The aftermath of FANS

It’s been three weeks since the FANS 24-Hour Race.  Going into that race, I had two concerns.  My first concern was my lower back, which has been bothering me since last November.  The other was a sore spot at the top of my left leg, where my hamstring connects to my pelvis.

I’ll talk about my back first.  For the first 16 hours of the race, it wasn’t an issue.  After midnight, I wasn’t doing as much running, so I had to put more effort into my power walking to keep my overall pace from slowing down too much.  I was able to do it, but I started to notice fatigue all the way across my lower back.  If I only had discomfort on one side, I would’ve been more concerned.  Instead, I attributed what I was feeling to tired muscles.  I wasn’t used to power walking for so many hours.  I didn’t really train for that.  Before FANS, my longest walk of the year was only nine miles.

In the last few hours of the race, I was beginning to slow down, so I put much more effort into my walking.  That’s when I started to notice discomfort on the right side of my lower back.  That was a bigger concern than the fatigue I felt earlier, but I was committed to getting to 100 miles, so I ignored the discomfort and just plowed through it.

Late in the race, I started leaning to my right.  Here’s a picture that was taken in the last 20 minutes of the race.

I didn’t have any idea I was leaning until my friend Mary said something after the race.  I later learned that I already looked like this at 3:30 AM.  I was leaning to my right for at least four and a half hours.

Immediately after the race, my lower back was so painful I could barely move.  It didn’t help that I also had delayed onset soreness in my quads.  Earlier in the year I strained a muscle on the right side of my lower back.  I was worried I might have done the same thing again.

Here’s the good news.  I took it easy for the next week, and my back felt a little better each day.  A week after the race, my back felt about the same as it did before the race.  After two more weeks of recovery, my back feels better than it’s felt at any time since November.  While it’s still not 100%, it doesn’t seem as though the race did any lasting damage.  What I felt right after the race was just the soreness you can get after running 100 miles.

If my back was the good news, my left hamstring was the bad news.  During the race, I barely noticed it.  I occasionally felt some minor soreness, but only on the laps where I was walking fastest.  It didn’t bother me while I was running, and it didn’t bother me when I walked at a more moderate pace.

I waited several days after the race before starting to run again.  When I resumed running, I initially ran at a relaxed pace.  My hamstring didn’t bother me.  It was only when I started to pick up the pace of my training runs, that it started to feel sore.  After a couple runs at my marathon race pace, I realized it was quickly getting worse.  Since then, I’ve had to emphasize rest.

In the last 10 days, I’ve only run twice.  The other days I get exercise by doing lots of walking, but all at a casual pace.  I’ve noticed improvement, but I still feel it when I run.  I also feel it walking, if I’m putting in extra effort at the beginning of a hill.

Over the July 4th weekend, I’m going to be running the Firecracker Triple: three marathons in three days.  When I’ve done this series in the past, I’ve competed for the overall win.  I won the triple in 2011 and again in 2014.  I’m probably not in good enough shape to compete for the win this year, but I would’ve given it my best shot if I was healthy.  Instead, I’ll probably take it easy and just run to finish.

There’s one other piece of good news.  Before FANS, I was carrying some extra weight.  I wanted to lose at least six pounds before trying to bring my marathon times down.  The day after the race, I weighed myself, and I was down almost three pounds.

I initially took that with a grain of salt.  I probably burned off a pound of fat during the race, but I was skeptical about losing more than that.  The rest could be water loss.  Indeed, for the next two days, I seemed to be gaining the weight back.  Then something amazing happened.  I started losing weight again.

Since FANS, my activity level has been fairly light, but my weight has been going doing a little bit each day.  This morning, I weighed in almost five pounds lighter than I was before FANS.

I noticed something similar the first time I did a 24-hour race.  My metabolism was elevated for the next week or two.  It’s pretty cool to be able to lose five pounds without any significant change in diet and without increasing my activity level.  I know from past experience that my metabolism will gradually get back to normal, but I’ve already lost most of the weight I wanted to lose.