First off – congrats to all that managed to get into the early entries for the 2016 Disney World Marathon! I envy you all. I have gone a total of 6 times (the last 4 in a row) and would love to go and do my beloved Goofy Challenge again but it isn’t in the cards this year.
So now my health. As I mentioned in my last post, I have been having some health issues out of nowhere and I have been feeling pretty awful. Today was the first day in 2 weeks that I felt like I could think clearly and didn’t need to take anything for headaches. It appears I had a toxicity issue with black licorice and my system went wonky and my potassium levels crashed hard. This led to some major swelling and weight gain – a total of 14 pounds gained in under 10 days. Over the past 2 weeks I have tried to run twice – once early on where I got in 3 miles in about a half hour and then once on this past Sunday. About a minute into that one I ended up walking to finish out 3 miles in just under 45 minutes.
In that time I did get in some yard work and I seemed ok but with anything strenuous like climbing multiple sets of stairs, I felt pretty much destroyed.
But I started hammering back the potassium in the form of Gatorade, bananas, orange juice and supplements. This got me to the point where I felt mostly human yesterday and then today I was feeling pretty close to myself (in the head at least).
In the end I felt good enough to attempt a run and even though it was glorious outside I decided I better do it on the treadmill in case things went south really quickly.
I started out at 7 mph and felt a bit rough, so I backed it off to 6 mph for a minute to catch my breath and then pushed it up to 7 again. I took the 7 mph to the 15 minute mark with one more minute at 6 mph thrown in there. After that I was up to 7.2 / 7.3 mph with another minute at 6 mph near the 25 minute mark and then finished up the remaining time at 7.5 mph. This gave me a total of 3.5 miles in 29:44 with a 1% incline.
By the end of the run I felt pretty good and probably could have kept going if I backed the speed down. But I really didn’t want to push it too hard and maybe relapse a bit, so I counted the run as a victory and shut it down.
Now that I have showered, I still feel pretty good – I guess I am on the mend here but it will probably take some time to get back to normal! It should be interesting to see how things go with my next race coming up on May 3rd (the WPS Half Marathon).
On a side note, I have now dropped 5 of the 14 pound weight spike over the last day and a half. I am hoping that most of the rest of the spike is gone by the end of the weekend!
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