Friday, June 1, 2012

Records, Recovery, and Racing

Well it's the eve of my fourth race of the season.  Tomorrow is Dam to Dam, a 20k run that is Iowa's largest road race.  I'm excited to run because I haven't done this race since 2008.  That was the year I started in endurance sports so I'd like to see if all the miles in the past four years have had any sort of positive impact.  I did take a look at my time and I ran a respectable 1:29 so if want to PR at this distance then I am going to have to run pretty hard.  It's an overall downhill course so if I have a good day it's doable.  I think I'm recovered from my debacle last week so that helps too.

So a little more on that debacle.  I once again learned (I guess maybe "again learned" is not the proper phrasing if since this happens from time to time) how important recovery is.  I had my race on Sunday and started to feel a sore throat coming on at that time.  The sore throat lingered around during the week.  My Tuesday run did not go well.  I had a hard time at the end of the run and chalked it up to the not being used to the heat.  So Wednesday was a recovery run, but I tacked on a couple of extra miles because I wanted to hit 55 miles for the week.  55 is the starting point of my official training plan for Chicago which I start next week and I wanted to make sure I could handle that volume.  Well the recovery run was nothing of the sort and I was forced to walk at the end.  The Thursday morning run to work was just as bad.  My legs felt overly fatigued, my heart rate was way up and more walking ensued.  The run back wasn't any better.  I finally took a much needed rest day on Friday.  Slept 9+ hours instead of 6 or 7 that night.  I had an easy Saturday with a short 5 miler that actually felt like a recovery run.  By Sunday I was feeling much better and hammered out a 16 mile long run around the lake that felt phenomenal.  In hindsight I really needed to focus on working that recovery and rest into the middle of the week instead of cramming crappy miles in.  All the signs of fatigue were there, but I got caught up trying hit that 55 mile mark and ignored.  Lesson learned hopefully.

The only good to come out of that was that my junk miles helped contribute to a record month of running.  I logged 184 miles in the month of May, despite a week of recovery after the Cap City Half the first weekend of the month.  June should be even bigger once the official training plan gets under way so that should be fun.  I'm looking forward to it!

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