Post Race Recovery Process

After the Silver State 508 race last week I took two days to drive back home.  About six hours each day.  Which is quite unusual for me.  I typically do numbing 12+ hour pulls.  The usual consequence of driving that long is one or two days of literal recovery from the numbing effect.

Part of the recovery process after bicycling races is unpacking, cleaning and stowing of cycling gear from the event.  I don't `hurry' that process simply because I've usually neglected other priorities in preparation for the race.  They take precedence.

Two nights after arriving home I was awakened in the middle of the night with something that never happened before.  The average resting respiratory rate for a well conditioned male is about 15 - 18 per minute.  I woke up with a respiratory rate of 35 per minute.  My heart rate was in the high 70's (compared to the high 40's - low 50's).  I had a temperature of 101F.  And my blood pressure was 170/75 (compared to the usual 120/65).  

I took some Tylenol and spent the next two days sleeping.  The respiration, HR, temperature and blood pressure returned to normal fairly quickly.  However I now experience an occasional mild cough.  It feels like my lungs hurt a bit.

So ... to what do I attribute this?  I have a typical cycling heart rate just above 100 BPM.  At intense efforts (climbing) my HR can get up to 145+BPM.  This intensity often quite short and is usually in temperatures never below 45F.  

The Nevada mountain desert got down to the mid 20Fs during the race.  I was pushing really hard up the mountain inclines at those temperatures.  Breathing very hard for what was, for me, a long time. I wasn't wearing a HR monitor but I was clearly breathing very, very heavily and deep.  I speculate that my HR was in the 140 BPM range. 

I'm guessing that the intense effort in the cold weather put a real strain on my lungs.  I was trying to climb at too intense an effort for the full time of my pulls, i.e., 30 - 45 minutes.  

In retrospect it was good to call it quits at around 2:00 AM and 27F.  

My body is teaching me.