Accumulating Fatigue

Yesterday Angela posted a picture of her bloody heel caused by her running shoes. My comment to her was something about how I never get blood like that. Seriously, I never had before.

Um, spoke too soon. I guess I forgot to knock on wood or something, because this is what my foot looked like today.

In my defense, my bloody feet are due to the No Sock Situation I had goin' on at that sprint triathlon on Sunday. They're still all ripped up and raw. I had to tape them up with mole skin to get my 10 mile progression run in yesterday. Which, by the way, was hard. I think the instructions from Jen said something about wanting to puke at the end.

I didn't actually puke, but believe me, I wanted to. I worked that run.

It's 5 weeks out from Hawaii 70.3 and everyone I know is in a big phase of training right now. This is a hard week for me, filled with lots of specific workouts. I knew that I was going to need legs to get through the next few days, and since mine were shot, I figured I'd give that ice bath thing a go. Couldn't hurt, right?

Wrong. Holy moly that hurt. Maybe worse than the run itself?! Seriously, I stayed in for 3 minutes before I just had to get out... I sat there staring at the icy water in the tub, and somehow managed to convince myself to get back in. The second time it wasn't quite as bad, and I forced myself to sit there for 9 more minutes before draining the tub in favor of the hottest shower I could stand.

The cool thing about this week is that my mom is visiting... and you know how grammy just loves loves loves to play with Moana... :) so I've totally taken advantage of the free time to put in some good miles! I didn't have to rush back from the pool this morning because she was watching Moana for me. The swim workout was 4500 hard longcourse meters (ok, I exaggerate, only 4000 of them were hard). Toward the end, after we were already exhausted from a lot of very solid 500's, I told Nalani that it was time to make our feet go numb. And she was game. That was one of the hardest swims I've done in a while. But we nailed it.

I followed that up with a great bike ride with Bob. Most of it was solid steady state riding, although he did take me off the beaten path a bit and showed me some nice climbs toward the end. It was awesome- we were riding through what felt like Old Style Hawaiian Living... by plantation houses built in the 50's on these quiet roads at the foothills of the mountains... papaya trees everywhere... doesn't get much better than that. Nice of Bob to show me his 'Sanctuary' as he called it.

So now I'm doing everything I know (sans ice bath) to help myself recover again before tomorrow.