November 3, 2023 - Heavy Legs

I always forgot, yet it always happens. To me, there's one true sign that I'm deep in marathon training. That sign, I have heavy legs for every single run. The intensity and volume just keep piling on top of one another. And the legs feel heavy day after day after day. But that's not the sign. That's just a product of the training cycle of hard and/or fast run, then long recovery. The real sign is that while the legs are heavy, it doesn't matter. A run starts out with a thought like "no way I can do what's planned today on these heavy legs." The thought somewhere during the run is more like "hey, this is going totally fine despite the heavy legs." It's just heavy legs. The heartrate is where it's expected. The rate of perceived exertion is on point. It's just heavy legs. Layers and layers and layers of training not every quite allowing the legs to fully recovery. Always just enough recovery to be able to do the next workout well. Never feeling quite right, but also not wrong once things get moving.

I don't get this feeling when training for other running events. When I took a few months earlier this year to try training for a 5k (ha, what a failure!) I often felt truly fatigued from hard workouts and not able to run well the next day out. With ultramarathon training, especially for big mountain events, the training is so varied with runs and fast walking and cross training that I never reach that chronic yet manageable fatigue. But marathon training, I've had that moment when I noticed it every time. I've always had a moment when I though "man, my legs feel heavy and tired and it doesn't even matter!" 

Perhaps that is the training working? Perhaps that's exactly the kind of muscular fitness that's needed to be able to continue at the target pace for those final miserably 10 kilometers of a marathon? I don't know. I'll just continue to do the work and trust the process and see what happens in a few weeks at CIM.