The Aftermath From The Marathon (6/26/10-October 2010).

I finished the marathon, got in the car, and drove home.  It was time to go to work.  I had taken Friday night off in order to sleep for the marathon but I hadn't taken Saturday night off.  I was hoping to finish with enough time to sleep a few hours.  I finished in 9 hours and 15 minutes, or at 7:15pm or so.  I work at 9:15p.  It takes about an hour to get home and 15 minutes to get to work.  I got home, and I knew I wasn't going to go to work that day.  In retrospect, I have no idea how I thought I could do my first marathon and then go to work.  Looking back, it's laughable.  Live and learn.

By the time I got home I started to hurt.  I think what really messed up my recovery was the sunburn.  I had the sunburn from hell (from running Running with the Devil without sunscreen).  There are so many things I could have done without the sunburn:  Touch my skin, massage, go into the jacuzzi, stretch, etc.  I couldn't touch my body.  It was a sunburn so bad I was shaking uncontrollably.  There were blisters and peeling galore and I think it took two weeks to subside.  The sunburn along with the aches and pain made it painful to walk, sit, lay, anything, really.  I could only lay on one side, not on my back.  I could not make contact with my calves, it hurt too much.  It took me 10-20 minutes to make it up the stairs and lay in bed, and then I called in sick.  Then I had to go to the bathroom.  Because of the sunburn it was an ordeal to get into and out of bed.  I strongly considered wetting the bed.  I could always change the sheets.  It took me 10 minutes to work up the courage to go to the bathroom.  I couldn't sit properly on the toilet because of the sunburn.  By now my legs were starting to really hurt because of the run and it hurt to stand up, sit down, walk.  I hobbled, and poorly at that.  I was a mess.  I was not expecting that.  It was then that I realized I had finally met my match.  And I had finally done it.  I had finally broken myself.

I somehow went to sleep that night, Saturday night.  And Sunday I stayed home all day in bed on one side only trying to move as little as possible trying to let the body heal.  I did go to work Sunday night.  I don't know how I managed to wear pants.  I almost didn't, work dress code be damned.  Monday I got the bright idea of taking an aqua class.  Because of the sunburn, the jacuzzi was out of the question.  And I don't know why I got the idea in my head of taking an aqua class, I just did.  And I got in the pool.  Suzi was teaching, my first class with Suzi.  When I got out an hour later, my hobbling started resembling a walk.  I was almost walking normally.  It healed me tremendously.  Next marathon I'm getting into a pool as soon as possible after the event.  It was the most wonderful thing ever.  I credit Suzi and her aqua class in getting me to walk normally again.  Tuesday, another aqua class.  Getting better and better, able to sit and stand better.  Wednesday, spin.  It hurt at the beginning but it was like getting creaky gears turning again, the more they turned, the better they turned.  It was literally rehabbing myself, like my body needed to learn how to move again, like it forgot how to move.

And I experienced the most curious thing ever.  I couldn't run.  I would think, ok, Debbie, RUN!!  And I would inch forward and .... nothing.  I think I wasn't able to run until Thursday and it was only a mild trot for a few paces.  I thought that was the coolest thing ever.  I lost the ability to run.  It was like my body was scared of running, like it thought that if it ran for me again I would put it through another marathon.  If you ever watched Speed Racer (the cartoons), there's an episode where SR crashes and gets scared of racing and Pops straps him to a chair making him watch a racing simulator while SR sweats.  That's how it was.  Especially with cycle, I think cycle got me running again because it taught my body how to get used to that sense of speed again.  It was really like I knew what steps to follow to rehab myself, as everything I did helped inch me along to recovery.

There is one thing that I didn't get back for a long time, and that was the mile in boot camp.  In a sense I never got it back.  I've written how I started running that mile in the back of the pack and I even got there first on occasion, but mostly towards the front.  After the marathon, I was next to last every single time or last.  I lost my mile.  And I quit boot camp before getting it back.  It wasn't until October 26th 2010 that I finally regained the pre-marathon pace of 5.7 MPH (previous had been 5.56 MPH) for an hour.  It took me exactly 4 months to come back from the marathon.  They say it takes a week to recover for every mile ran in your first marathon.  I ran 14 and walked 12.2 and it took me 17 weeks to recover.  Sounds about right.  And right after that run I regained the ability to blog.  Something happened inside that took four months to heal.  I definitely bit more than I could chew.

It was right around this time that I really got hooked into marathons and triathlons (even broken as I was) and I wanted to do endurance events = 26+ miles.  50, 100, 250, etc.  And I started adding a run before boot camp.  But I found that my body couldn't take the high impact of boot camp after the run, or maybe I hadn't healed properly yet.  But I suffered.  I hobbled.  I hurt.  And my last day of boot camp I was going DOWN towers barely able to move in a down incline and I just stopped and cried.  I couldn't do that to myself any longer.  I had to choose, triathlons or boot camp.  Triathlons won.  And so I quit book camp four short months after I started.

It is now October 30th, 2010, and I'm battling a flu, but I'm reading The Long Run by Matthew Long.  It's very inspiring.  I WILL do a Half Iron in 2011 and a Full Iron in 2012 or sooner.  And one day I will run a full marathon.  I have two Halfs coming up, at Valley of Fire on 11/20/10 (why do I always pick sites with hot imagery to them?) and the Las Vegas Rock n Roll on 12/05/10.  Then let 2011 begin.