Fast Recovery

It’s been six weeks since my last chemo treatment and I’m feeling great. Many of the chemo side effects are gone and I’m no longer taking any medication for side effects. Some of the medication I was taking for side effects is habit forming, so I’m very happy to be done with it. My stomach problems are gone and I can eat apples again. My red blood count must be going up because I have notice a huge increase in my running speed without having to gasp for air. About 4 weeks ago the fastest I could run 6 miles was at a pace of about 10:30/mile, now I can run it at 8:30/mile. I no longer need weekly blood tests; the next one won’t be till July. My hair is now coming back. It’s nice to have a little shade up there with summer around the corner. One of the side effects I still have is tingling and numbness in my toes and fingers, mostly in my toes. My doctor said it’ll take about a half of year for that to go away. No big deal, I can handle tingling.

Training went well this week, but my left ankle is showing some signs of stress. I’ll have to monitor it closely so it doesn’t grow into an injury that requires some recovery time. I no longer have slack time in my training schedule for injury recovery. I ran my 16 mile long run in 2 hours, 36 minutes, which was a huge improvement over the 3 hours, 12 minutes it took to run 16 miles 4 weeks ago. With the rapid increases in speed I started having thoughts of trying to finish Grandma’s in less than 4 hours. But I have to get those thoughts out of my head. There’s just not enough time to properly prepare for running 26.2 miles at that speed. My next two long runs will be 23 miles each. I’ll prepare for and run them as if it was race day. The biggest challenge now is not to let greed and adrenaline dictate my pace.