With the post-race highs can come post-race lows. In my case,
it was the struggle to physically get low to the ground and walk down stairs
from knee pain. My family laughed that I looked like a 90-year-old walking down
the steps. I could see the fluid built up in my knees. Knee pain is something I’ll
be fighting my whole life, especially in my right knee thanks to a surgery I
wish I never had many years ago. I can manage it though and generally now it doesn’t
prevent me from training as long as I’m smart. Pain in my left knee is less common
but once again, I can manage it when it flares up. Over the next few days, the swelling
went down and I was back to walking up and down steps normally. The night of the race I slept horrible which is normal but I felt like internally I was very warm.
However, things took a turn in other ways physically. The
race was Sunday. On Wednesday morning, I woke up with a slight sore throat. By
the evening I could tell I was sick. On Thursday, I felt like garbage and had a fever over 100F so I decided to take an at-home COVID test and it was instantly positive. Thursday
morning my period also started after only a 20-day cycle, most likely shortened
from the stress on my body from a hard race and COVID. By the evening my temperature had dropped and by Friday
morning I felt back to normal so I was happy for the quick turnaround. Honestly
being sick during a recovery week was good timing from a training standpoint.
It only cost me one day of easy training. The real question is, did I catch it
before, during or after the race? We’ll never know but I’m guessing I wouldn’t
have even gotten sick had my immune system not been tanked from the race. I
heard a lot of people got sick after the race.
The main annoyance of getting sick was canceling plans.
Even though I was feeling fine by Friday, I decided to cancel all Memorial
weekend plans including attending a wedding I had been looking forward to for
months. On the plus side, it freed up a lot of time over the long weekend to get
a bunch of house projects and yard work done.
As planned (minus an extra full rest day), I spent one
week doing all easy and short training, not looking at data, not having any
structure, simply moving my body a bit every day. The next week I started
ramping volume up a bit again but mostly focused on steady aerobic work with
some harder efforts mixed in with swimming. I got to spend an afternoon at the
lake curtesy of my friend and her dock she lets me use. I like to occasionally
mix up training so I enjoyed a bit of paddle boarding. I followed it up with an
open water swim with my husband and dog on the paddleboard next to me. Let’s
just say Nikita does not like the lake, especially when on the
paddleboard and really doesn’t like it when I’m not on the paddleboard with
her, but instead just out of her reach. Needless to say, she fell
into the water a few times trying to get to me. It made for a very entertaining view every
time I breathed to the right seeing her staring down at me in a state of
distress.
By the next week I decided it was time to start focusing
on some of the little, but specific, things I didn’t worry about during my last
training cycle leading up to Chatty. For Chatty I was focused on building a
solid foundation again. Now I can start building new levels. I swam hard enough
that I felt shaky and a bit sick to my stomach and then wondered why the
shower water couldn’t get any colder. I did some specific intervals above threshold
on the bike. I did a run test that I literally haven’t bothered with in years
just because I was curious. I threw on some fins for a few 25m fly in the pool,
which I will admit does not look pretty. I’m having fun with mixing the hard
work in here and there, and on other days realizing I’m not feeling it and
going nice and easy. Some might classify this as polarized training which has
become the newest buzz word in the endurance world, as if this approach hasn’t
been around for a long time. I call this blending multiple training approaches to
work on specific adaptations while keeping in enjoyable and low key. This week
I’m back in high hormone phase so I’ve backing off some. I believe that females
should alter their training based on their cycles to maximize progress over the
long run. Also, I’m not in serious training for a race right now so I’m content
spending more time with relaxed training.
My 11-year anniversary was the weekend of the race so we
did not celebrate it at all. Literally, I didn’t even remember it was my anniversary
until I was scrolling through Facebook and saw someone else comment about their
anniversary. It made me feel better that when I said “Happy Anniversary” to Bill
that his eyes got really wide because he clearly forgot as well. We are pretty low
key about these things and it works for us. He really wanted to go to the beach
at some point during the summer so I decided June would be best for our schedules
and we did a long weekend trip to Isle of Palms. We finally made it out to
celebrate with a nice dinner complete with amazing cake. All I’ve wanted since
my race was to have good chocolate cake but the two times I was supposed to
make it, the plans got cancelled. If I made the cake for only my household, I
would have ate 80% of it myself in about 2.5 days. This cake was worth the wait
though and we got a second piece to-go for dessert the next night. Finally, my post-race
celebration was complete. I also got in some ocean swimming and some very sweaty runs including on the beach which is always a treat.
And in other news, I got a roll down slot
to the 70.3 World Championships in St. George this year. I had mixed feelings
about going. Last time I got a slot I didn’t go, mostly because I didn’t stay
for the slot allocation and didn’t know they called my name until afterwards. It’s
going to be expensive to go there pretty much only for the race but I figured
it will be even more expensive in the following years when it's in other countries. I’ve traveled to that section of the country several times over the
last two years, so I don’t want to use any additional days of Bill’s vacation
time to travel around afterwards. Unfortunately for my brain, I actually ran
most of the run course when I was passing through St George in April when it
was in the 90s, I was sleep deprived and having a rough day. It was one of the
worst runs I’ve had all year. But despite all that, I thought why not and signed up. St
George, here I come! … in over 4 months.
