[5/8/12]

Before I continue I would like to sincerely thank my friend and colleague in my class Dustin! Thanks for generously supporting my cause :) Your donation marks the very first donation from our class and I'm honored :)

So... I think I'm going to have to take a short break from training because I think my body is starting to wear out from training for the past three months. I'm currently battling a couple of injuries right now: possible muscle strains in my lower left back/hip muscles and also possible groin strains. To prevent further injury, I've decided to take about a week off from training to allow my body to recover and recuperate. I will evaluate how I feel after church on Sunday and start up again from there if I'm at 100% again on that day.

These injuries came about overtime. My lower left back/hip/groin started to bother me on Friday, May 4th while my cousins were in town visiting me (which was amazing by the way!). I did a light workout this past Monday and I felt twinges of pain radiating around my lower left side. Here are my results for today's run outside:

This result is pretty disappointing. By mile 3 I started feeling a moderate pain around my lower left side. Ignoring it, I continued running for another 5.5 miles and the pain progressively got worse. I had to dramatically slow my pace (hence the resulting mile splits) and eventually I was forced to stop. After some light stretching I attempted to start again but at that point my body wasn't up for it anymore. Since I ended 2.5 miles away from home I had to limp all the way back.

I may not be able to reach my dream of achieving a 1:25:00 half marathon but I still feel that a 1:30:00 half marathon is still within my reach. This obstacle, however, has shown me how much more challenging this journey is going to get. Because of this fact... the only one I can turn to is God. I have faith that He is trying to teach me something with this injury. What it is, I have no idea... All I can do is continue praying and fighting for my day to day goals.

As a final word, I promised to make this blog as real and as honest as I can. I do this because I want to not only honor the gifts that have already been given to me, I want to make sure that you all know that I'm doing the absolute best I can to balance medical school with my training while still attempting to find time for friends and family. I will continue to move forward with this!

Marc