Day 90

Well, the shocking metamorphosis did occur, sort of...I expect an even greater one on Day 91. lol

Seriously, though, I ran pretty well today, considering the sort of blah race and all the other running yesterday. My legs were surprisingly fresh. In fact, I felt so good this morning that I passed my usual turn around point and even considered a 7.5-8 mile loop...but then I decided to be sensible. It was the day after a race, things might start to catch up to me after a while, the dog might get hot (we had no water), etc, etc. I'm glad I listened to the sensible grey matter: around 43 minutes, things started to tighten up. I ran a bit more just to see if they'd loosen up, but no. Hence 47 minutes and another 15 to walk home.

This evening, I figured I'd go maybe 30-40 min. My legs were even fresher still and my form felt great, really tight, and after about a 1/2 mile, some guy was trailing me, breathing hard, spitting...well, I found the energy to make him work a bit. I didn't want to lose the 4-2 breathing rhythm so soon though, so he passed me eventually and I decided to trail him. Shortly before my 2ish mile mark, though, he started to slow down. Fortunately, I knew that I'd be turning around soon so I slowed down, didn't have to worry about bruising his ego by passing him. LOL. I turned around and picked things up again, just a bit, just to see how long I could continue coasting along. My breathing was slipping into the 2-2 range, but it wasn't a hard run, not at tempo effort. It kind of felt like 1/2 marathon pace.

And then around 2.5 miles or so, I heard a guy breathing hard and spitting behind me. Really? No, it was some other dude, and he was fast. So I trailed him until I got to my 4ish mile mark (it was 4.08 miles--yes, I cheated and checked on mapmyrun.com afterward) in 33:15. I jogged it out to 40 min.

I can't believe I ran at 8:09 pace for 4 miles! A month and a half ago, that was my 2 mile pace, with considerably more effort. I'm definitely on the mend, not 100%, but getting there. I'm still not sure if I'll PB at any distance this year, but it would be nice to get back to where I was before things started going south.

I had a follow up with my nurse practitioner today and another ferritin test. It'll be interesting to see the numbers now.