My Plicas Are What???

Medial Synovial Plica Irritation. Boom. I just hit ya with it.

I got a full evaluation from the trainer today, including fancy knee-centered knowledge I'm guess normal humans don't know. Doc was able to show me exactly what the problem was and wrapped up his exam by handing me two rolls of Ace bandages (to better hold the ice) and some advice, "Quit pretending to be an athlete." This was in the same breath he told me another "Cy" school had cuter cheer coaches, so you can assume the severity in which I took his advice. He's quite the jokester, but the man is good at what he does!

Since I knew what was going on and wasn't stressing over the puffy masses covering my knees, I felt more at ease to go back (however slowly) to my runs. I dragged Michael with me to the park again since my last three runs were treadmills. I pep talked myself up enough to get going, but totally wasn't prepared for the first couple minutes of pain. It was just the stiffness wearing off until my muscles warmed up, but boy oh boy!

WAY COOL part of today: I saved about $300 bucks!!!!!! Totally worthy of an over-abundance of exclamation points. You all know that I've been seriously looking into a Garmin or a Pulsar heart/pace monitor which, even on eBay, start at $250 without the footpod which is yet another $100. There is definitely no way I can shell out those big bucks because I'm really not that ballin'! How did I solve this problem? $5 iPhone App! RunKeeper is exactly what I needed and nothing I didn't want. It tells me my pace and run time along with my distance every 5 minutes. Perfect!

So what did I end up running? I'm still taking the Thorny advice. Instead of 2 miles, I did 1.71 in 19:59. Homegirl voice told me five minutes into my run that I was at a 13 min pace (I told ya... those first few minutes were not cool) but I did the next 15 minutes at 11:30 pace and I felt really good. I'll see where that leaves me on my run tomorrow!