Half A Mile!

Tonight, I ran either .54 or .55 miles. :) It was a slow pace, .45 miles (where we stopped the stopwatch) was at 5:53 minutes, but I wasn't winded at the end. My calves hurt like heck though. We're not sure what I must be doing, but my calves tighten up very quickly. I do warm up and stretching (though possibly not enough), but they still tighten up pretty badly. After running that distance, walking was painful, but as I walked, it loosened up slowly. I got home, stretched, and Joseph rubbed my calves some, which helped loosen them up a lot. We're not sure what exactly the problem is however.

One theory is that, maybe I'm running too much from my calves. A possibility is that I bounce on the balls of my feet too much, and therefore use my calves too much, due to Irish dance. In Irish dance, everything is done on the balls of your feet, the higher the better. So my default is to land, and spring back up onto the balls of my feet, and too push back up onto the balls of my feet. We're not sure that that is the problem though. I've been working on running "quietly", which seems to mean less impact, but that didn't seem to fix the calf thing tonight.

We don't know. Any ideas? During dance class, my calves don't tighten up like this, so it's odd to me. We're not going to increase the distance anymore for a while, though. I'm content at half a mile. It feels like a real accomplishment, much like completing the whole block did. But our whole block is only .45 miles, so a half mile wasn't that much further. Pretty good progress for having started running only about 3 weeks ago. I bought my first pair of running shoes about 17 days ago. :) Now, we're just going to work on making that half a mile better.