Back in White and Black

I began my training again today. I've been basically resting with easy workouts, waiting for all the soreness from the marathon to go completely away before starting back. The rest has been a cleansing for that residual lactic acid that was built up in my muscles. Lactic acid is the waste the body makes from the muscles work. Think of yourself as a car for a moment. You take in fuel, (Food), and your body breaks it down into a fuel, (Sugar), your muscle can burn to do work. When your muscle takes what it needs from the fuel and makes your body go it has waste that is produced, (Lactic acid), and must be expelled, like the cars exhaust. But When your body does something like a marathon that it doesn't normally do, it can't "exhaust" all the waste, it is simply not trained to handle that much waste. So it takes a while for the body to cleanse the waste. That is one of the reasons that you need a long recovery. That and the muscles themselves healing the damage they sustained.

When elite marathoners train they do a lot of long distance, their body learns to handle, expel, the exhaust waste. That is how they can train with such high mileage each week. But most of us don't have the time to train 75 or more miles a week to train our body to handle the stress of long distance. So when we do our half and full marathons we have to rest for a few weeks after.

I upped my intensity just a little, added a quarter mile of walking at 10 mpm pace and a mile of 12 mpm, with 4 miles total. Then started back with the weights for legs and chest. The plan is that each week I'll add to the intensity and the weight and by spring be ready to race again.

The amount of recovery time required after a race depends on a couple of factors. One of course is your current physical condition and body weight. The more extra fluff you are carrying the longer the recovery since the more weight you had to move. The other factor is your age, 50 plus athletes need a bit more recovery time that the under 40s.

Another problem with carrying that extra fluff is that you have to share your blood, oxygen and fuel with the fat cells. So just getting leaner will make you more efficient. When you get leaner and you increase your strength and endurance with the weights and walk/running you start improving by leaps and bounds.

Now if I can just get shed of the 10 lbs I gained in January and get my intensity back to normal I'll be well on my way to racing shape by spring.

Thanks for reading.

Training Panda