17km

Saturday night I was shivering under the blankets, all of my joints were hurting and my temperature was 38.5C (that's 101.3F). I un-programmed my alarm clock, I knew I would not have been able to get up the following morning at 7am and go running, no point in waking up then.
I didn't feel much better on Sunday morning, but at least the temperature was a bit lower. I read a bit about what to do if you have to skip a long run, and opened my training program file to reconfigure it but... I just couldn't get myself to do it and postponed this operation for a little longer. After lunch I had made up my mind: I would go out and just do 3 of my usual laps instead of going far away, so that if anything went wrong I could always turn around and head back home relatively quickly. My husband tried to stop me, but he soon understood it was no use.
I took it very easy, with a 1:1 ratio (1 minute run, 1 minute walk) and everything was good for the first two laps. At that point I wanted to finish my run, but the last 5km were hard. The sun went down, and so did the temperature. I started feeling very cold, especially my hands even though I was wearing gloves, I tried skipping some of the walk breaks but it didn't help much against the cold, and I was starting to feel feverish again. But I simply had to finish, and finish I did.

What during the final kilometers had been a mere annoyance, after a couple of hours became just plain pain: my left knee again. I had run on Thursday with my old shoes, and that had proven to be a mistake so I decided to switch to the new ones for good. As I write this on Monday afternoon, my knee is still very sore, though I can walk without problems and go (easily) up and (less easily) down the stairs. I need to schedule strengthening exercises in my program, it's the only way to really take it seriously and do them regularly. I think I will also rearrange my training program to avoid any long run for the next 3-4 weeks, so that my knee has more time to fully heal while I work on my muscles and also so that I don't have any long run during the holidays, which would realistically be at high risk of cancelation.

I think I proved yesterday that I am not looking for easy excuses to skip my workouts, but I also think I need to shift my focus for a while and concentrate on my knee now.