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Ann Gaffigan's Steeplechics.com Blog:
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Learning to Fly
(posted on 02/21/08 at 10:05 pm EST, updated on 02/21/08 at 10:06 pm EST) | I knew I was feeling better when I started waking up on my own before 10am. Some of you are probably laughing (I get that a lot), but I used to sleep until at least 11 and still wake up feeling tired and would struggle to start my day. By this past October, I was waking up on my own somewhere between 8 and 10 and feeling like a normal human being…what a feeling! You sometimes don’t know how bad you were feeling until you’re finally feeling good.
At the end of November, my best friend and 1500m stud Anne Shadle and I flew to Oahu for the USATF Annual Meeting. We would be attending the meetings Wednesday through Sunday, and then were booked to stay several extra days to enjoy the sun and sand. My goals for the trip besides participating in the meetings were to have a good time, get some fair weather training in, and avoid getting run down.
Traveling, especially in the clouds, has never been my favorite thing. You rarely deplane feeling upbeat or energetic or hydrated. And it seems like you never get the amount of sleep you’re used to when you’re away from home. You also don’t eat the same foods, have access to as much water as you want, etc. You already know the drill.
Traveling to Hawaii is almost like traveling to Europe; the same distance and time change without as much culture shock. So I really wanted to be careful. I took my smoothie cup with the lid so I could mix up my smoothies with protein and green powders and my liquid iron every day. Anne and I made numerous trips to the ABC Store across the street for the biggest bottles of water we could carry. And the nice thing about Hawaii is that fresh and healthy food is easy to come by if you’re willing to pay.
While we had envisioned a week and a half of sun and sand, what we got was a week and a half of tropical storms. Sounds like a bad deal, but the storms were beautiful to watch from the balcony of our hotel and it kept us from spending too much time in the sun. It allowed us to sleep in without feeling guilty that we weren’t taking advantage of our location right on the beach. We did a tempo run together on the University of Hawaii track during an overcast but dry afternoon and did several runs around the Diamond Head Crater.
I also did something I’ve never allowed myself to do before: I gave myself a break when it was necessary. On the day I arrived, it was almost dark and I had been traveling for 13 hours. I had woken up at ungodly hour to get to the airport. I was tired and hungry. So I went for a 30 minute run instead of the 8 miles I had scheduled. A week later, after the meetings were over, I was feeling wiped out from walking everywhere in the sun (we hadn’t rented a car). So I skipped a morning run or two to get my legs back. My flight home to Nebraska was a red-eye and I didn’t sleep much. I went home and slept that afternoon instead of running.
And you know what happened? I didn’t get out of shape! I didn’t pay for my skipped miles with fitness. On the contrary, I got on the track a week later and ran one of the best workouts I had run on a track since 2004: 12 x 400m with a minute rest, where I started with a couple 72’s, stayed comfortably at 70’s until #12, and finished that baby off with a 65, feeling like I could run a few more. Now I wasn’t going to go break any records after that, but it was something. More importantly, I was feeling better than ever.
After four years of competing at the Division I level and three and a half years at the professional level, I had finally figured out how to travel properly. | | Send a Comment |
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