A Furry Tangent

Well I needn't have worried what I exercise I was going to do last week as I ended up not doing any at all. My cat was scheduled for an ultrasound on Tuesday to confirm or deny whether my vet had actually felt the abnormal lump in her belly that he thought he had felt at a regularly scheduled checkup three weeks earlier. Sure enough, he had. My 12 year old cat had lost 1.5 pounds in 3 weeks, had begun vomiting, and had a confirmed malignant tumor on her colon. After weighing the options, and given her overall good health, we decided to have the tumor removed, and fast. She went in for surgery on Friday, and came home on Saturday. We're now 5 days post-op, and the kitty is doing very well, except for the cone on her head that and the less than fully cooperative attitude toward taking her pills (Photo shows her resting on her favorite comfy chair. We built box stairs up to it since she's not allowed to do any jumping for 2-3 weeks).

The entire week was such a bundle of fear and worry, I did my best to just curb the stress eating (can you say Halloween candy?), letting exercise and all the happy foot stretches and strengthening exercises go by the wayside. This week, I'm trying to get back on my game. I'm planning on following the Runner's World Barefoot Forum's barefoot running plan, starting with stage 3 (since I've been making the switch to living and running more barefoot since August).

Before getting completely sidetracked by my fur baby, I came to a realization: that even my version of starting slow with the barefooting perhaps wasn't slow enough. I started at 1/4 mile, and slowly increased to 3/4,  1.5,  1.7,  2.1 and so on, but I followed a straight linear progression up to 4.25 miles. What I'm realizing is that I should've hit 1.5 miles, and then continued to run only 1.5 miles for say 2-3 weeks, before then moving up to 2 miles, and running that distance for 2-3 weeks and so on.

So whatever thing in my ankle is hurting, I think I just overused it without giving it a chance to strengthen. So here we go again. And I'm thinking that I'll only ever go in the VFFs as far as I've already learned how to run barefoot. (At least that's my thinking, though with winter coming that may not be realistic. I suppose if I use the VFFs to go longer distances I'll just have to be very conservative with how much longer I go.)

10/31 -- 3/8 mile
11/3 -- 1/2 mile

With such short running distances planed for the foreseeable future, I've *got* to get more gym/cardio time in. That new swimsuit may still have to happen if I'm going to be off the bike for a bit, too.