Hurty feet indeed.

When I named this blog "My Feet Hurt!" I did it half jokingly. I was expecting my feet to be a tad sore from all that pavement pounding. I even expected a minor injury, perhaps from putting my foot down funny or slipping on some gravel, all of which I am told are the common perils of running. So when my first foot injury arose on Friday you'd think I'd have been celebrating. I would now be able to proudly show off my battle scars, proof of my dedication to my chosen exercise regime. Not so. I didn't hurt my foot out running. How, you ask, did I injure myself? A slip? A fall? No, no, no. 

My shoe bit me. 

Yes you read that right. Friday night I made my way to the tube station to go to my fiancé's work party, and my shoe bit me. My sensible, flat shoes that I had worn specifically with the aim of preventing foot injury. The sensible shoes I was planning on later swapping for the highly impractical 5 inch heels. My sensible shoes have a funny sense of irony that's all I'm going to say. In all honesty I had noticed a slight pinching sensation on my (5 minute) walk to the station, but I figured I must have just got something stuck in the shoe. Picture my shocked, disbelieving face when I pull the offending shoe off at the station to find my heel completely red with blood. Blood! My sensible shoes made my foot bleed! This is the type of injury I would expect had I decided to run a marathon in my aforementioned 5 inch heels! Or just taken part in an Army-style march across the Brecon Beacons. In the rain. 

My lady readers might understand this sentiment more than my male ones, but you place your trust in your sensible shoes and mine betrayed me. Traitors. 

Anyway, for those of you who like seeing this kind of thing, I have thoughtfully included a photo of my heel. It has healed over somewhat now and is no longer actively bleeding (yay) but still hurts to the point where conventional shoes (ie: anything that's not a welly or a flip flop) are agony to wear. 

Oh, and for those of you (probably not) wondering what happened to my night out? Well I went to the work party anyway, in my pretty knee-length cocktail dress with my handsome dinner-suited-up fiancé. And what did I put on my feet? 

Flip flops. I wore flip flops. 

PS: special shout out to my fiancé who left work early to go on a mid-winter mission to find and buy me said flip flops.

Milestones

Since I started running back in May and started this blog I feel like I have reached many different milestones. I ran my first race back in July, I joined not one but two different running clubs, I can now run 5k without stopping or feeling like I'm about to die and I've met loads of new people who share this crazy desire to run around outside in the cold for some crazy reason. All of this is wonderful and I'm super happy for myself. One milestone has always eluded me however. Not because I couldn't reach it but because I always avoided it. Well, this past weekend I finally let myself get there.

I went for a run with my fiancé. 

I know, you were probably expecting something slightly more dramatic right? What you have to understand is that my fiancé was in the army for 5 years and, even on an off day, is a million times fitter than I am. This has always made me slightly apprehensive to go running with him. I always had visions of me huffing and puffing on hands and knees fifty metres behind him while he runs at a tenth of his normal pace. So I decided to wait until I would be able to keep up and show him how much I'd improved. (Pride is a funny thing isn't it?) 

Anyway, the run went really well. Yes, he did have to slow down so I could keep up but not to the cartoon-like exaggerated extent I had been picturing. Yes, at the end of the run I was in large amounts of pain. On the upside, the reason for the large amounts of pain was that his naturally faster pace made me speed up to try and not slow him down too horrendously. Which resulted in me shaving two more minutes off my time! 

So here we are. One more demon defeated. One more milestone reached. 

Basically, yay me.