Thoughts and recovery week

Since there is going to be a whole lot of recovering, cherry juice drinking, and possibly biking this week (if it ever stops raining), I won't do a day by day post.  I am still sore today as I start writing this (Tuesday) but it is getting better.  My main area of pain right now is my right hip and right quad, which is probably all interrelated.

Driving back, I had a lot of time to think about things and try and reason with what actually went wrong. I had such a strong first half, running all of the hills and honestly feeling really good.  As I said earlier, I have that I finished the first half in 2:12 (they had me at 2:25 and it honestly didn't take me that long to cross the start mat once we started), which isn't a PR for my half, but a good half time for me for a half marathon.  So what happened?  I fueled fine, taking my stinger waffles every hour on the hour.  I hydrated fine, taking a big sip of my nuun plus water every mile and then increasing that as I started to sweat more salty. I did notice even though the weather was coolish (i think it was 60 when we got done) and the humidity was low, I was super sweaty.  I chaffed HORRIBLY.  I will spare you the pictures I sent to my coach, but it was certainly the worst I have ever chaffed. I chaffed under my bra even though I had put on enough body glide to make a slip and slide jealous, under my left arm, and my back.  Like bloody chaffing that hurt SO bad in the shower, even with vasoline smeared all over the chaffing.

This is the only pic I have thus far from the race.  My MIL took it and I look ROUGH.  Notice Little red stealing my water immediately!

I know mentally when I caught up with those ladies, my mind kind of gave up.  Misery loves company and when they were struggling, I decided to struggle with them.  I honestly don't know if I could have finished without them.  A funny aside, we started talking because my brand new wireless fully charged headphones would NOT turn on, and I had my phone on listening to music.  I HATE when other people do that during a race, so I apologized and told them what happened.  We started talking and never stopped.  I instantly bonded with them in the throes of misery:).  I had already decided that hills would be mostly power walked the second time through, so we were on the same plan anyway.  When I got home, I wanted to check the head phones again and low and behold, they worked on the first try.  Weird huh?

I am just going to let any feelings of disappointment go.  There is no point in dwelling.  I have mostly spent this week trying to recover and get ready to get back in the swing of things training wise.  I still have my ultra coming up April 29th and this is kind of a test to see if can do both a marathon and an ultra in the same training cycle.  I am going to attempt a 3 mile walk run today (saturday) and see how it goes. I know both dogs are ready to get back to running even miss stella ella!  Next week it is back to the grind, but nothing too crazy.  Coach and I talked and we agree, there is no need to do anything wild and high mileage before the ultra. I know I can do it, I don't have a specific time goal, and I want to reach the line injury free, rested and recovered.

So have a great weekend and next week!  I am hoping to have some pictures soon from the race photographers that I will post if and when I get them.