Overdone

I am a mess of aches this morning. Good grief!

This follows a dreamy running week last week, no pain, holding fast times without feeling the effort, and running 42 kilometres over six days. But then I played soccer on Sunday, about an hour after my last effortless run. I got up Monday to swing kettlebells, and played more soccer on Monday night. When I ran again on Tuesday evening, yesterday, it was a totally different run than Sunday's bliss, even though I was going a similar distance. My right ankle felt swollen, and the pain shot up my leg with every stride. I made it 6.85 painful kilometres -- usually I would top up my distance upon return to even it out, but I didn't even care. I was in too much pain. I even stopped to stretch along the way to see if that would help. It was agony to hold a 5:10 pace, which I managed, but barely. Ordinarily that wouldn't be terribly disappointing. But honestly, last week every run was around a 4:40 pace that felt next thing to effortless. I thought I'd turned a corner, speedwise and effortwise.

I'm wondering whether that fast week of running was due to NOT playing soccer the previous weekend. So it could be that soccer is wrecking my running.

But I'm not going to stop playing soccer.

I got up this morning and dragged myself on my usual run with my friend, 8.8km, slow. So within 14 hours, I ran about 15.5km, none of them pleasant. Clearly I need to take it easy for a day or two. I have another run scheduled for tomorrow evening (I run when I have the opportunity, not necessarily spaced for optimum training purposes), but I'll see how I'm feeling.

I find it funny how quickly I can go from feeling strong and quick and in excellent shape, to feeling quite the opposite, achy, old, limping, slow.