That sounds too dire. But I am discouraged. I felt great after the long run, good enough to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with my husband's family and then drive four hours home, arriving and getting everything unpacked by midnight. I spent the next day on my feet in the kitchen, still feeling fine, if a bit tired. But by Tuesday I wasn't feeling fabulous. I could not get up to swim, as planned, but slept instead. I ran twice on Tuesday, just two short runs, squeezing them both in at odd moments: while the kids were at swim lessons, and on my favourite trails after dropping my soccer girl off at a practice. Short, fast runs, no more than 4km each, about 8km total. I also biked around town on errands, and pulled the stoller, too.
Then I woke up early on Wednesday to run with my friend. That's 8.5km, but we go slow. I felt weary. I'd planned to go to yoga over the supper hour, but when supper was finally on the table all I wanted to do was join my family to eat it and to talk. This yoga over the supper hour no longer seems to work. And I finally realized why. Because supper is my favourite time of the whole day! I work hard to prepare a thoughtful healthy and delicious meal, and then my family sits down and (mostly) enjoys it together, and we talk, and we have time to sit and relax and just be together. So no wonder I don't feel like missing out on that time of connection.
Having realized that, I will no longer feel guilty about not doing yoga over the supper hour (and I was feeling guilty, and lazy). No more! I went to yoga class this morning instead, early. That's doable, especially if I'm swimming on Thursday mornings instead. Which I did not do again this week. Because I was too tired and also extremely achy. Muscle aches like I haven't had for a very long time. I just felt sloth-like yesterday. I did no exercise whatsoever. I did make an insanely tasty fall meal, and ran errands all afternoon. But that didn't feel like accomplishment ... and by bedtime I was again just so tired.
But I got up and went to yoga this morning. My shoulders must have been crazy tight. As soon as we started doing poses where our arms were over our heads, I got extremely woozy, black spots in front of my eyes, deeply uncomfortable feeling in my body, and nauseous too. I actually had to lie down periodically between poses, and then finally gave up and laid down for the rest of the standing portion of the series. That's never happened before. Weirdly, another woman in the class had the same experience, and she's a regular too (actually, she's a teacher there). That made me feel slightly less wimpy, but only slightly. I was able to do the poses for the floor series, though some nausea persisted. Finally, at the very end, I did a modified rabbit pose on my own. That's meant to loosen the shoulders and muscles along the spine. I was pouring with sweat, and feeling pain all along my spine (good pain, if you know what I mean).
Throughout, I kept wondering what was going wrong. Was I have a heart attack (women experience nausea during heart attacks, right?). Was this a sign of terminal illness (yes, I'm a hypochondriac.) After the final rabbit pose, and loosening those muscles somewhat, I remembered that in the photos Kevin had taken of me on the long run, my neck was pretty tight in some of them. Maybe I did that run with a lot of shoulder/neck tension--running with my shoulders, you might say. And then the car ride home, and then some admin work that had me at the desk on Tues and Wed for many hours in a row. And voila: muscles in agony.
I am planning a short run this evening, and praying that I feel good during it. I need to get one more long run in on Sunday in preparation for the marathon. Or .... maybe I don't. Some people start tapering three weeks before their race. This would be a two-week taper. And I'm still not sure how much I'll taper. I'd like to get back into the pool, for the lungs. I'm going to play it by ear and try listening to my body more closely. Obviously it's telling me something. Unfortunately, the thing about being a runner is, you have to over-ride your body's messages in order to go faster and longer. You have to say, you can do it, when your body is saying, let's stop now, why don't we.
I'm questioning whether I've over-reached by aiming for this marathon. I'm thinking that I will scale back my time expectations, and simply aim for completion. After all, then I'll be able to say I've done a marathon, and that is something I've never done before. It would be a worthy accomplishment regardless of time.
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