After hurting my knee during the Disney World half marathon on January 10th I was a little worried about the next couple of races I was signed up for. They weren’t too far in the future. I was flying back to LA on Monday and the Star Wars Half Marathon Weekend was happening at Disneyland the following weekend. Yikes! Back in June when I registered for the Star Wars races I decided not to try to run the half marathon since it was only a week after the Disney World half marathon. As much as I really wanted to do it (and complete my Coast to Coast Challenge in record time), I figured it was just too ambitious for me at this point in my running career. And it’s a good thing I set those low expectations since my knee problems would have made a subsequent half marathon excruciating. As a consolation for skipping the half marathon, I registered for both the Star Wars 5K and 10K to still enjoy the weekend, just with less running. After my injury I was definitely concerned that I wouldn’t be healthy enough for the Star Wars races less than a week away, but I actually felt pretty good after resting and icing my knee for a few days. So on Friday morning when I crossed the start line of the Star Wars 5K I thought everything would be fine. It was just 3.1 miles, right? Too bad my knee was hurting so much after the first mile that I had to walk the rest of the race. I was so disappointed. To avoid further injury I ended up walking almost all of the 10K the next morning too. It was probably a mistake to even do that, but there was no way in hell I was going to miss getting the inaugural Star Wars 10K medal! Maybe that makes me materialistic, but I paid quite a bit of money for that race and it was going to take a lot more than a sore knee to keep me from participating. So despite the difficulties, I crossed both the 5K and 10K finish lines, but I felt awful. About a week later I decided I needed to do something about it.

To be concluded…