I am feeling soooooooo much better post iron injections! My energy is back, my pace for my workouts is getting back to what it used to be and I'm feeling really strong. All the marathons I did this summer may not have been fast, but they did apparently make me strong.
So, from the beginning... The worst thing about coming to New Zealand? The trip here! Holy cow! I've been to China three times and Australia twice, but this was a long flight. And in terms of training a lot of time to get tight and cramped and sore. But after more than a day of travel I arrived! At 6:00 AM, so I had allllll day to stay awake. I managed it, even got a workout in, but it was not easy.
It took me I'd say about 4 days to get sorted. Luckily I found an AMAZING massage therapist who has worked on race walkers and knows exactly where the sore bits are. After that brutal session I was so much looser. I've been tight for so long and she really got stuff worked out! So the first weekend I was there I did a fun little local 5K RW. It was in a really nice park, a little out and back and then three loops of about a mile. I would've been happy if I'd been about 25:30 after all the travel, the tightness and there were some rolls on the course. I was so pleasantly surprised when I went 24:36! And I came back in the afternoon with a solid 10x400 session that was faster than any I've done since January!
The next day I did a 35K and I ended up doing it on the track because Tony (my friend I'm staying with) had to work on the pole vault pits. I did 10K one direction, 20K the opposite direction, and the last 5K the first direction. I stayed incredibly even and pushed the last 5K really strong. It felt so good to move again and feel like my old self. Again, it was my best distance session since at least January/February, and probably even before that.
As I've done these workouts I've been going through my training diary to see the last time I've done a session that strong. I have to look back to the very beginning of the year, and some of it was last year. It makes me realize how tough this year has been. I'm so glad it's gotten resolved. I probably could've/should've known earlier about the anemia, but the thing with letting it get so low was I finally could get the shots which have gotten me really up and above. Otherwise I would've been constantly floating around the almost anemic level. So even though it made part of the year pretty awful, things are really looking up!
We didn't realize it would happen, but Alana, NZ's 20K Olympian, is in Auckland so we can train together some! We did a kickdown together near the water and it was super windy (I mean windy) and it was great to have someone to walk with. There's no way I would've pushed as hard as I did with us working together. It was great! We're doing it again this week and hopefully the wind won't be as brutal!
I did the Auckland marathon for training yesterday and it went great! I was just going to do it as a training walk, so no pushing. Man was that hard. I hit 30K and really wanted to pick it up, but I didn't, I stayed good. I only pushed the last 3K, which I would normally do in a workout. The thing that everyone here said when I told them I was doing the marathon was "Oh! You get to go over the Harbor Bridge!!!!" Every. Single. Person. It was pretty cool, but also fairly steep. That was my second slowest K (slowest being the start when you're still trying to get sorted). Even with it being one of my slowest I still passed so many runners. And starting at about 23K I started passing people left and right. I seriously should've counted. Not one person passed me after 20K I think (might've been earlier than that) so I was really happy with that. And the second half was faster than the first. Of course the first half had the hills, so that makes sense. But with how many people I passed I know I still paced it well.
And the best news is I'm not one bit sore today. It's a cross training day and it went so well. Which is great because I have one more hard week of training before an easy week and then I race the NZ 50K championships. I'm not going to race it all out, it's going to be a solid training walk, I'll be a good girl and not push/race it too hard.
The nice thing about being here also is getting back in the swing of full-time training. Doing all the extra stuff that sometimes goes by the wayside when you're home and have all those home things to do. I've been doing my yoga again and hitting the abs really hard. It's a good reminder that will carry on when I get home for sure.
And I'm getting to do some fun stuff, I'm really excited to see some of the Lord of the Rings sets, since I am a LOTR fan. It hasn't been super warm yet so we haven't gone to the beach, but we will. And while I obviously miss being home and with Dave, This is probably the best I've really kept myself busy and focused and am not completely crazily home sick, so that's both good and bad.
So back to training, back to staying focused, and onward to improvements!
As always, if you'd like to help support me, please go to my online stores and buy stuff! It's stuff you'd get anyway and I get a percentage of sales to help me with training and racing. So please, when you're getting your holiday presents, please think about buying through my stores!
Here's the link to my flipgive store. There's tons of different stores you can go to, so take a look!
https://athletebiz.flipgive.
And if you're looking for awesome workout gear head here!
https://www.athletebiz.us/athl
Thanks ;)
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