Weeks 5 and 6: Spring Break

The past couple weeks have been a blur.  My softballers and I left on the 6th for an 11 day road trip as our "spring break."  Thankfully, due to weather, they didn't have to play all 11 games that were scheduled.  As an athletic trainer, that many games in that many days was a nightmare, especially since being on the road means managing injuries with only my two hands.  But anyway, as far as my training goes, I did a lot better than anticipated.  Bouncing from hotel to hotel and state to state wasn't exactly the best for my training schedule, but I did an exceptional job at adjusting.  I even got some really great runs in in some unexpected places.  In Columbia, South Carolina, the coaches found a park on one of our days off, so I got to run 4 miles along a beautiful lake and do some cross training on the shore with some of my athletes.  Back by the hotel, I explored a little (after consulting the hotel staff about safety and such) and found another sweet little park with a running trail encircling a small pond.  Those two workouts were definitely the highlights of my spring break.  However, I did have a couple failures as well.

First of all, oh sweet goodness, THE FOOD.  I ate so much food.  It was terribly hard to control my food intake when we ate out for every meal, and my tab was covered by EKU.  Don't get me wrong, I usually ordered from the lighter side of the menu, but being surrounded by division one athletes at meal time is a terrible thing.  When in Rome, right?  Well, that mentality really bit me in the rear, and I put on five pounds as a result.  And seeing as my poor body was not used to that kind of fueling, I got to spend the week feeling all kinds of bloated.  Needless to say, I can't wait to get back to my woodland creature diet so my body can find normalcy again.

The second failure was by far the most disappointing.  This past Saturday, 3/15/14, I was supposed to go for my long run of 7.5 miles.  However, we were staying in Antioch, TN, which doesn't have many places to run that would be all that safe and cuddly past a certain time, and there was no way on earth I could get amped up for an hour on the treadmill.  So I didn't do it.  Instead, I visited with a new friend I had made that day, an athletic trainer from Tennessee State University.  We had a great time, and I really needed some laughs and relaxation, so I refuse to say that day was a complete failure.  But I was just so looking forward to kicking that day's ass.  You see, Saturday was the two year anniversary of my "strokebrain," which is a fun little nickname I have assigned to a terrifying time in my life.  At age 22, I had a stroke.  In the midst of it, while I could neither speak nor move the right side of my body, my sweet and amiable doctors told me that, with a minimum of three months of physical therapy, I had a 30% chance of regaining full function of my right side.  That was right after they told me that they were going to push the clot-busting drug called TPA, and if they were wrong about me having a stroke, I would most likely die.  So that's the motivation behind all of this 1/2 marathon stuff.  Basically, I want to be my own little success story.  Which is why my failure on Saturday hit me so hard.  I wanted to celebrate that day with a 7.5 mile run because it would have signified my new, healthier life.  But I can't dwell on it, so I'll just have to attack this week's training with a little more fervor.

This upcoming week is week four of my official training, and therefore it is a rest week.  Each run is only supposed to be three miles, withe the exception of Saturday's long run.  I'm thinking that I'll pick it up to four miles a day though, to make up for last Saturday, and because my three mile route here in Richmond is starting to get a little stale.  I did a pretty good job staying hydrated over spring break, so I'll just have to maintain that this week, but I don't really foresee myself cutting back on the coffee very much.  I don't exactly get a day off during season, so I need something to keep me awake, and I'm certainly not going to turn to crack.  So I'm left with coffee.  Sorry, goals.

So there you have it.  The highlights and lowlight of my past couple weeks.  Until next time!