Easing back into it....

It's hard to define "easing" when you were actually in decent shape before you were out of it, and I was only out of it a few days, so I defined "easing" liberally.  That is, after getting word from my new doc on Tuesday afternoon that I could test it out with a 15-30 minute light run and then ease my way back into training (letting pain be my guide), I ended up logging 50 miles for the week.  Obviously not a huge week mileage-wise, but a heck of a lot more than I thought I'd be doing being that I'd been lounging around in the hospital up through Sunday afternoon and my previous doc had told me no activity for at least several weeks. So, this is what the two weeks post DVT/PE looked like....

Sunday: discharged from hospital.  Funny that I wanted them to keep me longer, but I finally got a male nurse on the last day and he was cute (that wasn't really why I wanted to stay, but I was nervous about leaving the hospital because I'd been in a serious amount of pain up through Sunday morning and was worried about another painful bout).  I was not yet breathing normally and couldn't talk without stopping to take breaths mid-sentence, but the calf pain from the prior week had pretty much disappeared and I could walk without pain, probably because some of the clots from my calf ended up in the outer reaches of my lungs.

M: 1.5 mile walk; still breathing funny (labored, I guess you'd call it)
T: cleared by doctor to ease back into running and 15 minutes later did a 2 mile run, 4 mile walk
W: 4 mile run, 2 mile walk
Th: 6 mile run
F: 8 mile 2% downhill run on treadmill working down to 6:40 pace (progression run of sorts).
Sa: 11.5 miles on trail in Forest Park
Su: 12 miles easy w/ Meghan on trails in FP

weekly total = 50 miles (I counted the initial walking miles as they were part of easing back in...)

M: 8 mile progression run working down to last 2 miles @ 6:00 pace
T: calf felt tweaky for the first time in a week, so went easy with a 6 mile run
W: 8 miles; hard effort (Terwilliger hills)
Th: 11 miles moderate
F: 4 miles easy and 5 miles treadmill (90 degree heat, 40%, 2% uphill grade)
Sa: 12 miles (2 treadmill sessions, same heat, same grade)
Su: 25 miles @ slightly faster than race pace (7:25 average)

weekly total = 79 miles (lots of quality/up-tempo miles....feeling better about Italy)

In my third week post-PE, I'm planning to hit just over 80 this week, and then will begin a two-week taper into Worlds on April 22.  In the meantime, I'll avoid running with scissors or banging my head on a rock, but I'm feeling pretty OK in general. Training hasn't been ideal, but it never is. If anything, I got a 5-day extreme rest period with my hospital staycation.  My calf feels normal, my lungs have no further issues, and I met with a hematologist yesterday who said the more active the better and had no issues with me either: 1) flying in 2 weeks, or 2) running 100K.  Amazing the differences in medical opinions out there, but I like both my new primary care guy and the blood man because they give good advice (a.k.a. the advice I want to hear).

I've had some difficulty getting my INR level (what the blood thinners affect) to stabilize where they want it (a normal person is at 1, on blood thinners they try to get you between 2 and 3), but as my friendly anti-coagulation clinicians have mentioned, they don't typically work on people like me, and things like exercise and a healthy diet affect the dosing. We're getting it figured out and it'll all be over soon enough, as the blood man thinks that 3 months on thinners could be sufficient.

So, Italy is 100% on.  Now for the 2-week starvation diet if I plan to break out the bunhuggers. One of the issues of so many doctor visits over the past few weeks is that I know exactly how much I weigh, which is information I usually happily avoid and which does not encourage me to expose anyone to my butt in huggers.

Below is a locally-made video of the course in Italy.  Warning, you may get slightly nauseous while watching from the camera motion, and you may get a song stuck in your head (and the tree car-freshener adds that extra touch to the video). Seems like an interesting course, with a fair share of alleys, parking lots, tight turns, rough road, parks, and a fairly diverse environment overall. It's a 20K loop, so we get to do it 5 times, which is better than 10!