Peak weeks and weak peaks

Hey blog. I’ve been neglecting you.

I just have not been feeling well this past week. Like someone turned the faucet off on my energy supply. Like achy and chills and misery. I had several bad runs last week and Saturday was the big, 17-mile day.

17 miles is a threshold, I’ve decided. 17 miles is (at least, for me) when you cross the 3-hours-of-constant-running mark. 17 miles is more than a 5K past a half-marathon. 17 miles is the point where you get reactions like this on Twitter:

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/bodoff/status/183615084185141248″]

So after a week of bad runs, I thought, “this 17-mile run really needs to be good. The only thing that’s hold you back is you, Pattie. You can’t let the thought cross your mind that it could be bad. Just ENJOY it.”

I drove to Brunswick and found a new friend, Mike, who needed a 17-mile run. And Wanda, who originally agreed to 12, but was easily talked into 15. 🙂 And Wanda’s friend, Roger, who had never run 15 miles before. So we were a group of diverse skill.

It was beautiful. The new company kept m distracted. The weather was perfect. And at the end, when we came back to the Little Dog Cafe and most of the running group had dispersed for the morning, I felt happy to have my group and happy to be marathon training and happy to have FINISHED that run for the weekend.

It still was a little too fast. Click for deets and splits.

One of my goals this training was to not be so wrecked on the weekends. It’s not fair to my husband and, more importantly, I can’t put off the things in life I used to do on the weekends because of marathon training if I want to keep running marathons.

And on Saturday afternoon, I was OK … ish. Well. I took a sleepy trip to Home Depot and spend the rest of the day finishing off the Hunger Games trilogy. (Which was so so good, by the way).

Sunday I was wrecked. Whatever I had recovered from earlier that week on Saturday, I felt 100 times worse on Sunday. Achy, fevery, chills, nausea, misery. I spent the next two days in bed, which really sucked, because now is not a great time to be getting sick at work.

I feel a bit better but not quite myself today. This week, 7 weeks out, is a hard week, one of the hardest in all of training, in my opinion. 5-8-5 miles for the weekday runs, then 18 miles on Saturday. I’m skipping today because I still need rest, and I feel like forcing through it will do more harm than help.

 

Pattie Reaves

About Pattie Reaves

I'm a new mom and renegade fitness blogger at After the Couch. I live in Brewer with my husband, Tony, our daughter Felicity, and our two pugs, Georgia and Scoop.