PMD & Holy Weakness Batman

PMD or "Post-marathon depression" is a mood disorder that can affect runners after completing a marathon. Symptoms include eating all of the snacks, drinking all of the beer and an almost obsessive interest in watching all 7 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Amazon Prime. Subjects will usually be uninterested in day to day events and may experience general lack of enthusiasm for the future. Symptoms can be intensified by PMS or an injury that prevents the subject from running. Treatments include wallowing, developing a training plan for the next big athletic event, gaining back all the weight lost during training and snapping out of it because the subject can no longer fit into her pants,  realizing it doesn't matter that the subject can't run because she has lost so much strength from months off of cross training that she drags her ass to a megareformer class only to get her ass handed to her. OK So that kind of fell apart at the end, but its a pretty accurate description of how the past 2 weeks have gone for me. After seeing my PT last Wednesday I got really exited to be able to go for a trail run this weekend only to wake up on Friday and not be all better like he said I would be. I did go to yoga on Saturday and the butt feels better every day but I am still not quite walking properly so running is certainly out of the question.

I finally dragged myself out of my post marathon / unable to run daze and realized that while I gained a lot of fitness during the last 2 months of marathon training, I had all but put my cross training on the shelf and it was time to get some of that muscle back. I re-connected with my much loved, but somewhat neglected, Classpass membership and signed up for a 40 minute megareformer class this morning. I had been participating in this class fairly regularly in the first couple months of training but as my mileage went up my participating in strength training went down. Boy did I feel the lack of strength training this morning! I feel worked in a way I haven't felt for a while. The ass kicking I received was totally what I needed to get me motivated again. So what if I can't run yet, I clearly have a lot of non-running work to do to be able to run healthy. For now I will work on whole body strength and riding my bike to maintain the fitness I worked so hard for. Of course, I'm still counting down to getting out on the trails but I know they will be worth the wait.