‘Let’s Get it Started’…Again!

I realized I hadn’t made a post about the 1/2 marathon until today.  It was awesome!  I did not realize what Shamrockn’ meant!  Along the course there are live bands playing as you run.  Just when I would get a bit tired, I would being to hear music and it would charge me up.  It was great.  The course was nice, almost 100% flat.  I only had one mishap.  About 8.5 miles, one of the women from my training group was still with me.  We saw the 11 mile sign on the other side of the street we were running on (there was two way runner traffic on the closed street).  I made a joking comment about jumping over to the other side and calling it 11 miles ran.  She said that we were close to the 11 mile mark, she had run the course last year and we had just passed the 10 mile mark.  In the distance one could see runners crossing over some sort of overpass.  I believed her!  I didn’t have anything to judge it against and thought to myself…man that was easy to get the mileage in, (didn’t hurt that I had missed earlier mile marker signs and didn’t realize until I saw the next marker)  Well, the runners that were going over an ’over pass’ were up on a levy road.  As I mentioned,  when she said this it was about 8.5 miles, because the next marker I saw was 9 miles.  The bitch!  I got it in my head that I had conquered mile 9 easily.  When I saw that sign, it was like I had to run it all over again.  That was about the longest mile of my life (so far).  I wouldn’t quite say it was me hitting ‘the wall’  more like I was ‘played’.  I finished the race according to my watch, at 2:58:33.  The official time according to the race timer was 3:00:52.  -Not bad considering a look back to my first posts in December.  This currently puts my mile at 13:40 or so.  I have to be able to make 26.2 miles, running them at a 13:44 pace to finish the CIM on December 5.  I think I am on my way! 

I took 3 days off to allow my body to recover from the 13.1 miles.  They were relaxing in a painful kind of way.  I have been sore in the past, but this was a soreness I haven’t ever quite experience, kind of like layers.  Just when I thought I was through most of it, my left calf  has severely tied up; I think because I was hobbling so much on my right leg earlier this week. 

I dusted myself off yesterday with a Yoga class.  I probably shouldn’t call it Yoga, more like Steve attended Yoga class to sound like some type of dying animal…I thought I had done a pretty good job of stretching after the run and the last few days… class yesterday proved that I had just scratched the surface.  I was caught off guard at muscle groups that were still fatigued, there were positions that I would just laugh as certain muscle groups would not support the rest of my body.  Had this been my first time at Yoga, I would have been incredibly discouraged.  Most of the class was laughing along with me and my pain…

I am going swim this evening and do some resistance work.  I was planning on hitting things hard again by Wednesday, however, my mind is ever so humbly listening to the rest of my body, and I will ease back into it.  I will be back to daily workouts and postings, additionally, I am going to get back to a strict diet and caloric intake routine.