Run... Yawn... Run - Corina's Marathon Blog

Back into another recovery week. That means I am now 2 months into my training. This week I have entered a phase of my training I have come to know as “sleepy time”. This happens every time I train hard and consistently and usually lasts about 4 weeks. In the past it has happened much earlier in my training plan, but maybe I haven’t been training consistently enough until now for it to kick in.

Basically during my “sleepy time” I get very tired. I want to sleep all the time and given a spare half hour I’ll happily take a nap rather than do anything else. For once I spend more time thinking about sleeping than about food, and that’s saying something. Alan knows that when I get that look in my eyes it is best just to send me into a quiet room for half an hour and I’ll come back functioning better after a bit of shut-eye.

After a few weeks I get used to the new level of training and then I’m fine and can operate happily on normal sleep levels. During all this my body feels fine. I’m not achy, I don’t come down with any injuries, I just want to sleep all the time.

It is especially annoying when I come down with this during a recovery week. Because my runs are shorter I think that I should be feeling better. Instead my body almost relishes the chance to slow down and I tend to feel more tired than usual until late in recovery week. I’ve done this long enough that I know that is how my body reacts, so I just need to look after it and wait for the next phase to kick in. When it does I’ll feel stronger, faster, run better and manage to stay awake all day.

But until then … good night!