Day 5: Sleep Now in the Fire

“Sleep Now in the Fire” – Rage Against the Machine

Today’s run:

Miles: 2.81

Time: 40:01

Pace per mile: 14.14

Shin splints, man.  Zombies trying to eat my flesh/brains/whatever, and I’m whining about shin splints.  The walking dead helped me stay motivated to keep moving, but I did as little as possible.  Running only if I absolutely had to. 

I vaguely remember reading something about shin splints years ago (one of those times when I tried running for a week, only to come up with an excuse to stop), and this is all I remembered:

1. Stop running until they heal.
2. Try to run more on the balls of your feet than your heel.  It’s the heel strike that causes this.

And that’s it.  All of my knowledge of shin splints based on two small bits of information that may or may not actually be accurate.  Accurate or not, it was all I had, so I rested until it felt healed.  Which was a week or so.  It’s hard to keep track of the days.  It seemed to work well.  The shin splints are gone (for the time being, anyway) and I wasn’t turned into a zombie.  That’s the best news I could’ve hoped for.

I found something curious as I hobbled along this past week.  I was under the impression that these zombies could be killed by removing the head or destroying the brain.  But, as it turns out, that may not be correct.  I was walking when I heard a noise in the tall grass to my right.  I poked around with my bat and ended up finding out that it was a head.  Just a zombified head, sitting in the grass, like it was having a picnic.  When it saw me, it started gnashing its teeth.  It couldn’t move, so it just sat there, staring at me and gnashing.  Just like that head from Automaton Transfusion.

 I think that head was still alive. It’s been a while since I’ve seen that movie.

I stared back for a minute, then decided to make sure that destroying the brain worked.  Which it did.  So that was nice.

And that is how I dispatched of my first zombie.  Just bashing in a lonely head in the grass.  My mother would be so proud of me.

“Sad & Beautiful World” - Sparklehorse

In case you were wondering, here is what WebMD says about shin splints.