HIT BY A TRUCK

So, I have not felt great for the last three weeks. Zena seemed to really fuck me up. I don't know if it was actually Zena, or something else is going on, but my training in February was completely derailed. I am still not feeling back to normal and Shamrock is next weekend. I am almost certainly staring a new Shamrock PW in the face there and I don't know if it would be even smart to actually race it at this point.

What happened? Well, I gave it my all at Zena, one week after Miami. Now, my legs were still a little tired from Miami, but seemingly not bad at all. Zena just completely destroyed my body though. I had Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness from it, peaking on the Tuesday after the race. I was legitimately limping around due to the way my muscles were feeling. My lower back specifically was really fucked up and in a lot of pain. I am not sure if it was from the pounding on the downhills of Zena or what, but it was pretty bad.

How I feel.

Eventually the soreness faded but my lower back remained in pain and overall I was just really tight. I did some stretching and took some hot baths, which would relieve things temporarily, but eventually I'd go back to feeling crummy. When I'd go for a run, my legs would have no "pop." It feels a lot like the month after the marathon. I might feel great otherwise, but there is no spring in my step. Runs that should be easy are hard. We're talking about half marathon heart rate levels for a four mile run at 10:30/mile.

I also got a cold after Zena (or COVID-19?)... I'm wondering if it was just an opportunistic thing with my body broken down from the race. That's been slowly getting better but I have been a little stuffed up since the race. Overall my body just kind of feels like it got hit by a truck and it really doesn't make sense. A 15k shouldn't do that to me. Even one a week after a hard half marathon effort. I dunno. It's just really annoying.

Things are slowly getting better. A six mile run the week after Zena was super hard and my watch said I overextended myself and I would need a full 4 days to recover (this was at like 10:30 pace, mind you). The same run the next weekend was again overextending myself but this time it only said I needed three days of recovery. So things are slowly getting better. But here we are three weeks removed and I still feel like 50% fucked up.

So that's been really frustrating. Should I have just stopped running for two weeks and did some intensive stretching and cross training? Probably. My strategy of sitting around and then running twice a week isn't really working. I think in the end I just pushed my body too hard. I was still recovering from the Miami Half, even if I felt pretty decent, then I went and pounded out some terrain I was not properly trained for. It sent me into a tail spin I have not fully recovered from.

The good news is I don't think it has anything to do with my psoriatic arthritis. Unlike my "breakdown" in 2016, my knees feel great! My back hurting is due to tight/knotted muscles, not inflammation in the joint. I think if I did some yoga and pool jogging I'd be back at 100% within two weeks. However, that isn't going to happen. So the question is, while my improvement is slow, how long until I am back to normal? What do I do about Shamrock next week? If I try hard, how far does it set me back? Is it even worth it?

I think I'm going to go run six miles miles, just like the last two weekends. Hopefully my "recovery time" is less than the 3 days it said last weekend. And then do I just take a week off before Shamrock? Do I switch to the 5k and just fun run it to protect my recovery? I don't know.