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Recovery Update and the “Curse” of Racing Long

With San Diego 100 nearly three weeks behind me, I’m slowly getting back into running.  I made a promise to myself that, no matter how much I felt like running, I would wait at least 10 days.  And that’s what I did.  I swam a few times, went on some hikes, did yoga and even got out on my bike for the first time this year!

I did my first run last Thursday and have been running every other day since then.  I’ve been keeping the runs to around 6 miles and not running too hard.  During each of the runs, I’ve felt great for the first three or so miles and then leg heaviness set in.  But slowing down the pace a little and working on picking up leg turnover helped me to finish each run.  I’ve got plans for a big run on Sunday at Mount San Gorgonio with a group of friends, but will take it easy and probably do much more hiking than running.

In other words, recovery is going really well and I’m psyched to get back into real training soon for Run Rabbit Run in September (11 weeks from this Saturday!).

So what’s this “curse” mentioned in the title of this post?

It’s the fact that I’ve had to miss a bunch of fun training runs over the last 5 or 6 weeks!  I started my taper about 2.5 weeks before the race and have now been recovering for that long.  I’m not a huge racer and most years I only do one “A” race, which is usually my longest race of the year.  In 2013 though, I’ve already done the Backbone race and SD100. I tapered and recovered for both. That’s a lot of missed training time!

I’m crazy jealous of all the awesome training runs I’ve been hearing about from friends’ blogs and Facebook posts. (I’m mostly talking about you, Billy, Dom and Elan)  I miss running!

I like racing (I think), but I love training.  I don’t get a huge thrill from the stress of racing. Of course, during a race I get competitive, but that’s not really my natural state.  I’d rather just run to run.  But, even though I am an insanely internally self-motivated person, dedicating the time and energy to all the training would be tough without a race goal.  This has definitely been evident during my recovery from San Diego.  I’ve been sleeping in much later than usual and even then, struggling to get out of bed.  Also, I use races as an excuse to travel and see trails that I otherwise wouldn’t be training on.

There are three possible solutions, but I don’t see myself doing any of them:

1. Don’t taper for or recover from races, i.e. “train through” races.  I know plenty of people who race all the time and use races as training.  And I do train through shorter or less key races, but for my “A” races or the longer ones that wouldn’t even give me a chance to be at 100% on raceday.  I’m amazed at the way some people can bounce back from one race and be training (or racing) again right away.  I can’t race like that.
2. Do shorter races.  Shorter races usually have shorter taper and recovery periods. But that would defeat the whole purpose.  
3. Don’t race, just train.  That might work for some people, but no matter how much I love training, I do need the races as motivation.