Summer Training: The Bark is Worse than the Bite by Shannon Amrein

Shannon is a rising junior from Amherst, NH. Shannon battled through multiple stress fractures, diet allergies, and sickness for years before finally being diagnosed with Lyme disease as the culprit a little over a year ago.

Let me preface this by saying: my summer has not been interesting. I have worked training in after work. I am at work between 7:30 and 8 am most days, and leave between 4 and 4:30 pm. I get home and go out to run and usually, this being New England, it has not been very hot.

I have had, overall, a really great summer of training. My mileage is much lower than most of my teammates (30-35 miles is my goal range) but it's still a lot more than I was able to do a year ago. I have been gaining my speed and stamina and endurance back and I'm starting to feel more like myself.

One of my favorite views from my runs

My summer training has been made difficult by my continued struggle with Lyme disease. As most of
you probably know, I was diagnosed with Lyme last summer. Ever since then, I have been on continuous bouts of antibiotics. I started seeing a new doctor this summer who has helped me immensely. Unfortunately, my doctor clinically diagnosed me with another tick-carried infection: babesia. It has made training difficult at times though because I'm on medicine that is specifically killing this parasite (it is very closely related to malaria and lives in your red blood cells) and has made me feel horrible at times.

The day I'm writing this is the first day in my life I did not finish a run. I caught a ride home mid run with my mom because I felt too horrible to even make it the last .70 miles to my house. On the other hand some days, my runs feel amazing and I feel like I could go on forever. This is a good example of how up and down my summer has been in terms of training. As one of my teammates described it once when he asked me about it, "it's a roller coaster". Sometimes I can push through the bad Lyme days and run anyway, sometimes I forget I'm sick because I feel so good, and more and more rarely do I come home from work and have no energy to do anything but go to bed.

One of the gorgeous roads I run on

The bad days come because of medicine changes, because of eating the wrong thing, because I'm tired. They also come with incredible self-doubt, with panic that I won't make it through the bad days, with worry about how it's possible to still feel this bad over a year into treatment, and with fear about my ability to train with and work with my teammates this fall. These are all things I'm going to have to deal with when I'm training at school as well. As much as I hoped I wouldn't be, I will still be on relatively massive amounts of antibiotics during the upcoming season. As they change, I know I'll react to them and I can only hope that it won't affect the season too much.

I'm writing this because summer is a tough time to train, both mentally and physically. I know I haven't been the only one going through mental and physical battles to keep up with the training, and although everyone's battles are different, they're all important to ensure that everyone on the team comes back strong and ready to run.

Meeting up with Michaela whose from nearby Pennsylvania

My summer training really has been as much a mental training as it has been physical. I'm so excited to give my all to our success as a team this fall, and I'm confident that all my work, as well as everyone else's, will pay off in less than a month when we're back at campus, and until then, happy running!

PS: Please tick check every time you run, even if it's on regular roads, because I don't ever want anyone of you to have to deal with this.