Recover As You Taper

The first thing I noticed a day or two after our epic cycle trip was that my hip flexors were a bit tired. That didn't come as much of a surprise after that little adventure, and in fact I was feeling a lot better than expected - 3 consecutive days of several hours of running would have left me in much worse state, that's for sure. Come Monday morning my legs seemed to have forgotten about the cycling already, so that was good.

However, around that time I started noticing a sore throat. This could have had two sources, my room mate for two nights in Kerry had complained about the same, as had my son Shea after I had returned back home. However, just about every single cyclist was suffering from a cold the week after the ride so I'm reasonably sure we all got it there. Usually I manage to fight off most infections without being bothered myself but I did feel sufficiently bad on Wednesday that I cancelled the run for that day. My HR had already been elevated the days before that, so it had been in my system already. Thankfully the whole episode passed very quickly and by Thursday I was already back out on the road, blowing out the cobwebs and feeling surprisingly good, so that's that.

Despite that one enforced rest day it was actually a pretty good running week. The legs are feeling fresh, which may be a sign that I really undertrained this time but I'll take it, it's better than being overtrained and trust me, I know what I'm talking about. My longest run was a 2-hour easy jog on the trails of Bray Head. Usually you meet a lot of people where the cross is but virtually nobody else on the rest of that mountain as you head southwards but this time I must have come across at least 20 runners on my 2 loops there, so I guess the locals were out in force to check out that part of the route for the Ecotrail in 2 weeks' time.

I'm actually really looking forward to it. I was a bit apprehensive when I signed up and wasn't really sure if I really wanted to subject myself to that, but now I'm definitely getting excited about it. I hope the weather will be somewhat manageable, I'm still very much a newbie in the mountains and could do without nature throwing a few extra challenges, but we'll see. It's not as if we had a choice. That's part of the fun after all.