After the marathon, I found myself in a bit of a rut, I lost my groove, so to speak. The first week wasn’t so bad. I felt sore, for sure. The average 100 year old walked with more ease…
LaCoach had advised us to go for a bike ride the next day, to keep things moving. So I strapped Vik into his bike seat and we spent a little over an hour, enjoying the sunshine and wonderful surroundings. We have absolutely lovely areas around our home to ride/run/walk for hours.
A fun little race
A week and 2 bike rides after the marathon, the sore muscles weren’t sore anymore and I was in Hilversum. I had just spent the night at my parents’ house with Vik and we were off to town for the local City Run.
Just like last year, me and my sister Miriam were running the 5km Yakult Ladies Run. We had initially planned on doing the 10km, but as I wanted to wait and see how I felt after the marathon and she couldn’t get in as much training as she had hoped, we decided to do the 5km again.
The run went great. I even took 4 minutes of my last 5km PB, finishing at 30:07. Miriam also took off 4 minutes, despite having been sick in the week before the race. Yay us!
So this is a post-marathon dip…
And then things went really down the drain. I got hit with a really annoying and terribly long lasting coughing flu/bug. It took me over a week to get better, but 2km into the first run of my new schedule, I was coughing my lungs out again…
I ran my training surprisingly well, despite a few coughing stops. Unfortunately that one run would also be the last one for a while. I really needed to rest my body. I was soooo tired all the time. My lungs felt tight and stuffed and I just had no motivation whatsoever to go running.
Getting back my groove
It wasn’t until last week that I finally started to feel a bit better. Energy levels were rising, I wasn’t as tired anymore and I felt something tickle inside when I thought of running. I decided next week would be finally be the time to start over with my new schedule.
Waiting isn’t really my thing, so yesterday I went for an off-schedule run. Just to see how my body would handle running again and if I still had it in me.
I planned out my route and made sure it had several points along the way where I could cut it shorter. So my run would be 6, 8 or 10km long, depending on how things went.
Well… Things went surprisingly well. Just a bit faster than I had planned. I ran 6:03 pace instead of 6:45 and it felt goooood! But I knew I wouldn’t last 10km at that pace and I definitely didn’t want to overdo things either. So I took the first shortcut and stopped running after 5km (30:17).
New plans
Having finally run again, my motivation has completely come back and I can’t wait until my training tomorrow morning! I’ve also signed up for a few new runs. On May 26th, I’ll be running 10km at the Vestingloop in ‘s-Hertogenbosch and on October 13th I’m running my first official half marathon here in Eindhoven.
I’m back!
