Post Solstice

It was good to be back running after a three weeks hiatus. The occasion was the Summer Solstice Run, led by Ryan Barrett, a Salomon flight-crew member, out of the Salomon Toronto store, and the idea was that he would run loops out of the store into Sunnybrook Park from sunrise to sunset, and other would join for one or more loops.
Garth and I made the first loop, at 5:30 am - it was already warm. My hips got tight at the end, but I didn't think much of it. Then in the second loop my left IT-band started hurting: I got a bit more worried. I nevertheless started and finished a third loop. Garth went on and completed eight.

A little bit of Rhonda-Marie's magic touch, plus some more of Joshua's, and I felt ready to come back for the 7 pm loop, and even did the shortened last loop. Total for the day for me : 45 km :-)

I had a great time chatting with a lot of people, including Agatha, whom I hadn't seen in a long time, and Peter, who distracted me form the pain in the evening loop until I got warmed up enough, and stayed with me and continued on chatting till the end. A few Ontario ultrarunners showed up - that was nice, as a lot of them were at Niagara that day.
I had a good chat with Susie, Sam, Miles, a few strangers, a few regulars from the Wednesday group.

I went to "restaurative yoga" on Sunday, stretched, relaxed. And strangely, when I went for a short run on Monday with Yusri, over lunch time, my IT-Band didn't bother me at all.
Nor did it come back on Tuesday night, nor last night.
My glutes suffered in the hills yesterday, but I'm ready to start the real training next week!!

Oh - and I committed to swim 4 km with Rhonda-Marie on July 20. I already happily started open water swim with Scott.