Nearly a month has passed since my knee injury. Regrettably, that month was to be the pinnacle of my training. And October was to begin the tapering period for my race, and be a time to focus on keeping my gains sharp and practicing the more subtle arts of trail running like running on my driveway to replicate the desert terrain, balance exercises, and maintaining my cardio. 

That’s the bad news.

The good news: my knee is better.

I’ve spent the last week and a half testing it out at various paces and inclines and can say, with fingers crossed, that it is now in working condition.

So what now?

Cue the Rocky Theme Song.

Now, I take this month I’ve been given and trained like a soldier going off to a brutal war. My 30 mi journey through the desert will be just that, brutal. I am vastly under trained with respect to where I was the year I ran the Georgia Jewel 37 Miler. My cardio is depleted. My leg strength, how well I can climb hills and mountains, has suffered a huge blow. My long run mileage of 15 is a far cry from the 23 to 25 MI I would have liked to have done before toeing the line in Las Vegas.

Now, I have to find the right balance between training hard and overtraining. And I have to sandwich in there the pursuit of not reinjuring my knee or causing a new pain in some other part of my body to flare up. The question now: will I be able to run my race without being cut off for going too slow?

We’ll see.