Monday’s with Jessica [Ep 73]: Recovery Week

It’s already been a week since race day and what a race I have been getting to reflect on! Receiving the race photos earlier this week let me recapture the moments of the race I would have forgotten about, and put an image to remember them too.

I’ve slowly started to reflect on just how much I both love racing long distance as well as how well my body handles it, seeing how much work I put into the race and what that retaliated as, showing that the more you put in the more you get out of it!

Although I run further than a half marathon each weekend as my long run especially leading up to the race, I had never had the recovery time I did post race, the mixture of lactic acid and the work I was putting in to keep at a high power and pace throughout the race definitely worked my legs hard. It took a total of three days to get the front of my quads feeling back to normal and not sore and aching while moving about or sitting down, it really shows the impact change from a long slow to a long hard workout.

The low impact week was nice as well having less large workout to overthink and try to complete perfectly, having some shorter Level II runs was defiantly what my sore legs needed to stretch out and followed with some strides to try get some momentum into training again.

Unfortunately, on my second run back when my legs finally felt 99% good again, I tripped 7 minutes in skinning my knee along with part of the other and the side of my body up to my shoulder in scratches. After a quick 2 minutes on the floor of the road I gathered myself together and contemplated to go home but didn’t see the point as I would just get myself to run again later and would be easier to just keep going and push through any temporary pain now as well as with the adrenaline I had with it.

I seem to be a pro at dressing large skinned knees now, so did that pretty quickly before getting on with my day. After 6 days of slightly lowered intensity I was back to my 2:30 hour bike ride this morning followed by a 10 minute run and that certainly got my athlete clock working again having to get some inspiration to get through it nice and early, though I much more of a wake up and get it out of the way person than to procrastinate and do it at night, slight girl math to me is if I do it when I wake up it seems like less than if I do it in the afternoon as I wouldn’t be missing anything in the morning but sleep and would in the afternoons when I could have been doing other things.

All in all, this was a nice down week post race to reflect and be proud of what I achieved through Ray and his support in coaching, I can’t wait to get back into it fully next week and see what I can achieve in three weeks before my 3,000m and 4,000m nationals in Timaru!

– Jessica Bray