Recovery

The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea.
Isak Dinesen

There are at least a dozen training marathon training plans out there, all them differing in mileage, rate of build up, speed work and percentage of time spent walking the course. Regardless of their different emphasis on these factors though, all marathon training plans have one thing in common: they require at least one week of recovery between the marathon and the first recovery run. Due to the convoluted neural pathways present in most runners, the statement “at least one week” is immediately translated to the phrase “at dawn one week to the day, get out there again and start thinking about next year’s race.”

Which is why, all across the planet today, from the plains of Kenya to the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, there is a spring ritual taking place that warms the heart of all who see it. As the sun brightens the sky in the east, the runners of the Boston Marathon take to the streets in their yellow B.A.A. shirts, blinking into the light like polar bears emerging from their dens. With no real plan yet, we are uncertain and a bit faltering as we start out with an easy mile lope. Once we determine that we remember how to run, we start to check for injuries. A hill here to check on the hamstrings. A bit of a high step here to check on the quads. Is that shin pain something to worry about, or is it just a tight muscle? Near the middle of the run something amazing happens. We remember why we started running in the first place. This is really cool. Up and out with the newspaper carriers, nobody else yet on the road, music blaring in the headphones and the shoes rhythmically hitting the pavement, sprinting up and over the next hill just because we can. There is no better way than this to begin the day.

Then we attempt to log the run in our running journals, and we don’t know what to call it. This run can’t be classified as a tempo run or a long run or even a “junk mile” run. Sadly, there is no place in a runner’s log for fun run. So I added that box today and then x’d it in.

I’d love to tell you that I intend to live in this blissful fun run world for the rest of the summer and that I am not yet thinking about the next marathon, but we all know that that is not the case. The difference between sane runners and marathon runners is that marathon runners (at least those that I know) are pathological, data driven goal setters. Without the marathon/carrot and the scaffolding of mini-goals required to get there, we float around like untethered helium balloons.

So yes, I do have a plan. Portland is only 5 months away, and I have already chosen the training plan. I have sketched out my mileage in an excel spreadsheet. I have plotted out my cross-training days against my weight-training days. I have developed a new work out log.

But for today, that 3 mile run was enough.

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