wednesday morning? Rut-roh. I got out of bed, feeling a bit stiff but not bad, and then my right knee acted like it wanted to slide out of place or something. I know, it's a hinge joint and all, but that's what it felt like.

And that continued the whole. Freaking. Day.

It wasn't that it was painful exactly. There were moments of "eeek!" but mostly it just felt... weird. It started to improve mid-afternoon and was making fewer threats of sliding out of place (again, my perception/ description of the feeling). And on Thursday it wasn't feeling weird anymore, but had developed just a slight, dull ache.

Friday all was well with no ache or weirdness, so I decided to do my W2D2 run on the treadmill. I'd opted out on Thursday due to the ache-factor. I knew I could make it, but one extra day couldn't hurt I figured.

I should have taken two extra days, I think. Because this morning, there's my right knee... threatening to slide out of place again.

The good news is it's not as extreme as it was on Wednesday. I'd done some reading on knee issues and right after my run last night I stretched well, showered, then immediately took some aspirin and started icing the knee. So maybe that helped. But I'm thinking that the actual intelligent move would be to just suck it up and show up on Tuesday for the group run without running again.

I don't know. On the one hand I don't want to "wimp out". But on the other hand I don't want to keep pushing a body part that's been historically pissy with me and end up completely hosing my chances of ever finishing this class, let alone a 5K.

If anyone is out there today (or in days to come) and has any thoughts, ideas, or knows if maybe strapping up my knee or wearing some sort of brace might work? I'm open for suggestions.

Well, time for me to get a move on. I've got grocery shopping to do (hello knee brace), and then a day of cooking to get in. I'm working on making tons of stuff in advance so I'll be sure to have food for both work and dinner during the week with no excuses for eating out. I ate out Thursday, and the results were... embarassing.

Oh what the heck. I'll take a page out of Jenn's book. Here's what I had on Thursday, with the evil calorie tally thereof:

Yeah, it's ugly. Bear in mind that the foods listed are approximate, and the calorie count could actually be worse. It was an Asian buffet for lunch, then Chuck-E-Cheese for dinner. Yikes. Poor restaurant hits, and then lousy choices when I got to each.

On the plus side, I averaged up my caloric intake for the week and even with that paean to poor dining, I was still within my "losing" calorie range. That's something I try to remember -- that one day won't do me in. A whole run of them (see Halloween - New Year) will, but one day? That can be worked with.

If anyone's interested, here's what I'm cooking today:

Slow Cooker Salsa Chicken
Black Bean "Hummus"
and
Creamy Spinach Zucchini Soup

Have a great weekend, everyone! Clearly I'll be trapped in the kitchen awhile... ;)