After a spectacular, amazing and exhausting June, running San Diego 100, pacing Jon at Western States and having a crazy work schedule between both events (I pulled 4 all-nighters the week of Western States) I found myself fatigued, tight and sore - totally worn out and this despite taking a whole week off of running after pacing Jon. The beginning of July I was exhausted all the time despite 8 hours of sleep every night. Tired before bed, tired getting up, tired during the day. Every time I went out for a run I was fatigued and my body, especially my legs were tight and sore. I figured I was over trained and took it easy the next two weeks. When that didn't help I took the rest of the month off. Just to be sure I went in to see my doctor and the blood test showed nothing out of the ordinary. I was worried my thyroid was out of whack or that I had anemia again. Nope none of that which is good.
I started running again the first week of August, ughh it was painful. It was like my body was a tightly clenched fist and it took most of the month to slowly ease and stretch my body back into running. I had knots and pain in places I hadn't even known until I started running again. I also um… put on some weight. Heck I didn't care, I indulged and since it's the summer which is my biggest season for beer drinking… well you get the picture. I'm still not 100% but moving in that direction. After a month my runs still don't feel as fluid as they used to and I have only just started doing long runs in the double digits. So far so good though. Being over trained is not cool, kind of makes me wish there was a drug that could cut the recovery time.
Now I'm just thankful I can run consistently again and to have the DESIRE to run. At it's worst I lost my passion for running, I preferred to sit around and do nothing and was totally fine with it…no actually I preferred it rather than being out suffering through another bad workout.
Moving forward, I'm a member of Strava and they have a new contest, 100 miles in 16 days. Ultrarunners and high mileage runners will have no problem with this but like their elevation challenge, 10,000 feet of climb in a month, I'm curious to see who has the most miles at the end of 16 days. I'm psyched for it and will use the contest to further jump start my training. I've had a month of "easing" back into things, now is a good time to start going long again. This weekend I had two decent runs, today's run better than yesterday but both in the double digits. While todays run, at 15.5 miles, is shorter than yesterday's, I enjoyed every mile of it.
Out of the valley back into the mountains.
