Last week, I wrote about how I needed to reevaluate my goals and plans in regards to Erie. I decided I’m likely going to shift my goal race back to Philly in November. In the meantime, I’m still planning on running Erie as a training run, but that could still change as the race gets closer.
Making that decision was hard and means having to accept my biggest running goal for 2014 (a BQ for 2015) won’t happen. It sucks, but I know this is the right decision. On the plus side, this did ease a lot of weight off my shoulders. And without the pressure of having my goal race two months away, I was also able to see that I needed to take a few days off from running to rest and regroup. The reality is most of my rut is likely caused by over training. Because I jumped right back into things after New Jersey, I’ve been in hardcore marathon training mode for almost seven months now. That’s too much. And then pile on top the fact that my increased progesterone dosage is causing me an immense lack of motivation and energy, as well as severe depression, and I’m not in good marathon training shape. I can feel it throughout my body, it just doesn’t want to move when I’m out there.
So I took most of last week off. I ran eight miles on Wednesday and that was it. I took the rest of the time to just relax and rest my body. I can’t say if it’ll be enough yet, but it’s probably better than something. It’s likely just one week off isn’t going to magically fix all of this, but it can’t hurt. I hope. Taking time off for me is always a risk because I lose fitness almost instantly. A week off now practically destroys everything I’ve worked for. It never used to be this bad, but having a testosterone level that is only 4ng/dL will do that to you. For reference, the normal female range is somewhere between 20-50ng/dL and the male range is 300-1000ng/dL or so (these numbers can vary a bit depending on where you source your info). When I started HRT, I was around 300, I believe. Essentially, what this means is my body will pretty much do anything it can to not have any muscle.
Anyway, I’m hoping to get back into it this week. I’m going to rework my schedule for the week so as to not be jumping right into a 53 mile week, but I’m planning on getting at it hard. I also have a 5k on Wednesday night so it’ll be interesting to see how that turns out.
