RRRR!

Rest, don't push it, listen to your body... I was getting that advice from nearly everyone, runners, shop keepers and even a physiotherapist who had suffered shin splints. I had been feeling increasing pains in both my inner lower shin and outer shin lately and felt my legs were heavy and tired all the time. I was really spooked by my possible 'anterior compartment syndrome' and even more by the possible 'tibia stress fracture'. So I took a whole week off, no running.

Ruby provided a way to keep my mind at least a bit focused on running after that. I made a beginning to write an application that can read my exercise data from my Nike+ipod. The app is not finished yet, only the parser part is. I still need to finish the part that gets the data from the database and shows you some nice trends. I'll put the code on github when I have that part running.

Reading 'Ruby in Practice', which I've won, gave me inspiration for my app. However, I did not even finish the first chapter or two other books were in my mailbox! Off course I started to read those, 'The Manga Guide To Databases' and 'Grey Hat Python' as well. To add to the book frenzy, I just found out I also won the ebook version of the ultimate Ruby bible: 'Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide'! So yeah, get ready for some reviews ;-)



Running put the great week to a fantastic end. I have been feeling a bit jumpy the whole week, I really missed the running already. I guess it's quite addictive. Anyway, I did some googling and asked a physiotherapist I know about some stretch exercises for my shins. Yesterday I found the following stretches and they had an immediate effect:




Seated shin stretch
More shin stretches
'Swan lake stretch'

That last one did it for me so I decided to call it the 'swan lake'...

Ok...after that I decided to wear my new black-tech-ninja long-sleeve running shirt and go at it. This time however I really took time to do a proper warm-up. First a fast paced 1k walk, after that a 1k run. After that some stretches. Then I went off, I felt the inner shin hurting again quite soon. But then I saw a horse track, a sand path. When I went running on that, I felt nothing. The rest of the run was mostly a struggle because I had not ran for a whole week and was eating pizza and other badness while doing my geek things. However, when I got home I was pleasantly surprised by my stats: I passed 4K, nearly got to 5, RRRR!!