Posts Tagged ‘recovery’

It’s been a while since I’ve had so many post-race thoughts, but I am trying to avoid a long drawn-out post with everything.

There are a lot of things to tell, such as meeting Bill Rodgers, discussing the hills of the Baltimore Marathon, and visiting Holabird Sports – I will get to all that eventually.

Before I do that, though, I have a big THANK YOU list to get to. I’m not sure if it’s because I put myself out there more for this race, but I felt like I had more support than usual to carry me through to the finish on Saturday.

First and foremost, I want to thank my wife for so much – for putting up with my back-and-forth antics on even doing another marathon, dealing with my sweaty clothes, getting up on Saturday mornings with my son while I was out running, hooking me up with a Mary Kay foot soak, and walking around a strange city to support me on the race course. I could easily go on and on.

I want to thank longtime friends of mine for their comments on my blog and over on Facebook. It turns out I have a lot more running friends than I ever realized.

The support on Daily Mile and Twitter have also been tremendous – I can’t thank those people enough, many of whom I will never even meet in real life. Many of us have gone through the same stuff in the past year, from injuries back to full health, and I never felt alone in that process.

I’d like to thank Dr. Wimmer of Wimmer Chiropractic. Through all my adjustments and rehab in the winter and spring, I sort of feel like we were a team getting me to another marathon. I looked back today at our Q&A exchanges from earlier this year and it’s funny to hear me talk about signing up for Baltimore when it didn’t seem realistic at the time. While Dr. Wimmer is not a runner, not yet anyway, I’d like think I taught him a thing or two in the past year.

Lastly, I’d like to thank anyone who has left a comment on here – some of you aren’t on these sites and just read for the fun of it and offer up great support (THANKS MOM!). For that, I am very grateful.

Image: Felixco, Inc. / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Earlier this summer I was introduced to Tommie Copper compression gear via Twitter. I was asked if I would be interested in testing the product out for a review. I’ve been curious about compression gear for a long time, but never invested in anything — I choose the word investment because as with many things with running, spending money on something can often be a win/lose situation.

I had the calf sleeves for a couple of weeks before putting them to the full test. After I experienced some calf soreness on a couple of runs in my neutral shoes (Ghost 3), I tried out two calf sleeves after a few runs. On a couple of double days, I wore the sleeves between runs and after the second run. And after every long run since late July, I’ve worn the sleeves for at least an hour or so.

I have been very impressed with how refreshed my legs feel after wearing them. After most every race and long run, I feel like I am having less and less soreness. While some of that might be attributed to being in better overall shape, I have to give credit to Tommie Copper.

In addition to the calf sleeves, I also have been wearing the knee compression sleeve for my left knee — the one I injured — after long runs for at least an hour. After this past weekend’s 20-miler, I wore it about an hour prior to going to bed as well. The next day, and now two days later, those 20 miles are already a good memory. While I haven’t had problems with my ITB, it’s nice to have the knee compression. It just feels like it’s giving me a boost to my recovery.

I have given these the full test — in addition to wearing them a few times a week, I have also washed them twice. Besides a small hole in one of the calf sleeves — due to my own hard pulling — they have held up well with a similar fit after washing.

The only drawback I have found is that the calf sleeve does not come in pairs — at a retail of $24.95 for one sleeve, the price doesn’t set Tommie Copper apart in the compression market. With this being my first pair of compression sleeves, I don’t have a solid comparison to other brands as far as comfort and recovery go, so when it comes to cost I won’t pass judgment as to whether it’s worth the investment.

I will, however, recommend them. You can’t go wrong with a 100 percent money-back guarantee.

For more information on Tommie Copper, visit their website, “like” them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter. You can also check out some videos on YouTube, including an endorsement from Montel Williams.

Last week I was in the funkiest of funky moods. I refrained from talking about running as much as I could.

In addition to my mood, I wasn’t feeling all that great either. Combine those two things and I have what felt like a horrible week. Now that I’ve had a couple of days to bounce back, though, I realized that I let my mind and body settle into recovery week.

That’s not really a bad thing; I needed a cut-back week with my mileage and I needed rest. Tuesday’s post about ending my “do something” streak was only a hint at how tired I felt. Add a few nights of going to be earlier, a couple of weekend naps and considerably less running miles – and less intensity – and I’ve come to the conclusion that I was completely lacking respect for the recovery week.

Nothing I did last week was bad, but if I had a little bit of a different attitude about things, I wouldn’t have felt as miserable as I did. Yesterday’s 8.3-mile run — my longest non-long run in a while — and today’s core workout were good, but I also have felt like they took a little more effort than usual because I let myself slip into a low.

I’ve written a lot on here and on Twitter this summer about staying focused – these next few weeks are so important for that. The Baltimore Marathon is just a little more than 5 weeks away – I have my highest mileage weeks ever to go, a couple of 20-milers to knock out and I have to maintain quality runs to hit my goal.

Image: Boaz Yiftach / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I wrote the other day about how I hated missing this year’s Blue Ridge Half Marathon in Roanoke. So instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself, I hit the road for a short run on Saturday.

It was completely spontaneous as I had actually planned on taking the day off. To remind myself of missing another half marathon due to ITB injury recovery, I wore one of my 13.1 visors and the race shirt from last year’s Lynchburg Half Marathon.

Wearing these things and putting myself in the middle of conversations of races I can’t do right now is how I motivate myself. Being told and telling myself I “can’t” do something doesn’t settle well with me. While I feel like I am over my injury, the path to getting back to where I was distance-wise feels like the biggest uphill battle I’ve ever had. A few years ago I wouldn’t have cared this much, but I do now. It’s tough, but I’m determined.

Here’s a little known fact about me — I very rarely plan my routes. I usually just have a general mileage range in mind and then run wherever I feel like it. I do have certain routes that I know the exact mileage of and have actually been sticking to them lately in my recovery process, but today was different — it was time to run with absolutely no plans beyond getting to at least 6 miles.

So instead of starting from home, I drove to the local middle school to start my route. Then the goals starting coming to mind — hit some long hills, both uphill and downhill. Considering three months ago I was told to avoid hills as much as possible, I wanted to go out of my way if I had to in order to run hills.

Another goal was to not worry about my time at all. When I looked at my watch I made a promise to myself to just look at the distance and avoid looking at the current pace or time elapsed.

I also wanted to make sure I enjoyed this run — for the first time in a while I stopped and took several pictures, including this pony behind the Elks National Home in Bedford:

Things were going great and a few miles into it I decided I needed to do something to help my mind — run the hill where the pain started in October. So I ventured to that part of town and stopped and took this picture of it:

I posted it to Twitter with this simple message: “The hill where my knee pain started 5 months ago. Time to make it mine.”

I made it mine. And I made this entire 6.2-mile run mine. I ran it like I wanted today. I had fun. I didn’t think about my knee. I hit so many little goals along the way that I almost let my emotions get to me. It was like the finishing line of a big race.

Today I crossed a hurdle — I’m not injured anymore; I’m not in recovery either; and while I am training for a 10k in a couple of weeks, I am officially ready for the rest of the year with all these lessons learned in my brain ready to be utilized. I am, as many people on Daily Mile keep telling me, back.

It’s been a while since I’ve had intentional down time. With the exception of a couple of weeks this year when I was sick and my knee injury, things have been on fast forward for a while.

So I’m taking a bit of a break — both physical and mental. I’m not setting a timetable or any rules — I’m doing less blogging and tweeting and spending less time on Daily Mile. I’ve stayed fairly quiet for a few days already and will probably stay that way for a little while. I’m not completely going away … just backing off the peddle a little bit. It’s time to regroup and get to 2011 in a good state of mind.

My body is telling me something — after 4 weeks of increasing my overall miles and after two weeks in a row of 12-mile runs, it’s time for the first recovery week. I really wanted to have one more week of increased miles and get to 30 miles for a week, but my legs are flat out tired right now.

So, I made a decision today to cut my miles back for the week and let my body recover from the past four weeks of training for the Richmond Marathon. Since 19.7 miles for the week ending July 11, I have logged weeks with mileage of 23.2, 25, 26.7 and 26.9. It doesn’t really feel like that much, but the heat and humidity coupled with the gradually increased mileage has taken its toll.

This all being said, however, comes on a week in which I have a half marathon planned — a non-race race, as I wrote about recently. This could change my strategy for the weekend, but I’m not really making that decision right now. I’m still doing the race and still plan on 14 miles being my long run for the week despite what most people do on a “recovery” week. I just know that I need to cut back on the miles for a few days or else my legs will absolutely hate me.

This is part of my non-plan plan, and I’m sticking to it.

Three days removed from the Terrapin Mountain adventure, I’m almost over my soreness. I had a nice short recovery run last night, am taking tonight off and will continue with a planned long run tomorrow night of 9-10 miles. I’m still all giddy about that run/hike the other day, but perhaps the most surprising thing is how sore I’ve been.

While some of the soreness is due to the fact I probably could have waited a month to do that, I’m also discovering what it’s like to recover from running on rocks and falling on ice and leaves. While my elbow soreness is going away slowly, my legs are sore in completely different places. It felt weird yesterday to walk around. Today it’s just a dull soreness that will be gone by the morning.

I continue to be bummed about dropping my “31 in 31″ plan and 100 push-ups for at least this week, but it is what it is. I can’t let that get me down when I have so much more going for me right now. I haven’t felt this great about running in a few years, so I have to take this momentum and roll with it.

After running two races two weekends in a row, there’s no question that I was extremely tired this week. On Tuesday, when I thought I felt fine, I went out for a short run with my dog and suddenly had that post-race soreness hit me like a ton of bricks. So all week I’ve been taking it easy, getting in some walking and very short running with my dog. I’ve also managed to fall asleep on my couch earlier a couple of nights as well. After two of my most satisfying races in five years of running, I certainly had one of my best rest weeks ever. It’s time to get back to the grind this week!

So, what’s next?

… Stay tuned.

With an upcoming crazy weekend with a baby shower out of town, I’ve never been more happy to not run as I have this week. With a walk and short jog with my dog yesterday, it was liberating to know that I’m just taking this week to do whatever when it comes to exercise. It’s nice to know I decided to avoid a marathon this year … had I chosen a marathon this fall, I would’ve kept to the rigorous routine and probably would have driven myself to the ground this week. Like I said earlier this week, maybe next year.

When I get back to town Sunday evening, I will have figured out what I’m doing this fall. The only thing that makes sense for me with a baby on the way is the 10 miler; anything after that isn’t worth traveling to. And I’m holding a grudge against 13.1 miles right now, so I don’t want to even think about that distance. I was almost convinced to run the Baltimore Half, but the price just jumped to $80, so I quickly thought twice about that. There are several community races around here that I may do and I may be very happy to just do those.

Meanwhile, here’s a reminder for myself on what I want to do next year …