The rare post

Well sadly, these things are becoming rare lately, but I finally have a few minutes so I wanted to say hi again and empty a little corner of my brain in the blogosphere. Mayhem and chaos still reign at home, but I'm getting everything done that I need to (including some training) so I think I'm winning the battle. It was a pretty good weekend for riding even though mid week last week sucked and then I almost ruined things for myself Friday. I knew I was finally going to have some time at work so I had planned to run "long" 6 or 7 at lunch. I headed out and after the first 5 or 10 minutes I could tell my right heel was going to give me issues. I have strange feet and I always end up with this spot in the padding on the heel cup in my running shoes that wears out. It's not a big deal because it somehow never causes problems and around the time the hole gets big, the shoes are dead anyways. Well I've been wearing new insoles to help support my arches and take some of the strain off my right shin and they raised my foot up in the shoe a good bit and thus just at the top of the developing hole in the heel. That coupled with wearing a crappy pair of socks meant that I could just tell a blister was setting in. Long story short, I had to cut the run to 30 minutes and I still ended up with a large and painful blood blister in the back of my right heel. Fortunately, there's no sliding of my heels in my cycling shoes at all so I still got in an hour on the rollers yesterday and then got out for about 2:45 today. My goal was 3 so I rode from home to the 2 hour team ride and then peeled off to come home at the end. I have to say that the last few miles weren't exactly easy especially into the wind so I was fine being 15 minutes short. I did let myself get roped into a mini-throwdown with another guy on the hills, but he had me beat more than half the time and we weren't going all that hard especially relative to the abuse we'll all give each other on that loop in a few months. The joys of riding with the team.

Just random other stuff going on... finally got my son's tilted skate issue sorted out thanks to this master skate doctor up in Wilmington. He's had a thing where he can't get on the inside edge of his right skate because his foot wants to just tilt out. Turns out his (and my... it's genetic) right foot is naturally turned outwards relative to the centerline of his knee-leg so it wants to go that way when he gets on 2mm of steel on ice. A visit to a podiatrist and a subsequent visit to the skate guy and they made some tweaks that have him up on center. It's actually pretty amazing to see how little they modified the skate and what a dramatic effect it had on him. It was also kinda weird to discover something about myself that I never knew and it sheds all new light on why it's my right shin that acts up first any time I have a problem. Funny how I get this far after how many thousands of miles of running and never knew it.

Ok, time for bed. Day off tomorrow so we're taking the kids to the New England Aquarium. Should be a good time.