Bouncing Back

Recovery from the LA Marathon was a snap.  It really wasn’t any different from “recovery” from a normal long run on a weekend.  Had I not been so sleep-deprived (I still think those 4:00 AM shuttles were ridiculous), I would’ve gone for my normal run on Monday morning.  Tuesday I logged 10 miles and didn’t notice any difference when compared to any other week.  Wednesday, still catching up on sleep, I took another day off, and Thursday, I did a normal 10.5-mile route in record time.  I feel like I should add an asterisk to that though, having only run one day in the three before it, I was on unusually fresh legs.  Four days after a marathon, and I’m talking about having unusually fresh legs.  I think my legs are finally getting used to doing what I tell them.

I’ve been taking off almost every Monday directly after a marathon, but I’ve also been taking off only two days leading up to a marathon, as opposed to my normal three.  I guess that balances out.  I’d rather train through them a little more though.  If I keep taking days off every time I have a marathon, with my race schedule, I’ll never get better.  In fact, I may start declining a little bit.

After my first marathon of the year, I promised myself that I wouldn’t run marathons on back-to-back weekends for a while, until recovery got a whole lot easier.  I guess it has.  So I’m running the Canyon Meadow Trail Marathon outside of Oakland tomorrow.  It’s one of the flattest in the Coastal Trail Runs series, only 3,070 feet of climbing.  If it were one of the hardest, I’d probably pass.  But the idea of doing one of these trail runs I’ve fallen in love with, without the brutal hills as a drawback, that’s just too good to pass up.