One week later: reflections, confessions, and what the future holds

It is officially one week since the marathon, and recovering was perhaps the most exciting variable of the entire season. I was fairly confident I would finish, but what would happen after I crawled, walked or ran across the line was completely up in the air.

Would I be in unbelievable pain?
Would I ever want to run again? For a lot of the season, the answer was no.
Would I have to wait weeks to exercise again?

Well after running/jogging across the line, I wasn’t in any pain. I was fine. I was more devastated that the TNT season was over than anything else. It has become such a big part of my life and I love my friends! So physically I was fine, emotionally, a bit disturbed.

Around mile 19, I realized I was running a marathon and really enjoying it. The feelings and realization are hard to describe. But I knew I would run another race in the not too distant future--definitely by NYC 2009, maybe 2008 if I can get it.

The first days after the race I was sore. I moved fairly slowly, definitely didn’t do much extra walking, and took to walking backward down the stairs to alleviate the pain my quads felt when going down steps.

On Wednesday I got a massage at Ohm Spa. It was fabulous, and, like magic, on Thursday, I had zero pain and did a mini workout. Today I am 100% recovered I have done a few workout videos and a decent amount of walking, and feel totally ready to workout normally and run again. I am looking forward to enjoying my old favorite workouts, spinning, dance classes and Pilates for a while, before jumping backing into training.

Now for the confessions

I did not run as much as I should have during training. I never got to the point where I enjoyed running on my own, so many weeks I only ran the Tuesday and Saturday practices and cross-trained the other days.

In hindsight this hindered my performance because I never built up my running speed. During my next training season I will run at least 4 times a week, and do more speed work. My endurance was there, but I should have done more running.

Now that I have accomplished my goal of completing a marathon, I want to work toward a better time, maybe even qualifying for Boston…now there is a feat!

Maybe I will resume this blog when I start training for my next race, or maybe I will drop a line when the relevant occasion arises. In any case, I hope someone finds this helpful.