Recovery Run

Stupid mono. After 2 weeks of fever and headaches, 1 week of… really phenomenal digestion issues, and a few more days to make sure they were gone, I finally felt up for a run Thursday.

Now normally when I run, whether it’s a race or just a loop around the neighborhood, the thing I most want to avoid is stopping to walk. I hate having to stop to walk, so it’s the thing I fear the most. Even in a 1 (that’s one) mile race I did last year, I was afraid I’d have to stop to walk. Totally irrational in that case, but every time I stop to walk during a run, it feels like a little defeat. Anyway, when I ran Thursday, the thing I most wanted to avoid wasn’t walking. It was passing out.

I knew it was going to be hard, because walking up the stairs at work still gets me a bit winded these days. But since I am otherwise symptom-free, I decided there was no point in waiting any longer to run. It’s just fatigue. I’ve run while fatigued before. That’s the whole point of marathon training, in fact – to train you to run while you’re fatigued. But I wasn’t quite prepared for how out of breath I’d be. I was going very slow, but breathing about as fast as I do for a hard workout run. By the end of 3 miles, I was just done. I felt like I’d run a hard 5k – wanting so much to just sit down and die, but knowing I needed to keep moving. It was brutal, and I felt awful. I chalked it up in the success column.

I tried another 3 miles on Saturday, and there was noticeable improvement – I ran slightly faster (still well below my usual pace), and didn’t want to die at the end. Today, I ran 5. My average pace was hilariously slow. It was hard, but once again, I didn’t want to pass out. Okay, maybe there was a moment right at the end of mile 3 when I wanted to pass out, but I kept going. Stopping to walk doesn’t really enter my mind during these runs, because that’s usually a leg problem. My legs are actually fine when I’m running this slow – my aerobic ability is the bottleneck right now. Stopping to walk wouldn’t really help, so I just keep going.

So that’s where I am. My training plan, if I had been able to stick to it over the last few weeks, had me running 14 today. I ran 5. Next Sunday, I’ll try 10. Then 13 the week after that. If all goes well, I should be able to merge back into my training plan in 3 weeks with a 16 mile long run. If all doesn’t go well, I can cut a couple weeks out of the top of the cycle, and reshuffle.

So I’m back. I won’t be breaking any speed records soon, but I’m running again. Who knows, in time I may start worrying about having to stop to walk again.