Running on Empty

That is the way I felt when I got up this morning to meet my run club for the weekly long run. My alarm went off at 5 AM which was probably a little too early but I am notorious for hitting snooze 5 or 6 times before I actually get up and needed to be at our meeting spot with a cooler of ice by 6:30. Pretty much every muscle in my body was hurting due to my workout on Thursday (I did weights and cardio with DJ and then had what ended up being a 2-hour tennis lesson that evening). I rolled out of bed, got dressed and in the car by 5:45. Today, the scheduled run was 14 miles so I had to bring my fuel belt and a couple of GU gels for the road.

Despite my overwhleming desire to sleep late today, I was soooo glad I got up and went to run club. I would have never had the motivation to run 14 miles on my own today given my aches and pains. The group is fun too, we generally talk the whole way which helps distract you from the distance. We had decent weather, not too hot, not too humid, decent amount of cloud cover. Overall, it was a comfortable run. I would prefer running without the fuel belt but there aren't tables with little cups of water everywhere like there are at the races so you do what you have to do to avoid passing out from dehydration. :)

After the run, there was a speaker. The topic for today was self motivation and how to focus on your goal by using positive affirmations to get past the pain of running or other negative thoughts that might get in the way of completing the goal. It was kind of interesting, she touched on some kind of self-hypnosis thing. I'll have to read more on it later, at that point I was needing to get up off of the curb I was sitting on and stretch my legs. (the positive affirmations I was trying to use to eliminate the pain in my arse and legs at that point were failing me...)

Over the past two days I have had a couple of people mention the topic of ice baths to me. It has been kind of random because they just mention it out of the blue and then I happened to read another blog about someone who had tried it. After I had great difficulty getting up from the curb after the speaker finished this morning, I thought today might be the day for an ice bath! I stopped at QT for the ice, grabbed my wallet, got out of the car almost to the door and then realized not only had I left my keys in the car but had left the car running! Hmmm.... perhaps I was a little disoriented from the run... crazy..... Two bags of ice in the tub, some cold water and 10 minutes later I was feeling pretty good. I will not lie, the ice bath is not for the faint of heart. The first 3 minutes are a bit torturous but after about the three minute mark I acclimated to the cold water. It definitely helped, my legs were feeling pretty good afterwards.

On tap for tomorrow: Biking! Either at Stone Mountain or in and around the neighborhood. We'll see how I feel when I wake up...