Deep Water Running During Recovery

Recovery?  What’s that?  Well, Mr. Invincible is working on recovering.  I believe it is just a muscle strain on my lower right calf.  After spinning Thursday, I felt great.  So, Friday I was back out at the track for a 12 x 400 interval day.  The warm up was fine, but after a few intervals I could feel the pain coming back and getting worse.  After the 5^th interval, it was time to jog back to my hotel before I ran into deeper trouble.  I still got 5.5 good miles in.  Today I was going to test my hydration theory on a 20 mile run, instead, I am taking the day off from running.  Cutting the lawn and washing a few cars is my impact exercise for the day.  How am I going to get better as fast as possible and not lose my condition for Chicago?

The fastest way to heal my leg is to avoid running.  Water running, I’m told, is as option.  Here’s a great article on the subject:

http://www.pfitzinger.com/labreports/water.shtml

A quick trip to Academy and I am equipped for the new activity.  When will I be able to come back?  I spoke with a friend, Patrick, who was a distance coach at TCU and is now moving to California to coach at Cal. State, Long Beach.  . His diagnosis, serious over-training.  He advised no more than 2 Interval days in a week and not loading on the sprinting.  Cut back the long run by 30%.  Also, substituting a Tempo run for a Interval or Sprint workout might help and give me as much speed benefit.  I was encouraged.  Out of caution, I did the water running today.

Water running is a little weird.  Since the resistance as all around, you feel it moving legs forward and backward.  It took me about 20 minutes to get used to it.  After 45 minutes, I got a bad calf cramp in my left leg (not the hurting one) and I called it a workout.  As I write 30 minutes later, I feel like I had been out for a good, but not a hard run.  My legs are reasonably tired, but I feel pretty good. 

Tomorrow will be a tempo run test and I will find out if I need to spend a week in the water or just back off the hard speed work.  I registered for a 15K on Memorial Day (9 days away), so I hope to be back in the form I felt on Tuesday when I had a fast interval day and was overly pleased with myself.