Recovering

Incredibly, two or three people who ran the marathon on the Wednesday woke up and went for a run on Thursay morning. Mika K. and Yoshida are two that I know did.

I on the other hand, didn't even think about running from Thursday to Saturday, but went for an easy 7.5 km in Yoyogi Park on Sunday. The niggling left hamstring/groin was sore for the first couple of days but soon settled back down to little more than a presence.

Last night was 5-k time trial night at the track. I thought about running it hard...for exactly 3 seconds before giving myself a metaphorical slap in the head. In the end I decided to run it in around 19:30 to 20:00, perhap pacing someone in that zone who was trying to record a good time. Settling in to the pace, Mika T appeared to be going hard. Knowing she had gone under 20 minutes for the first time last month, and recorded other great times like her 3:13:40 at Tokyo Women's on the 20th of November (yes, only 10 days before), I felt she was going for it so decided to see if I could help. We were running at 95 seconds per lap, which would have got her another sub 20 minutes. That was going pretty well for the first four laps, except her breathing was becoming very laboured. I was losing confidence that she could hang on. There was a bit of head wind down one straight, so I tried to give her shelter. But then in lap 7 she just couldn't hang on any more and I had to slow down to let her catch up. We went through that lap in 1:03. But poor Mika was still working so hard. I knew she was shot and told her to take it easy. It was too soon after the marathon to be trying for any new PBs.

My legs were feeling tender, but my breathing was fine. So I left Mika to her fate and ran on to see if I could latch onto someone else and give them a lift. Subash was working hard up ahead and I gradually hauled him in and dragged him around the last 400 m. We came in at 19:39. While the run was aerobically not too difficult (in fact it was slower than the first 5-k split of my marathon), it did leave my legs much more tender than I would have expected. My heart rate was at 90% for much of the latter part of the run, indicating that my body was finding it pretty hard going and vindicating the decision not to try and push things too hard.

Colin had a similar experience, going into the run with legs that felt fine, only to find that a moderate level of exertion for 5 km left them feeling almsot shattered. I've found it to be short-lived and the legs are feeling alright today. No run though. Perhaps an aerobic run tomorrow morning.