We’re back home! It was a very long, but relaxing trip. For me, anyway: all I had to do was sit in the car and chill mess with my phone all day long. My fingers hurt from all the Instagraming, which is no bueno considering how badly the rest of me hurts too.
When I say Instagraming, I mean mostly taking photos of the LA Marathon medal — which is by now splattered all over the web [dang, missed the opportunity to break that news!]
The clover, as I’m sure you’ve already been informed by the fellow bloggers, is made of green glass, so it’s see-through! If you look carefully in this photo, you’ll see a tiny road (the I-5) and a truck on the right side. But you really have to try your hardest to focus. And use your imagination a little bit?
I’ll tell you all about the race later (too many photos to look over and make blog-ready for now).
In the meantime, for my fellow runners who raced hard this weekend and now have little to no use of their legs: hurts, huh?
I knew my quads were in trouble the minute I crossed that finish line. I limped along until I found the family, then tried to kneel down to take a photo with BabyRuns. This is how far I got:
The soreness is worse today and will probably be at its worst tomorrow, so I’m having to resort to little tricks to accomplish even the simplest things like walking or conquering a flight of stairs. Here are some of them:
1. Stairs
When absolutely unavoidable, hold on to the railings and pull up your body weight with your arms before you step up, twisting your body slightly to one side your foot steps up diagonally or even parallel with each stair.
Go down facing either side of the stairwell — not forward, or your quads will hate you.
2. Standing up
Pretend like you’re going to do a triceps dip and push yourself as high off the chair as you possibly can, move your hands onto your knees and unfold yourself up slowly, using your back and core muscles rather than your legs.
3. When nature calls
Let’s just say that men don’t know how easy they have it with this one… most of the time. To sit down, grab to the sides of the toilet seat and lower yourself using your arm muscles only. Same for standing up. When using public facilities, take advantage of the handicapped stalls: they have railings to hold on to.
4. Walking
I just lock my knees and waddle. Don’t care if people point at me and laugh. (But I carry my medal in my bag, so I can shove it in their faces in case they do.) Just kidding. I would never shove. Just casually drape it round my neck, smile and wave a few fingers?
5. Rolling off bed
Do it butt-up. I’m serious. Lying on your stomach, take one foot down, then the other, lock the knees and push the rest of your body off the bed.
6. Socks
Can you bend down from the waist and touch your toenails? In this case, you could try to put on your socks this way while standing up. Or sit on your bed (feet up, legs straight), lock your knees and bend from the waist to pull on those suckers (–>sockers? what we call socks that are particularly challenging to handle<--). Third option: sit down on the bed, relax your legs and lift up the knee using your hands until it bends so your foot is close enough to put on that sock. Then push down from the knee (again, using your arms and not engaging any of your leg muscles). Voila: you are fully socked.
Dancing
Ha ha! Gotcha!
No dancing for at least a few more days possibly ever, but I will start introducing some active recovery tomorrow (two days post-race). A short easy swim. The foam roller.
I foam rolled for about a minute the afternoon after the race and got the pain sweats on, so I quit. Can you blame a girl for not wanting to tolerate any more pain in a day, though?
Today, I’ve been gently using the stick.
And drinking lots of water to flush out the lactic acid (and yes, I know this doesn’t help the ‘nature call’ situation, but if my chiropractor tells me to do it, I do it). And eating protein to help those torn muscle fibers regrow.
Now your turn: What do you do for post-race recovery? Where do you feel most sore?
I LOVE the photo of you trying to kneel down. Hilarious!!