Marathon Training Day 2: Ice baths and Inhalers Are Magic

So when I turned 23 on my birthday last week, it seems that my right hip turned 75.  Those of you in South Florida may notice a funny limp, and that I'm taking the stairs *VERY* slowly.  Although my hip is starting to feel better, now it's the left knee... go figure, that's the life.  After my run this morning I was praising God that according to my training schedule tomorrow is a day off, otherwise I might not be physically able to continue with this course of action, but as it seems by now (nearly 7pm) I think maybe I *could* run tomorrow if that was on the training plan, but I'm still ever so glad that it's not.  I'm still getting up early, but I have a couple papers to write so that's what I'll do instead.

I went in to talk to a doctor about my asthma issues yesterday and explained that I was taking up running again but wanted to make sure I could breath, and that it'd been a while since I'd trained regularly and told her about how hard it had been to breath etc.  She lectured me about how I'm not 14 anymore (I've certainly figured that much out...) so it was going to take some work, but she was amazed that I made it 3 miles.  I tried to explain that I didn't actually run the full three because I couldn't really breath and that I walked a good portion more than I would have liked.  Apparently it didn't matter.  So I guess when I say that I'm out of shape, what I mean to say is that I'm not in the shape that I want to be in.  I want to be in the kind of shape that means that getting up at 5am and running 3 miles is not going to earn me the nickname 'gimpy'.  But ultimately getting in shape is not enough of a motivator, I have to be working toward something, and so I'm working toward running a marathon, once I get one under my belt the next step is to work on qualifying and running the Boston Marathon.  Naturally I don't expect to qualify in my first marathon, the goal there will be to just finish, I'll worry about qualifying times later.

The Inhaler I was given by my doctor pretty much fixed the asthma issues, a couple puffs on that and I hit the road with a set of new lungs.  I'm figuring out however that it may not just be that I'm out of shape, but that my legs are used to running on softer material, trails, grass, etc.  Things not available where I live in Miami (between Downtown and the Grove).  So the past two days I've been taking ice baths as well.  These are much less magical than inhalers but they seem to work nonetheless.  For someone who gets as cold as I do, there is little more hellish than struggling through a 3 mile run/walk that was surprisingly chilly with an added wind chill factor only to get home and force myself into a bathtub filled with cold water and two bags of "Party Ice".  I remember going into the trainer at Wa-Hi back in the day and standing in the "Whirlpool" A big metal tub filled with ice water and a little thing on the side to keep the cold water circulating.  What do we learn from these practices? Runners are insane.  Nonetheless, my legs feel better than they did.

Now my roommate claims that she's no where near my shape, and perhaps considering that I've been raised in competitive swimming and was an accomplished distance runner in middle and high school then there are a lot of people not in the shape that I'm in, but I don't think she's doing too bad... check out her blog: http://epicyclesandellipses.blogspot.com/2010/01/on-running-er-walking-kind-of-quickly.html