Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Crossouch

This past weekend I headed down to Norfolk, Nebraska for my little sister's wedding. Way to go Rachel; you found someone who will watch Golden Girls with you and put up with three closets filled with your clothes. Seriously, Rachel is a catch and she managed to find a nice young man.

In the meantime I got to do a workout with my cousins, wife, and uncle. My cousin Chris is a personal trainer and he specialized in these evil workouts known as Crossfit. My calf had been hurting me pretty bad after the Minneapolis Marathon so I hadn't run for four days. I was planning on trying just an easy three to get back into the swing of things. Chris suggested that we do a Crossfit workout together that would include some running so I took the bait.

Ho-ly ouch. The workout itself wasn't that terrible--sit ups, push ups, lunges, step ups--things like that. There were parts that were tough but overall I felt like it was fine. Then came the next day. I had to drive six hours back to Minnesota and my legs felt like they'd been attacked with a meat tenderizer. My groin, hamstrings, and glutes felt terrible. It didn't help that I then spent the next six hours keeping them immobilized in the car.

My calf is feeling much better now. I iced the heck out of it along with giving it "The Stick" treatment. I ran an easy four yesterday and definitely had to shake some rust out. Now I'm working on keeping my calf loose and starting to do some strengthening exercises to prevent a recurrence.

I'm starting to have trouble keeping track of all the exercises I should be doing to prevent previous injuries from recurring. Knees, IT band, PTT--pretty soon I'm not going to have time to run because I be so busy do core and rehab work to hold myself together.

Seriously, I try to do core and calisthenic exercises three times a week but it often times ends up being twice a week. I suppose that's better than not at all. It's funny but once I get up to running 60-80 miles I week taking 20 - 30 minutes three days a week for other exercises seems like a big hassle.

Last week I was hoping to do 85-90 miles as a peak week for the Afton Trail 50k but with the stupid calf injury it ended up being 33 miles. Oh well, I was only around 50 miles short. This week isn't going to be much better seeing's how I'm only at four miles and it's already Wednesday. Afton could ended up being even tougher than I was planning.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have heard of Crossfit but haven't done it myself.

Bummer about all the injuries!

It takes SO much time to do everything we "should" be doing! As if devoting 1-3 hours of running a day isn't enough, we should be: stretching 1-2 times a day, icing, weight lifting 2-3 times a week, doing core work, plyometrics, eating right, and getting enough sleep.

Seriously, can't someone pay me to do this??

Anonymous said...

Oh, and P.S. I love The Stick!