I’m running a marathon in Richmond on Nov. 16th and following an 18-week plan. On the second 20-miler of the training plan a couple weeks ago, I was an idiot and ran the entire thing faster than my previous marathon race pace (7:34). It felt great as I was doing it, but needless to say I have been feeling the effects ever since. A week later, on my next long run (16 miler), I began to feel pain in my left lower hip/gluteal area, but largely ignored it until after my most recent long run, which was a 17 miler this past Friday. While I don’t feel much pain during the actual run (barely felt it at all on the most recent long run), I definitely feel it after the fact, and have trouble getting up stairs quickly or really just moving my left leg in an unusual way.
I’m now just under 4 weeks until the marathon and I’m not sure what to do. Even though I don’t feel it much on the runs themselves, I am pretty confident that somewhere during a 26.2-mile long race I will most definitely be feeling it. What do you think I should do here? It’s obviously one of the worst times during training to get hurt. I’ve put so much work into the past 14 weeks that I don’t want it to be thrown away.