Friday, April 25, 2014

Muscle, muscle, who's got the muscle

A couple of weeks ago I  had an epic week of training. I don't always want to be pushing the envelope this way, but it worked out okay for me this week. Generally, my rule of thumb is no more than 10% of my longest run, or my weekly  kilometerage. This means if I did 40k long run and 60 for the week, I would do no more than 66 for the week and 44 of that for the long run. It helps to avoid injury. Something I have been prone to since I started running 10 or so years ago.
The week I speak of had a 24 km run on Tuesday, 15 on Thursday, and then 42 on the weekend, for a total of 81 kilometres. My muscles were definitely sore after the week was over, and I spent a great deal of time rolling out my quads and it band. For sure, I feel the fatigue in those two muscles the most.
I'm not sure what it would feel like to have Duchenne muscular dystrophy, but Virginie tells me that when her brothers were transitioning from life walking to life in a wheelchair, that they would often cry because of the pain in their muscles. Her Mom would lovingly apply hot packs, and massage their muscles for them, often to tide them over. Both Virginie and I have said it many times in our blog, but because of their lack of strength, we feel they put for ultra marathon effort many times.
We keep trying to get out to a family that have a couple of boys with Duchenne's. I think it happening next Saturday. We are all busy, so it's a sacrifice for us both to meet, but I am really looking forward to it. I'll be sure to post our impressions after.
When I got back from 46 km this last weekend, I was really exhausted. Virginie was feeling strong this week. A couple of days ago I told her I thought she was being merciless near the end. When we get tired, we will often pick a target and run towards it. Then walk for a whole. The little mini goals really seem to help. With that said, Virginie picked a goal that was more than 2 km away. This was too much for me, but I did not want to be wimpy, so I ran anyway. When I asked her why she had picked such a far away goal she responded "I did not want to be wimpy" lol! There was a nice thing about are run this weekend though. We ran in an area where we had previously not set foot. It was brand new, and exciting. For Virginie and I, that's saying a lot. I don't mean to brag, but our training has brought us from one side of Edmonton's river valley to the other. We really needed some new ground.
Oh, and no snow :-)

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