Training, Feb. 13 through Feb. 19

This one had all of the excitement of last week, except that it was a cut-back week in which I didn't even feign doing a workout (with some justification), so the executive summary really says it all: 75 miles in 10 runs, just punching the clock and if nothing else feeling like I'm now at a point where I can count on feeling genuinely good throughout the course of a 10-mile run and far better at the end than in the first 10 minutes.

I had a minor scare after Friday's second run, when my left ankle -- the one I fractured on a trail in New Hampshire in the summer of 2012 and intermittently hampered my training for the better part of three-plus years -- seemed to be acting up. I went through the usual paranoia of trying to tell whether it was that pain or just a new, unrelated twingy pain; the sort of thing I wouldn't have even worried about had there been no precedent with that particular joint.

I soon figured out that, history aside, I probably shouldn't be running in shoes with about 8,000 parsecs on them even on dirt surfaces and walking around in thin-soled flip-flops all the time even in a best-case scenario. (I'm pathologically lazy about tossing old shoes even when I have a new pair or two ready for deployment.

Just to be safe, I babied the hell out of myself on Saturday, mincing through five slow but gloriously uneventful miles, and then today I put in a good ten. Today I was going to run a four-mile tempo or at least do a set of strides, but between the ankle scare and the high winds out there today, I put it off.

In less than six weeks I plan to be on the starting line of a 5K. Plenty can happen in six weeks, both good and bad. And that will be among the most obvious pieces of wisdom I will ever dispense, until next week, when I'll be plumbing new depths of inanity but also hoping to provide evidence of reasonable fitness.