Maggie’s Frosty Foot Experience

Congrats Maggie! We love having you as part of the CFA/SAC Family!!

I’ve been a member of Crossfit Asheville since November of 2009 and am so grateful for what Corey, Shanna, and Randy have brought to Asheville.  Due to an injury, I’ve spent the past year balancing out my strengths in the Individual Design Program of the Stay Active Clinic. It’s been a great change in pace and an awesome opportunity to focus on some specific goals.

This past fall I mentioned to Corey that I was interested in running a 30K trail race in January, the Tsali Frosty Foot. I’ve always been attracted to those mega long distance trail runs but never thought I’d get around to training for one. I’ve been running since I was 13 with a handful of those years spent competing. Corey threw some numbers up on the white board, roughing out mileage for the next several months, and I was off. I loved the idea of running one long run a week and doing my Stay Active Clinic workouts twice a week.  It seemed so simple.  Naturally, my running friends thought that was crazy.
The first few weeks were rough as my running in the past two years has been sporadic and at most it occurs a few times a month.  Adding training for this race to working 25 hours a week and taking 3 classes might have been overly ambitious, and so my training was compromised to a long run every 10-14 days and 3-4 workouts in between.  But this also gave my body plenty of time to recover from the long runs and endless rounds of rowing and burpees Corey had me doing.  I tried not to worry too much about getting in more running or more workouts and focused instead on getting enough sleep and eating well.
The race day weather was balmy with a chance of rain. My time on the trail was quite a journey. It felt easy and comfortable; it felt hard and long; it felt impossible.  I crossed the finish line at 3 hours and 50 minutes (about a half hour over my goal) and let out some tears of relief as my friends congratulated me.  Yes, the race would have been easier if I had stuck to the training schedule, but I’m not sure I would have made it to the starting line if I had run more frequently before the race.  All that distance on top of legs that have already been running for 20 years might not have done me much good past a certain point.  I recovered from the race really well and only had some minor inflammation in my knees and sore hip flexors. I was happy to get back to CFA this past Thursday and not worry about getting too sore for my next long run (no more of those for a long time). Thanks to Corey for helping me through this process and introducing a new way to approach racing, and to Shanna, Becca and Dawn for their advice, encouragement, and manual therapy.

Maggie