Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, etc.! I hope you’re having a great holiday season and have had or will have an opportunity to spend time with family, friends, and loved ones. I’m very thankful this holiday season…I’m grateful throughout the year for everything I’m fortunate enough to have, but it does seem to get emphasized more during the holiday season as families try to get together and people reflect on the past year.

I got back to running during the past week, after taking nearly three weeks off to let my twisted knee heal. My first run was a four-mile jog on Tuesday at an easy pace, and it went well though I had some intermittent soreness in my kneecap (a different part of the knee than I had injured). It was just some mild soreness as opposed to injury-type pain, it came and went throughout my run, and it didn’t linger after I finished running. My next run was a seven-miler with my wife on Thursday – I ran an easy warm up and cool down, sandwiched around a four-mile tempo run at her pace. That was a good workout, and my kneecap bothered me during parts of the tempo run portion and toward the end of the cool down. But like the previous run, it was just soreness in my kneecap that was more of an annoyance than anything, it wasn’t in the spot I injured, and it didn’t linger after my run.

Getting ready to do a tempo run with my wife, and hoping my knee would hold up.

On Christmas Eve, I wanted to try a faster-paced but shorter run so I ran 5K on the roads near my parents’ house. That went very well, and I had no knee pain at all during or after the run (yay). I was able to run at a decent pace, though the second mile was a little slower than the first and third miles. I definitely felt the effects of not running much recently, as I felt more tired – and got winded earlier – than I should have for that pace and distance. But I have no complaints, and much more important to me than time or pace was the complete lack of pain in my knee, especially with a fairly hard effort. I ran again on Christmas morning, but I was pressed for time and only had a chance to run a couple of miles. I wanted to get out there, enjoy the nice weather (relatively speaking, for Michigan in December), and see if my knee still felt OK. It got a little sore a couple of times during my run, but again it was just the annoying kneecap pain rather than injury-type pain inside my knee, and it didn’t linger at all after I stopped running. I’m very happy to be running again, and I hope to steadily (but slowly) increase my mileage and get back whatever fitness I lost over the last few weeks.

I hope you’re enjoying some time with family and/or friends! We get together with my family on Christmas Eve and my wife’s family on Christmas – we’re very lucky that we live close enough to our respective families so we can see both sides every year and don’t have to work around any scheduling conflicts.

Happy Holidays!

Questions:
Do you travel for the holidays?

Are your holiday plans the same every year, or do you change things up for family/travel reasons  or “just because”?

Do you run on Christmas or other holidays, or do you tend to take those days off?