Old Man Walking

The topic of conversation of a long run about 6 weeks back was about having "old man's walk" as a side effect of heavy training. If you've had it, I don't need to explain, but for the rest of you this is when leg muscles are really tight upon waking up in the morning and upon standing up from a long period of sitting. The walk is slow and stiff, and usually warms up after about 5 minutes to where you can't feel it. Others commonly ask if you are feeling okay, and then smirk when told its from running. Yeah, a real healthy sport, they think. I'm tempted to tell them its from a shrapnel wound I got in Desert Storm.

Anyway, on that run six weeks ago, I commented that to my surprise and given the mileage I'd been logging, I had not been experiencing OMW. I can now no longer say that. This morning the legs were extremely stiff.

Another good thing about having a coach is that, along with pushing me to do hard workouts, he also sets limits on easier workouts. Today's workout was a "recovery run" of 45-60 minutes. This was right on target, for as OMW cleared up the tightness in my right calf and the more generally beat up condition of my legs became more pronounced. So EM and I ran the Art Museum loop this morning, pondering among other things whether, given the "nutritional enhancements" in snack food, it was possible to satisfy all your nutritional needs on a diet exclusively comprised of Tastycake products. Run was conversational and done in 56 minutes (actually 56:14). I had to tell myself several times to keep it at 6.5 and not do the 8-mile 54th St. version.

Had the workout not been capped at 60 minutes, I know I would have went 8.