homemade recovery Ice bath

I started training for my half marathon with a nagging foot injury and an irritated shin. Definitely not putting the best foot forward on the entire experience, but one of the benefits of starting with pestering injuries is that I got into the habit of taking care of my poor legs and feet. In addition to foam rolling and stretching religiously, I started to ice bath.

After reading about how ice baths can help improve recovery and help prevent injuries, I decided it would be good to give it a try. But one major thing got in the way. I hate to be cold. I would rather be pouring sweat from being too hot than have to shiver even a little. I get cold so easily that I consider icing an injury on par with torturing someone for information. So the idea of purposefully putting my entire leg, or even part of my leg, into cold water was hard to get over.

To start out, instead of filling a bucket full of ice and a little water, I used straight tap water. Where I live the water comes out at about 65 degrees, which doesn’t sound too bad until you put your warm feet into it, then it’s frigid. I slowly built up to adding a couple handfuls of ice at a time. (And despite what the picture above looks like,) I put in about 4 handfuls in the beginning and add a few more once I get a bit used to it.

Even though I still hate putting my feet in, it’s nice to be able to “ice”  my entire lower legs and feet at the same time. In 15 minutes I’m done and putting on my cozy socks to warm up. To make it more tolerable I also wear multiple layers or wrap myself in a blanket and I try to sit in a warm spot (like in the sun on the patio). When it’s windy I sit on the edge of the tub with my bucket inside of it to make pouring out the water and drying off easy.

It turns out after hobbling through 9 miles, I put up a lot less resistance towards dunking my lower legs into icy water.