Keeping it Together

My running for the past month or so has been hampered somewhat by my lingering ankle injury. I went for a 10 mile run last weekend, which felt OK, until about mile 6 when my ankle started feeling a bit weak, I was on pace to make it in 1.5 hours but slowed up a bit and ended up going in 1 hour 32 mins. On the plus side, my toe hasn't been bothering me and the sore bursitis/bunion spot has also been fine. Maybe being forced to rest my feet for a while was a blessing in disguise. I've continued doing my upper body routines and started doing some cross training in the place of straight mileage. Saturday mornings I am doing my longer runs, with short runs and other cardio on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'm starting to realize that straight mileage isn't necessarily the answer for longer distance training. Sure if you want to be an Olympic class runner, you need to pound a lot of pavement, but I'm finding that cross training activities are actually improving my cardio and running more than running itself. For instance, I did the 100 burpee challenge yesterday (7:13, woot) and after that I hopped on the treadmill and it felt like I'd already been on it for an hour. It was like I skipped the laborious first 30-40 minutes it normally takes to get warmed up on a run and really start working the cardio side of things quickly. I've come to the conclusion that long runs are what's most important. Those 13-20 milers are what you really need to prepare for a marathon. All the 3-5 mile runs could probably be replaced by a mixture of other high intensity cardio and cross training activities without losing too much. I'm hoping that by limiting total mileage for a while, I can get my ankle back up to 100%.