Half Marathon Training Week 4

So this week's training looked quite a bit different. My shin is hurting pretty badly, and I'm doing my best to train as smartly as I can this time around. There are so many people who seem to be injured right now!! Why is that? What is happening? In my case, in the past, it was because I wasn't resting. I wasn't stretching. I wasn't taking good care of my muscles outside of just running them. I was pain free until I started this training program. I don't believe it's from the program itself. I still believe it's from beginning to swim again. However, after Monday's workout, I made a very difficult decision to rest this week. It was amazing foresight on my part!

On Monday I woke up not really feeling very well. My throat was sore and I had a headache. I decided to go ahead and swim anyway. It was a good workout. I did a quick warm up and then training called for 20 min of non stop swimming. Then I did a quick cool down as well. I did about half of the swim without stopping, but did need to pause for a brief minute to catch my breath a little. I'm not as strong a swimmer as I once was, and it was tough! I'll get there one day. I still wasn't feeling well when I got home, but figured I'd play it by ear for the following days. I spent the first part of the evening sewing my running skirt for the Hot Chocolate 15k!

Tuesday I was feeling a little bit better, but my shin was still hurting pretty badly. So despite my heart wanting to run, I knew I needed to rest. And so I did. What a difficult decision to make! Why is that so hard to do? Purposefully rest our bodies when they so desperately need it. What good comes of training and pushing through pain, not soreness, pain!! Why do we do this to ourselves? Instead of getting faster/stronger, we get tired/injured and run the risk of loosing out on not just a few days of training, but weeks and sometimes months in order to recover, and then we have to rebuild. I'm desperately hoping to avoid this situation this time!

Wednesday is rest day anyway, so I made sure I really rested. The cold I was fighting seemed to be going away and my shin was feeling a little better, so I was hopeful.

Thursday rolled around and I still knew. I knew I needed to not run. I had a race coming up on Sunday, I wanted to be sure I could run that, so I made another difficult decision and skipped out on my tempo run that day also. That night, before I headed to bed, I started sneezing. A lot. And my body started aching. I knew it! I was getting sick! I sewed up Brecka's running skirt this day!

Friday I woke up miserable! Are you kidding me! Two days before my race, I had a head cold and a sore throat! I texted a friend right away and picked up some doTERRA Onguard throat drops which usually helps to nip all that in the bud! I had planned to lay low, but then remembered I needed to get to the school for my son's award assembly and I was gonna be late!! I booked it as fast as I could, that mile to the school and made it just in time. Then I spent some recess time chasing around one of the kiddos I used to teach. My shin was pissed, but nothing else seemed to be too bad, so I was hopeful the cold wasn't a bad one. By the time evening rolled around though, I knew it was bad. I figured if I could keep it from getting into my chest I stood a chance of being able to run on Sunday without any major issue.

Saturday morning I woke up early to volunteer at the Hot Chocolate expo and felt worse than when I went to bed. I was not winning this battle! I spent 5 hours there helping (more on that later) and then went home to rest. My body was still so tired and my shin was still sore. I laid down for a little while as I was tensing my shoulder and fell asleep for just a bit. When I woke up I knew it was over. There was no denying, the cold was in my chest. I wanted to do a quick shakeout run. In hindsight, I should've rallied and done it, but I chose rest instead.

As you can see, it was a long week of doing virtually nothing. I walked 10,000 steps each day, but that's all I was able to do. Resting my body has been a very difficult thing for me this week. I wanted to run so badly. I was jealous when my friends would post up runs, especially Brecka, who I'm training with this cycle. How silly is that!! I'm really missing running with her right now!! But I knew I needed to take it easy. It helped to have her remind me of my long term goals and to tell me to rest. I want to be able to run for years, not just this race cycle. Resting when I'm sick and injured is important. I am a very blessed girl to have people help remind me when I'm so tempted to push myself in a way that wouldn't be good for me! And watching her kill her runs is pretty awesome too! I'll just act as a cheerleader instead of a training buddy for a couple of weeks!

The next couple of weeks may unfortunately look sorta similar to this past week. I'm still not feeling very well, and after Sunday's race, my shin is really hurting badly. I need time to recover. I would rather miss out on some of the earlier training runs further away from my next race, than miss the ones leading right up to it, or missing my race altogether, from injury. That doesn't mean I won't be doing anything this week though. I'm planning to make it to the gym for some cycle time and some light lifting. Nothing really hard and strenuous. Just enough to get moving a little while I wait for my shin to heal and my cold to get better. While I believe that resting is the way to go, I also believe that sometimes some movement helps to speed things up a little. Just sitting around will make me stir crazy anyway!

Stay tuned though for later this week on how our long run (the Hot Chocolate 15k) went on Sunday!!