This past month was spent away not just from blogging, but
from all my running and training as well. Do you know when that succession of
unfortuitous events happens? Yes, it
did. One trip, two exams and a f*cking terrible flu drove me away from any
kind of physical activity I could think of for entire four weeks.
First, a weekend in Amsterdam. Cool. In my deepest dreams I
even considered running there, in the morning, to keep my training schedule.
However, my willpower is obviously not that strong. “That’s ok, I am doing a
marathon training to run a half-marathon, I am far advanced on my calendar”.
Of course I couldn’t predict that I would get the flu there
and have to stay in bed for a week. Fact that overlapped with my final exams’ week.
Great. Super great. By the way, the cold persisted for 2 weeks.
In the meantime I had a 10k run in Richmond (details in a
future post) that I completely sucked. My time was horrible. I was feeling
tired, breathless and useless. And to make bad things a nightmare, my cold got
worse. That was the cherry on the cake. Result: one more week without running.
So the extremely-cautious-meticulous-tempered person that was
ahead of schedule became a whole month late. Today was the first time I felt
healthy enough to be able to go back to my regular training. I was supposed to
be doing week-7 now (4, 6, 4 and 12 miles consecutively) but, hesitantly, I
decided to go back to week-5 where I should run 3, 5, 3, 10 miles again and start
back from there. I am still not feeling 100% yet and, in addition, it would be
too pretensious to think that one month without any kind of exercise wouldn’t
affect my performance.
I have to confess it was very, very, very hard (did I say
hard?). First because after one month of indulging myself with crappy food –
and delicious Dutch nutella waffles – made me gain 2kg. I have never been a
slim person (lol) so every kilo that I lose helps me to feel lighter when I am
running. But nooop. My legs at the moment feel like massive chunks of wood.
Hippopotamus legs, I call them. And I am not being mean or too critic to
myself, I need to accept the true and pay the price of undisciplined 30 days of
food rebellion.
 |
| Chunky legs are actually cute if you are a baby hippo :-) |
Second, because of the flu, I can feel that my cardio capacity
was affected as well. While running, my heart rate used to stay stable on 165
and never go above 170. Today my average was 175 and – I don’t know how I
managed to stay alive – it reached 188 more than once. I was trying to keep my
pace at 9km/h but after 2.5km I started coughing like an old lady. That heavy
and disgusting cough where you can hear the throat squirming.
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