The Morning After

How long do you take off after an all out effort? A week? Two? I took two days ran a four miler and then the next day ran another four. Then I felt tired the morning after the second run so I took the next day off.

For the next 4 days I was a basket case. I couldn’t get enough sleep. Although analyzing the situation I’m not sure if it was fatigue from running or the consecutive nights with a structure fire in the middle of the night.

Being an on-call firefighter has its merits but sleep is not on of them. We don’t get called out too often in the night but this past weekend was all too regular. One night was a kitchen fire around midnight and the next night was actually the next morning but still counts a couch fire. This on top of a few false alarms. And don’t even get me started on being mistakenly paged out.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t in the midst of building a fence for my dogs in the back yard. Post holing and putting up fences I was using muscles I hadn’t in awhile. In fact the last two weekends I’ve been consumed by it. By Sunday I was so dead dog tired I actually took a nap in the middle of the day.

I was constantly doing something morning, noon and into the night literally.

I wish I could have monitored my recovery a bit better but I did notice that I was fairly dehydrated. I must have drunk 2 liters of water on Sunday before I had to pee some back out. That’s never a good sign.

Today is Tuesday, I ran for the first time since Thursday. It felt really good so I think I’m back on track. My wife and I agreed that we would try and keep this weekend open and no renovating. We’ll see!