Hello from Las Vegas. After morning coffee, I gassed up and drove straight back into town. I ran some morning errands, then hit the gym for an hour on the elliptical that was rather comfortable given the hours spent running yesterday. I followed that with a rowing machine session, my first swolework in about a week, and then out to finish more errands before the day was out.
I slept in this morning but feel alarmingly good… energy wise. Physically I’m still feeling beat up from the waist down after Saturday’s running. It’s all fortunately soreness: My left leg feels otherwise normal.
Today was supposed to be a scheduled day off. But I had a planned errand tonight pushed back to Tuesday night, so I’m going to make tomorrow the scheduled day off and do some light training today. Compared to yesterday my soreness feels a lot better, and some easy training will help move things along before resting tomorrow. It’ll be like a soft rest day followed by an actual rest day, helpful after the long workout this weekend.
Vegas has finally cooled off to where afternoons following work should cool to the high 80’s Fahrenheit, and I think attempting some brief post-work running sessions outdoors is worth a shot. Worst case scenario I have one brief, overheated session and I just bring training back inside the next day until further notice. But either way it will have to wait until at least Wednesday or Thursday for an attempt. (I notice there’s also a bit of wildfire haze this morning, so I guess that works out)
If I can resume workouts in the evening, that opens up my options quite a bit. If work break runs beforehand feel okay (and they’ve been feeling good since I’ve resumed them this past week), I could build back up to around 6-8 miles of interspersed easy intervals during training days. As of now I think it makes the most sense to still cross train early in the week, coming off heavier longer weekend workouts, and then work more on outdoor training later in the week as my legs bounce back, with one or two rest days in-between each week.
If I manage 4-5 weeks of consistent training this way or close to it, I think I can still be fairly ready for Indy.
One thing I really liked about this weekend’s long running is that, even though I hadn’t really done it at all in a couple months (outside of the 8+ miler I ran through Flagstaff three weeks ago), going long again was like the old adage of riding a bike: My body remembered how to do it even though I hadn’t trained anywhere close to it in a while. And yes, I stopped a lot in large part out of an abundance of caution.
But as many would tell you to fear, I wasn’t hurting and out of gas 3-6 miles in just because I hadn’t been doing 60 minute runs in a while. It took about a couple hours of running before my body really began struggling, which you’d expect even if you were well trained and had been running regularly for a while. It’s the other old adage: I listened to my body, and my body was able to handle quite a bit cold-turkey.
And it’s another good sign that, the day after, I was easily able to get back in the gym and cross train like before plus a little extra. It looks like overall I’m in good condition given I had to basically shut things down for a while.
Part of that is being patient and willing to pull back on my training, but also focusing on consistently eating good foods that foster recovery rather than inflammation. I’m not going to pretend my diet is anywhere close to perfect (hell, I had chicken fried steak Saturday night after the long run, and yes it was great), but most of the time I’ve been pounding clean protein, fresh fruit, and avoiding anything (else) fried. My supplement stack isn’t anything different other than maybe some extra Omega 3 some mornings. I always try to get Garmin’s recommended amount of water and at least get pretty close. Perhaps I’m getting more consistent sleep lately and that’s helped. But nothing I did during that recovery period was crazy-different outside of leaning heavily on cross training and being touch-and-go patient with my training.
So I’ll continue to be patient as I ramp up training, continue to listen to my body and give whatever volume and quality efforts I reasonably can going into October.