welcome to 2012

Happy New Year!  I just finished reading Susan's first 2012 post and I have to say, I am also struggling to get excited about New Year's Resolutions or many goals.  She said "  My goals as of January 1, 2012 really aren’t any different than they were on December 31, 2011" and I very much agree with her.  So maybe I'll review some 2011 accomplishments in this post and then talk about what I hope to accomplish in 2012 in a later post?

2011: Things I Accomplished
1.  Got to my goal weight.  Okay, so I never blogged about the fact that I was trying to lose weight - because I didn't want this to be a weight loss blog.  Alas, I had put on some pounds since college that I decided I didn't want to run half marathons with, so I got rid of them.
2.  Ran a 10 mile race.. and then a half marathon!  I think that's pretty spectacular, considering that in January 2011 the furthest I had ever run was 6.2 miles.
3.  Got a lot faster at running.  When I started this blog I doing 2 minute running / 1 minute walking intervals and averaging above at 12:00 min/mile, and one year ago many of my runs were around the 11:00-12:00 min/mile pace.  My 10k race in late 2010 was a 10:54 pace, which I was very proud of at the time.  About one year later, I ran a 15k at a 9:09 pace: 5k further and almost 2 minutes per mile faster!
4.  Cooked some delicious stuff, including Chicken Enchilada Pie, Baked Ziti, Indian Cauliflower Stew, and other foods I failed to blog about.
5.  Began to explore the world of baking - very fun (albeit not so healthy).

I also ended the year with some mysterious knee/IT band pain. Basically, every time I run, somewhere around the 1.5-2.5 mile mark my knee starts to hurt - on my knee cap, more on the bottom I guess.  When I stretch, my IT band is really tight... it seems no amount of stretching can make me feel like I've totally worked out the tightness.  Also, I have noticed that various other muscles/areas of my legs are more stiff/sore than normal.  Some days it's my quads, some days my calves or even my groin and recently it's been everywhere.  Fail.

So, I've been pondering whether or not to see a doctor, but I decided today to buy a foam roller and use that for a bit and see how it goes.  Any foam rolling tips?  One website I read said to use the foam roller on the target muscle for 60 seconds, 3x a day, 2-3x a week.  Does that sound right?  Should I do more, less, something totally different?

Happy 2012 - maybe in my next post I'll have some goals/things I'm looking forward to in 2012?