Amnesty Week

I'm happy to say that after a grueling 4 day long drive home from Florida to Rhode Island I finally made it home.  I got hit with every kind of winter weather along the way from ice storms to black ice to blizzard conditions that made me have to continually call it quits and sit in a hotel room waiting for the weather to pass.  But I'm happy to say that part is finally over.

So the week after a giant race for me is typically what I call an "Amnesty Week" meaning I can eat and drink whatever the hell I want whenever I want.  I don't count calories and I eat really really bad food.  I've had pizza, and lots of beer, and chocolate, and candy bars, and donuts and whatever I want!  Last night the girl and I made a giant chocolate chip cookie and then baked it most of the way and then broke it up and put it in a bowl while it was still warm and then added Ben and Jerry's Whirled Peace ice cream over the top of that which was easily a 900 calorie dessert.  I LOVED it!  And damnit I deserve it!  Oh and I drank a beer with it too!  Mind you this was after eating an entire small Mama Leone's Hawaiin pizza for dinner with another beer.   If you find yourself judging me at this point ask yourself this...   did you just run a 5k, 1/2, and full marathon back to back?  Yeah...  I deserve it!

So what else is going on this week?  Well I'm getting ready to leave again on Tuesday to go right back to Orlando for another work trip.  Other than that its been all about recovery and starting to think about whats next training wise.  Sadly all I can do right now is THINK about training.  I don't think I'm ready to actually do any yet.  My hamstring/glute area on my right leg has been an issue all along through this training process.  I have clearly very much pissed it off with the goofy challenge.  Its been stiff all week.  Today I tried to do a three mile run to test it out and see if I would be ok to do this 8 mile fun run tomorrow morning.  As soon as I started running it was stiff and feeling a slight dull pain.  I hoped it might loosen up in a little while.  After about a 1/4 mile I started to think about turning around.  I figured if it didn't loosen up at least I'd be close to the house.  And sure enough it got worse.  My body was letting me know it wasn't ready to run again yet.  So I stopped after a half mile and called it quits.  That area is clearly going to need some time to heal and I need to be patient and give it that time.  I have an appointment on the 24th with a sports medicine doctor so I'm going to take another week off of training and see what happens.  Unfortunately where the injury is I think its a bad idea to bike or swim without straining it.  So I think I need to just do nothing.  So next week will be a food recovery week where I'll try and diet a little bit and shed the amnesty week pounds and just do my best to recover more and wait until after I see the doc to decide whats ok to do going forwards.  I don't think this is a major setback by any means.  I just need to behave now to reduce the risk of training setbacks later.  So thats what I'm going to do.

So in the weeks going forwards I'll be putting my training plan together finally and committing to the races I'm going to do in 2011.  I may try and do some upper body strength training though to keep me from going entirely crazy...   or maybe some laps in the pool with a pull buoy so I won't be straining my legs.  Not sure about that one though but its worth a shot!