My new least favorite exercise

After running a marathon, things can get tricky. You hear all this stuff about how you are supposed to take one day off for every mile ran, but generally you're all pumped up from wearing the medal around, and already planning your next race. 

I took two complete days off, then was ready to get going again. My legs were still really sore, like the kind where going down stairs is tough. I haven't been sore that long after a marathon since my first. Of course, now I'm all jazzed up on running and can't wait for my next marathon (especially after reading Kari's  post yesterday). So it's kind of weird that I now have to shift gears, and start boning up on two other sports. 

Now that the marathon is over, I intend to start following my Half Ironman plan fully. Tuesday, the plan called for 60 minutes of biking and 30 minutes of running in "Z2", which means conversational pace. I was barely prepared to do that, but I tried. It's hard to tell what's conversational pace by yourself.

I had woken up Monday feeling somewhat better, but 10+ hours in the car took care of that for me. We didn't get home until after 9pm, so I was expecting to want to cry when my alarm went off at 5am the following morning, but getting up was surprisingly less terrible than expected. I did a pretty easy hour on the trainer, and then quickly layered up to run, since it was 27 degrees outside.

Running was pretty painful, but my "I love running because running is the greatest!!!" high carried me through a quick 3.3 miles. I was surprised to see an average pace of 9:17, since I was expecting this run to be more in the 10:00-10:30 or even higher pace.

My friend Jackie and I have been discussing doing a boot camp workout for months, and never seemed to be able to find a date that worked around everyone's crazy work and marathon training schedule. During Monday's painful car ride home, an email reminded me that we'd finally managed to schedule it. For this Wednesday. 4 days after the marathon. Awesome.

I wasn't about to back out since we had started talking about doing this in October, and since Jackie was designing it, she was nice enough to make it mainly upper body. Which may help, since I have a 1.2 mile swim coming up in a few months. I'd never done an outdoor bootcamp, but I'd heard they can be brutal. Even more brutal than waking up at 4:20 am to get there. 

The workout was brutal (and this was an "easier" one since it was our first and we are all recovering from intense races) but it was awesome. Jackie did a great job. She designed four circuits, with quick bursts of all sorts of crazy stuff - pushups, variations on pushups, situps, variations on situps, mountain climbers, planks, tricep dips, etc. She had one lunge set, but my quads were still screaming, so I did push ups instead. Extra upper body work never hurt a runner. I was also introduced to bear crawls, which may replace mountain climbers as my least favorite exercise of all time. 

I drove an hour round trip and paid $3 for the toll for the pleasure of that torture. Worth it. There's really no chance in hell I'm doing bear crawls and pushups at 5am on my own. Plus, once we get the hang of it, we are going to rotate who hosts/leads the workout. 

Obviously boot camp wasn't on the schedule, and I'd already skipped a day of the plan on Monday, so I had to replace a day of running with bootcamp. It feels weird, but I need to get used to the fact that if something needs to go now, it's running. I can't afford to skimp on cycling or swimming.

Tomorrow the schedule says an hour of swimming. I've never swam that long. Actually I've only swam half that long. I'm scared.