3 Things Thursday: Recovery Edition

Yes...I realize its Friday...but I worked a 13 hour shift yesterday [my post-marathon legs LOVED that, let me tell you] and didn't have time to post...so...ta da, 3 things Thurs/Friday!

1 - The legs!  Physically, the day after the race I literally couldn't do ANYTHING - oh my god. My boyfriend was laughing at me and singing "domo arigato mr roboto" every time I attempted to get up off the couch [which was rare haha]. Ironically, my hamstrings which gave me so much trouble during the race weren't really that sore, but my quads? Let's just say I was feeling those downhills - ow ow ow!  The outside of my left foot was also really sore, and I think I realized why after looking at my race pictures - apparently I land REALLY far to the outside of my left foot!  There's one picture where it seriously looks like I'm going to roll my ankle when I land, my foot is so far sideways.  I remember having the same pain after New Bedford but I've never felt it in workouts...wonder if it's just a race thing?  Speaking of the pictures, I really want to order the CD so I can post them up here, because they are pretty ridiculous, and definitely tell the story of my race well.  But we'll see if I feel like shelling out the $85 for that haha.  Wednesday I went for a swim because I was having post-race mopey syndrome and needed to workout in some form to get over it, but my quads definitely weren't ready to run.  Felt good to swim again and since I'm tossing around the possibility of an Olympic triathlon this summer, was glad to see that I still feel strong in the water.  Today finally I am MUCH improved - definitely still some lingering stiffness and achiness, but nothing too severe.  I am thinking about a 2 mile shakeout later just to kind of get things moving again, but we shall see!

2 - The schwag.  I got my Boston Celebration jacket yesterday, along with a new pair of Asics armwarmers, which I sadly had to toss somewhere in Framingham during the race. RIP, Asics #1s.  Luckily, they were only $8, and with the jacket being on sale after the race, I felt a little less guilty about my purchases :).  Umm yeah...I don't think I'm ever going to take this jacket off again. EVER.  I think I said at some point that I thought the celebration jacket was a little too over the top, but I lied.  The further out I get from the actual pain of the race the more I want to SHOUT to the mountaintops that I ran Boston. Sooo the jacket is fantastic.

3 - The mind. As you all mayyy or may not have been able to tell, I was feeling a little disappointed about my race on Monday.  That feeling is dissolving faster and faster as the days go by.  The more I think about it, the more I am completely amazed with how fast I DID finish given the circumstances! It would have been easy to just dial it in and walk/jog to the finish - but I am a racer, and I raced that race to the end - if 3:46 was the best I had on that day, well at least I know that's ALL I had. So I am much more okay with my race now.  I also have a lot more respect for that tricky bitch of a Boston course - I've heard it's almost impossible to run it right the first time and whoooo boy do I know now that's true.  I certainly made some tactical errors on my part - ahem, going out too fast EVEN THOUGH I'd been warned time and time again that that was a bad idea.  But what are you going to do?  I learned from it, and that's just one more marathon under my belt to take into the next one.  I am immensely proud of my training and of my race and nothing can change that.

As you can see, recovery is going pretty well...much as I am enjoying a little time off though, I'm raring to get back on the roads!  Hope it stays cooler a little longer so I can keep rocking my Boston jacket. :)

Also....a final random side story.  So I was on the train last night absentmindedly paging through one of the magazines that came in the Boston race packet - it was clearly an international magazine because it had ads for all these races all over the world - Europe, the Middle East, Australia...whatever.  It was kind of amusing browsing the ads and all of a sudden I stumbled across an ad for...THE HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN MARATHON...obviously in his hometown [where he lived in a little yellow house] of Odense, Denmark [which is on the island of Funen].  How do I know these random HCA facts? Well, my sophomore year of college I needed a literature credit.  Since I was already taking a full load of pre-med insanity, I tried to find an easy one.  The result? Literature In Translation 275 - The Tales Of Hans Christian Andersen.  The class was made even better by the fact that I took it with 7 of my friends, and that our professor was a complete nut who spoke in a faux-Danish accent and spent the first 2 weeks of class telling us about the glory that was Hans's life [we saw a map of Denmark + picture of the little yellow house about 300 times over that period]. Oh, and one of my friends joined the class a month late and still managed 100% on the first exam. It was hilarious and probably the most memorable class of my college career...so needless to say I am pretty sure the Hans Christian Andersen Marathon has just been added to my running "to-do" list of life. :)