Recovery Rollercoaster

It's three weeks now.

Three weeks since I had the best time running.

I'm not liking 'normal' life- everything feels dull and blunted somehow compared to 24 hours and 33 minutes of running around the TP and Ridgeway. At the same time the race feels unreal too. Seriously having trouble believing it happened.

Recovery has been a strange experience so far. I've been running 3 or 4 times a week but slowly and not very far except on Wednesday when I did 8miles (with walk breaks) and totally wiped myself out. This week I started back moving some weight around which feels good while I'm doing it but the DOMS have been pretty bad. I'm not forcing myself to train and I'm not pushing myself particularly when I do train but today it's struck me that actually I'm fatigued on a deep level both in mind and body.

No idea what to do about that.

I think keeping moving in some way is a good thing to do, if only because I struggle to sit still and do nothing- I get cross as well as stiff and sore, and I can't restrict my calorie intake to the 1300-ish I'd only need if I wasn't taking any exercise. What is proving hard to work out is what and how much it's sensible to be doing. I'm so used to pretty much everything in life being about struggle and striving that I'm a bad judge of when to train and when to rest and when to push through, when to take things really easy.

Race plans are slowly taking shape for the coming year. I'm having a real crisis over the 100 mile distance. I REALLY want to run more 100 milers. But I can see already that recovery is a complex thing and probably I only need one thing to not go right and suddenly recovery becomes a thing that will take months and months and scupper chances of doing anything else.

Why is that a problem? Well I'm torn between wanting to try a different 100 miler and going back to Autumn 100 to get that 100 Miles in A Day buckle- I was so close to that quite by accident I think it's worth going for on purpose next time. But there's the rub- I think having a very specific goal for a race means the focus has to be on a year getting ready to achieve it. Which means only doing one 100 miler next year. I realise people do run several in a year but at A100 I saw how tough that can be, how much it took out of far better and far more experienced runners than me and I'm not sure I have the resources or support to manage that level of recovery. 

So I still have a lot of thinking and soul-searching to do. And learning how to recover...