A week ago, I ran 13.1 miles to fulfill the obligations of the Disney Dine & Dash Wine & Dine Half Marathon that mythical wife and I signed up for months ago. We were itching for redemption to run it this year, as we had to bow out the year prior with lots of sour grapes on how runDisney handled it, because of a little unexpectedly quick turn around on pregnancy, but we signed up for it in 2020, thinking we would have our opportunity to redeem ourselves as well as introduce our little one to her first Disney trip.
Among other things ruined on account of coronavirus, this too was denied to us again for a second year, but we opted to stay registered and run our half marathons virtually.
Mind you, in spite of having obligations of a half marathon, I’ve basically been living on auto-pilot for large swaths of the year, and I hadn’t really done any proper distance training leading up. I run regularly, but only around three miles per run, mostly for maintenance and health purposes, and not necessarily with a distance goal in mind. Regardless, because I was planning on doing run/walk, I was still confident that I would be able to pound out 13.1 miles without killing myself.
Sure, some preparation probably would have made things easier, but I did just that, and finished my half marathon’s distance without dying. I admittedly hit a wall a little faster than I had hoped, and by mile 10 I was running out of gas pretty quickly, and my right calf was telling me that it was very unhappy with my choices in life, but I still finished, and under my goal time of 2 hours and 30 minutes to boot.
I figured I would be in pretty rough shape afterward, seeing as how such was usually the case whenever I’d done any prior 10K or 10-milers in the past, with training, but the following day, it was nothing more than the atypical tender quads and achy ankles, leading me to be quite satisfied that I wasn’t a complete train wreck of a physical specimen after having not been to the gym in literally eight months.
A day ago, as is something that always has to be done this time of year, I went outside and raked leaves, as I have three very large trees on my property, and therefore have a metric fuckton of leaves to have to rake. It was a massive pain the ass last year, as I had but a cheap wire rake that I had procured from Amazon, so I decided to not be a cheapskate and get myself a real, effective rake, even if it meant that I had to leave my house and go to a Home Depot to buy one.
But the investment paid off immediately, as it was far more efficient, far more ergonomic and I was able to compile some large mounds of leaves on my yard in what seemed like way less time than before. I was very satisfied by this. Unfortunately, the wild undeveloped area where I’d dumped all my leaves in prior years has overgrown quite substantially over the last year, creating something of a natural wall of shrubs, some of which still contain poison ivy. So it looked like the best option for me would be to bag the leaves in yard waste bags and dispose of them like most other people do who don’t stink up the area by burning them.
So, I bought some yard bags and spent the time bagging the biggest pile of leaves on my yard. It took ten bags, and packed to the gills, but I managed to clear probably 70% of the leaves that I had raked. Now, I have to figure out how many of these bags my cheapskate waste disposal company will take at a time each Monday because I’m pretty sure they’re not going to take ten full bags of leaves, but either way, mission accomplished.
Later in the evening, I’m doing things around my home, and there’s this niggling ache in my right hamstring. I’m puzzled to why I’m having this ache, as my half marathon run was, by this point, almost a week ago, and it’s not like my body to get sore on a delay. I’m wondering what the fuck is wrong with my body, and then it dawns on me why this is the case: the raking.
More specifically, the act of constantly bending over to pick up handfuls of leaves, and putting them into bags. This is not the least big strenuous while doing it, but clearly the fact that I kept to one side’s motions the entire time of doing it, it definitely took its toll on the other side of my body’s leg, which seemed to have been stressed the most in the act of working.
Leaves. Cleaning fucking leaves, puts more physical strain on my body than having run a half marathon. Sure, there’s numerous different muscles and motions being utilized by either for it to be a remotely accurate comparison, but the fact of the matter is that something mundane like cleaning leaves kicks my body’s ass more than running does.
This serves as another reminder of another part of my body that has gotten softer and weaker over the last eight months, having not been working out in the gym like I had used to. And contrary to all the leg day memes go, I always worked my lower body, as it is important for me to have strong and healthy hamstrings, quads, calves and knees, with as much as I run. But not getting to do the lifts and exercises I did at the gym anymore has clearly atrophied my legs in ways that running alone can’t condition, and it just makes me sad that among the numerous things that coronavirus has fucked up, simply being able to go to the gym and exercise is most definitely amongst some of my least favorites. ☹️
