Boo!

Get Your Monster Name

(the above borrowed from Vanilla)

distance: 3.3 miles (outdoors)
total program distance: 18.3 miles
pain level: bizarre, see below
Happy Halloween! I was Axl Rose this year – it was for an 80s-themed party. The good news: everyone recognized me. The bad news: there was another Axl there! But he went for the acid-washed jeans and aviators look, while I was more "Live and Let Die"-ish. We had fun posing together. Good times. Tragically if I wore the whole get-up to work I think I'd be fired (or at least sent home for the day), so I'm not in full kilt 'n' bandanna regalia. Bummer.

I enjoyed the Marathon program last night, though I was disappointed by its brevity. Nova had so much material to cover that everything felt skimmed over, and it was really hard to get invested in the fate of the runners because they were hardly ever on camera. It could easily have been made into a much longer, multi-part documentary, maybe 4 hours or so. I mean they trained for 9 months! And it was all cut down to an hour! It took some of them five times that long just to finish the marathon. But I still enjoyed it (maybe I even cheered at the TV a little when they all finished…) and it reassured me that finishing a marathon is a reasonable goal for myself.

My run last night was about 3.3 flat miles, took me about 30 minutes with some stoplights in the mix. I really paid attention to my form while running, trying to follow the ChiRunning principles. I struggle most with relaxation – I tend to get preoccupied with keeping my head up, leaning, hitting mid-foot, and so on. And then all of a sudden I realize I've been holding my shoulders tense for two miles. It's a journey, I guess. The author advises that it will take 1-3 months to really get comfortable with the new form. So far, I think its been worth it. Last night I felt no pain at all. (Although I do wish that I had introduced the new shoes and ChiRunning independently of one another. I think that a lot of the pain reduction is from ChiRunning, but maybe the Mizunos are miraculous.) I did get a new and different feeling in my legs though: they feel kind of… weary. Like on the inside. I mean, it makes sense. The whole idea of ChiRunning is to use your core and line up your column so that it does the work and absorbs the shock rather than the relatively delicate muscles in your legs. So I'm trading muscle pain for skeletal discomfort. Now I'll take discomfort over pain any day, but I'm not sure what my run is going to be like tonight. I'm hoping that if I do a really good long warm-up I'll feel dandy.

True confession:

I am a terrible, terrible bowler. I'm not quite sure how I ended up in two bowling leagues this fall, but it sure wasn't by having any sort of skill or talent at bowling. The worst part is that I'm not even consistently bad. That would be amusing and forgivable. No, I have to show flashes of brilliance that instill a false sense of hope in my soon-to-be heartbroken teammates. I might start a game with a strike, then follow up with 3/-, 5/-, and 0/-. It's just wrong.

Tonight is the NOVA broadcast of Marathon Challenge. It's showing in Oregon on OPB at 8pm (that's Channel 10 for PDXers). I've had this on my calendar since I read it about last month. It is a documentary about a group of first-time marathoners training for the Boston Marathon. The BM is one of those near-mythical occurrences that I know exist, but can't imagine ever participating in, like reaching the top of Mount Everest or finding a gas station downtown. To qualify for Boston I'd have to run an 8:25/mile pace. HA! I laugh. I'm all for positive thinking but let's not get crazy. My goal is to finish the darn thing, I'll worry about my time later. Thus I'm hoping to live vicariously through the people I see on TV (because no one's ever done that before…), and get a sense of what it's like from this program.

No running last night (rest day), but I did go to the gym and use an odd machine that was like the offspring of an elliptical trainer and a stair climber. I wanted to ride the bike so I could read, but I went to the Hollywood 24 Hour Fitness which is completely packed on Mondays (okay, all the time). I almost miss the old Hollywood 24HF – yes it was kind of like the dive bar of gyms, kind of seedy and dank, and yes my umbrella was stolen there, but it was never outrageously crowded and the people that went there seemed less jerky than the ones that flood the new building. Or maybe its just that the lighting is so much better now. Either way, I always felt comfortable in the old space, the new one: not so much.
***
The picture below is one I took on a trip to Newport in March this year. Apparently, the Newport Marathon is really awesome...and it's close by...and I'm a crazy person to even consider it....

Weekend Report - Good News

distance: 5 miles (outdoors)
total program distance: 15 miles
pain level: naught
On Saturday morning I headed to Fit Right NW on 23rd to get some new shoes. The store came very highly recommended, and I wasn't disappointed. The woman who helped was very attentive and professional, and the gait analysis was interesting. My left foot lands almost perfectly neutral (yay!) but my right foot turns out (boo!). She recommended neutral shoes, because its apparently better to undercorrect overpronation than to overcorrect a good landing. I got a pair of Mizuno's – I had never heard of the brand but I gotta say, they feel great. Also, on Friday night I picked up the ChiRunning DVD from the library and watched part of it. Stick with me, there is a point to all this, and that point is that my five-mile run on Saturday felt GREAT! Perhaps even amazing. I kept the pace up, I felt almost no pain or discomfort at all, and right around mile 4 I fell into this awesome groove like I was barely working at all. I almost didn't want to stop at five miles, but we’ve all heard the horror stories of the over-enthusiastic so I reined it in. I was on a total high the rest of the day.

Sunday I lifted weights and went for a walk as my cross-training. It was a gorgeous fall day in Portland, bright blue skies, unusually warm, beautiful foliage. Today is bowling day; beforehand I'm going to ride the stationary bike for a little bit. I've put my mental foot down that Friday is going to be my honest-to-goodness rest day, no planned exercise. It's a struggle for me to take rest days - I think because I'm terrified of falling off the exercise wagon and putting on all the weight I lost. You hear and read all these stories of yo-yo dieters, and how only a small percentage of people manage to lose weight and keep it off. I've kept it off for about…seven years now. At this point I feel confident that I won't gain it back, because I love exercising and how it makes me feel, and I never want to be as uncomfortable with myself as I was when I was heavier. But I still have those concerns in the back of my mind, and they make it very hard to be lazy for even one day.

Digression: So the Red Sox won the World Series last night. As a life-long Yankees fan, I find it interesting how the Sox are being labeled the new Yankees because of their huge payroll and burgeoning dynasty, and more insidiously because the Sox are developing the casual, non-fanatical "fans" who only wear Sox ballcaps and watch Sox games when they get to the playoffs. This is funny to me because I am a born-and-bred New Yorker who has always rooted for the Yankees, and my roommate is a born-and-bred Massachusetts-ian who is a diehard Sox fan (somehow we avoid coming to blows). So I have dealt for years, especially living so far from NY, with the taunts of "Oh, the Yankees, well its easy to root for them, no wonder you're a fan." (What I want to tell these people is that being a true NY fan means I also root for the Jets. THE JETS, people! I've had more than my fair share of heartbreak.) And now she is facing the same sort of thing for her BS cap. I find it amusing. At least I don't have to worry about getting taunted for picking an easy football team to love. The Jets are like...I can't even think of a suitable metaphor. They are like the burnt, deflated souffle in the NFL kitchen.

I had something of a reversal yesterday. My legs felt great at the beginning of the run, really fresh and energetic. But by the time I headed back down the hill they were totally tight and crampy. I did a kind of modified fartlek (tee hee!) around the track, speeding up when I felt like it and then returning to my normal pace (which is still faster than I'm used to). I dunno, maybe that was too much for my first three-days-in-a-row week. I stretched really thoroughly, and I don't feel any soreness today. I hope I can keep up the pace on my five mile run this Saturday. Now that I've started running faster and not just slagging along I don't want to stop. Speed is addictive.

Before my run I'm going into town to get some new sneakers at Fit Right NW. I really like the NBs I have now, but I've also had them for years (and probably well over the recommended 500 miles) and they've started to hurt my right big toe.

Musing alert: Back in July I toyed with the idea of running the Portland marathon this year (its in October). But I didn't have enough time to train and dropped the idea. Now I've made the decision to (as various highly-compensated sports figures keep reminding me) just do it. And I really think I'm going to – I don't think this will end up the Shelf of Rebecca's Failed Big Ideas. But its funny (from a meta standpoint) to monitor the ups-and-downs of my fear/exhilaration ratio. Sometimes I read a great, positive story like this and I think "I can totally rock the marathon!" And then I read an account like this, where the runner prepared well, hydrated, was young & in good shape and still ran into big problems (no pun intended, although that's a beauty, huh?). I know that if I follow my training plan and I prepare responsibly, I will finish the marathon. Maybe not in a stellar time, but I'll finish nonetheless. Many people have done it with much less running experience than I have (I rationalize). If I can complete my long runs without feeling like death I'll be okay – mentally I know that. But there is still that nagging part of me that wonders if I've set myself up for a very public failure. If I really want to succeed, I need to purge that voice. I need to believe that I can do this, that I have the grit and will have the training to be successful.

(cue inspirational soundtrack please)

First things first:

The sunset last night was gorgeous.

distance: 4 miles (outdoors)

total program distance: 7 miles

pain level: minimal

Heeding my wishes, the rain stopped as I left work. By the time I got up the hill the sun had broken through the dark clouds and was shining on all the wet, brightly colored leaves on the hill and on the streets down to the river…it was amazing. (This picture is not from last night, but it captures the general awesomeness of the view at sunset.) I had hoped that the rain would get rid of the bugs around the reservoir – not so much. Something I forgot to mention yesterday is that on the track around the lower reservoir there are little swarms of gnat-like creatures (perhaps gnats). They congregate on the south-eastern side and fly right at my face height (goddamn it). It is really, really hard to keep good race form and breathing when you inhale clouds of gnats every twenty paces or so. Ugh. It was better tonight, but I was also smart and wore a baseball hat. That way I could pull the brim down and angle my head aawy for the few minutes that I was running through their turf. I can't wait for the first freeze to kill those suckers off.

My legs felt stiff/fatigued yesterday as I was coming home, but after I warmed up they seemed okay. The first mile, as usual, was tight. I took it slow, like a continuation of my warm-up, and my shins limbered up. I think they will be my problem area. I've never had any knee, back, or thigh problems, ::knock on wood:: The only thing that gives me trouble are sore shins, which I know are shin splints. They aren't very bad though, just sort of a dull ache rather than any sharp pain, and I've never had to stop running because of them. I've been following the advice of the NY Road Runners gurus and doing their stretching regime, which helps. Hopefully as I get more mileage in I'll reduce the shin splints and not get any other aches and pains. (Yeah right!)

It's definitely my legs that hold me back – that's sort of a "duh!" thing to say, I know. But last night I was running around the track and I felt like I wasn’t breathing hard enough (again, I could nose breath). I consciously tried to go faster but it was hard for me to make my legs go fast enough to get my breathing elevated. They were all "dude, you've always been happy to just sort of plod along, why shake things up?" Clearly I need to do some speedwork to get my legs used to going faster, since cardiovascularly (apparently that isn't a word, but it should be) I'm doing just fine so far. Tonight I have a 3-miler; I think I'm going to go up to the track and try running one lap fast-ish. As fast-ish as I can manage. We'll see how that goes...

One run down: so far, so good

distance: 3 miles (outdoors)

total program distance: 3 miles

pain level: naught

On the bus coming home last night I read the form chapter in The Competitive Runner's Guide. He basically said don't try very hard to correct your natural form, but gave some tips to keep in mind. I tried a few last night. My favorite was imagining that I was holding potato chips between my middle fingers and thumbs to keep from straining my hands. I have a tendency to run with them straight out, alá the chase scenes in cop movies, which now that I've thought about it would probably hurt my forearms after 4 hours of holding them that way. So I tried to focus on that and on making sure I wasn't overstriding. I think I did well on both counts.

The main thing I did last night was try to self-monitor my heart-rate and breathing. What I noticed is once I got up the hill to the track and got in a rhythm, I was easily breathing through my nose and really was barely exerting myself. Bad girl! So I upped the pace until I was breathing a comfortable 2-2 (two footfalls on the inhale, two on the exhale). And man was I going fast! For me, that is. I was really surprised by how good it felt. As I said below, I've never timed myself ever, it's just been guesstimating. I didn't wear a watch last night either, but I think I did pretty close to a 5k, with a substantial hill thrown in, and I was at or just under 30 minutes. Sweet! Now all I have to do is be able to run at that pace for 4 hours!! Gee, nothing to it. :) But it does give me a lot of hope and encouragement. Heading down my street at the end of the run I felt great. We'll see how I feel after three days in a row. My previous schedule was every other day.

Total topic change: pumpkin spice lattes. I have a weird thing for PSLs, as I cleverly call them. They are full of empty sugar calories, and if you get one prepared the way I like it (double tall soy) it costs $4.20, which is just flipping wrong. But on a cold, brisk fall day, a well-prepared PSL is like…well, its like a little slice of heaven you can warm your hands around. But therein lies the rub – they must be well-prepared. If not, a PSL is the coffee equivalent of a two-day old 7-11 maple bar with some nutmeg on top. I've found that the Starbucks in this town vary wildly in the quality of PSLs they produce. The Starbucks on Third makes amazing PSLs, and it is a constant struggle to avoid the temptation when I walk by on the way to work. But this weekend I went to the Starbucks on west Burnside and…um…20th-ish, and the PSL was so bad that I DIDN'T EVEN DRINK THE WHOLE THING! Sacrilege! I felt terrible but I just couldn’t drink the damn thing it was so cloying. Anyway, it's turned me off of PSLs for awhile, which is probably a good thing.

Week Negative Six

Today is my first structured running day. I have six weeks before the start of Hal Higdon's 18-week program but I wanted to get in the groove sooner than that. I extrapolated his plan backwards to this week with the same scheduled days on and off and slightly reduced mileage. [A little digression on my running background: I first took up running as a senior in high school. I was overweight and I wanted to not be overweight. I also did Tae Bo and used my mom's old exercise bike, but neither seemed to really give me the cardio I thought I needed. So I started running (very, very slowly). I did the whole walk/run combo for a few months (holy painful shin splints Batman!) until I could go for 30 minutes straight. I reached my peak as runner the summer after freshman year of college. I was living at home and working in retail 30 hours a week, leaving me with a lot of time to run. I did 6 miles a day 6 days a week on the trails at the state park. It was awesome, I loved it, and I still love trail running more than anything. I never kept my times or thought about racing; I was running purely for fun & exercise at that point. Sadly, I did not keep running when I went back to school (for a variety of reasons, both mundane and exotic). I stayed in decent shape but not through running. I'd jog a few miles once or twice a month but that was it. End digression.] This summer I eased back into regular running as a way to get out of the gym and enjoy the great weather. I would say that since August I've been running 3-5 miles about 3 times a week, with a lot of hill work thrown in because oh hey, I live on a big hill. My goal for the next six weeks is to build up to a strong, reliable base of about 17 miles per week while starting to extend my long runs on Saturdays. I don't plan on incorporating any speed work until I actually start the program, because I want my base to be rock solid. At the end of six weeks I'd like to be chafing at the bit to increase my intensity. We'll see how it goes of course, in six weeks I may be crying uncle and taking up boxing or something. (In which case I'll field suggestions on renaming this blog. I vote for "My First Concussion.")

I've been wanting to get as many races of any distance under my belt as possible, so that I can get used to the atmosphere and the nerves before a race start (I assume it is slightly different than dragonboat racing). I plan on doing the Pier Park XC race on 11/17 and the Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving Day. I'm already committed to the Ho-Ho 5k on 12/9.

Gear update: I realized that I need to get an HRM. Everything I've read is all "heart rate this" and "heart rate that". Clearly a heart rate monitor is a key training tool and it make a lot of sense to me. But I was really torn between getting a fancy thing like the Forerunner or a simple HRM watch. My problem with the Forerunner is I don't need the GPS capability - I plan on mapping all my runs ahead of time. Plus, based on what the consumer reviewers had to say about the Forerunner's tracking capabilities I'm probably not missing anything. Really I just want an HRM/stopwatch combo, so I got a Timex Ironman watch for seventy bucks from Amazon. Once I've taken it out for a few runs I'll share my thoughts.









(Check out this completely unnecessary photo of my cat! Sweet!)

Someone has a case of the Mondays...

Actually that's not true, I feel fine (I mean, for a Monday). I got plenty of sleep last night, I was out the door on time, and I feel really vibrant and excited about this whole endeavor. I got "The Competitive Runner's Guide" out of the library and read the first few chapters on Sunday. Very informative, especially the stretching chapter. I'm definitely going to incorporate some speedwork into my training, although I'll have to plan carefully given the dearth of running tracks in this town. I told two more friends about my plan...it's getting to the point of no return!

I had a slight scare this weekend. I did a good five miles at the gym on Friday, then up Mount Tabor on Saturday morning (~3+ miles, straight up and down). I felt fine, a little bit of fatigue in the legs but I think I could've gone further if it was in the plan. Anyway, I did my cool-down and stretches and then got in the shower. I'm feeling all happy, singing to myself, and then BAM! I brought my knee down really, really, motherfucking hard against the soap holder in the shower. It hurt like hell, and when I tried to put my weight on it my whole leg was like "uh-uh, no way." I was terrified that I'd done some damage to it and iced that sucker for about an hour after I limped out of the shower. It hurt for the rest of Saturday and was sore on Sunday as well, but seems to be a lot better today, fingers crossed. It's a rest day today, but I'm going to go to the gym at lunch and take a leisurely pedal on the bike. Nothing hard, just enough to get my heart up a little. I'm sort of combining my approaches here, we'll see.

For my cross training on Sunday I lifted weights for about half an hour, then walked around downtown running errands for two hours. I got two new sports bras at Title 9, wohoo! I can't wait to try them out.

"Gear" Run down

I put gear in quotes up there because basically, I have none. I have my lovely, wonderful New Balance shoes that I've had for years and which will undoubtedly need replacing if I truly get serious in the coming months. I have some cotton ankle socks, some running shorts (meeeeow!), a pair of cold weather running pants (i.e. my new best friends, thank you PDX weather), some sports bras. I also have an i-pod that is like a fifth limb to me, I seriously cannot leave the house without it, period. (More on that later.) My point is that I don't have a heart-rate monitor, or one of those fancy water belt deals that will turn me into a human camel, or even a stopwatch. I figure I'm going to give myself until the end of November (at which point I'll be up to 8 miles at a time) before I make any gear purchases. No point in spending my hard-earned lucre on things that may, for all I know, end up on the dusty Shelf of Rebecca's Failed Big Ideas along with 3 bolo ties, a pair of wooden clogs, half a home-brewing kit, an assortment of wigs, and 18 connected paper clips. But when some merchant does manage to pry a few crumpled bills from my miserly little claw, I will happily share the news and any opinion I form concerning such gear.



Digression: Writing the title made me think of that movie "The Run Down" with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (love that his real name is Dwayne, btw). Anyone seen that? It's one of those movies that looked bad in the previews and was in fact quite bad and yet...it had its moments. And those moments made forking over two hours of your life not such a rotten deal. Let's just say that watching a drugged out Rock be assaulted by angry jungle monkeys is just as funny as it sounds. Clearly, serious cinephiles should drop everything and flock to Movie Madness. Do it now! They close at 10!!



Okay, just remembered I was going to write about my i-pod. So when I used to trail run in college I didn't listen to music because the trails were rough so you needed to pay really close attention to your footing and music was too distracting. But since I've been running on ASS-phalt I've listen to my Fifth Limb non-stop because I tend to get bored out of my mind. However, as Hal (Higdon) told me wisely, if you are going to be outside running for hours, potentially in the dark and/or poor weather conditions, it's important not to space out and put yourself in danger (from drivers/scary dogs/creepy people). So I'm going to try to wean myself off of it (it's not that I don't love you baby...no don't look at me like that...). We'll see.

Plans foiled already; new resolve sought

Okay, so I completely forgot about dinner with my parents tonight. I had all these plans to take a long run after work and now I have to try and squeeze in a quickie during lunch. I don't really WANT to run at lunch because a) I feel hurried and b) (vanity alert) my hair will get all unfortunate. But, if I run at a decent pace at lunch time I can do three miles easily, and then tomorrow do a nice longer run. And then? Oh, then its time to LAY ON THE COUCH and watch a movie and eat plain popcorn with nutritional yeast (because yes, yes I am going to drive to Freddies on Friday unless its not raining in which case I will stop by on my way home). (AND YES, I like nutritional yeast, thank you KATHERINE for corrupting my heretofore pure love of popcorn!!)
I'm looking at running up Tabor and doing laps around the reservoir. So, if it takes one mile to get up to the Reservoir, and one lap is .561 miles, then I could do an easy 5-miler by running up there, doing six laps, and running back. And if I run for speed, I should be able to do it in ~50 minutes. And eventually maybe 45. I don't think I have hugely unrealistic goals. Lofty maybe, ambitious, but not out of this world. I just have to stick to the plan.
Digression alert: You know here's the thing: really, its not that bad. If I can get my pace up, the runs during the week are fine, the max is 8 miles, which should take less than an hour and a half. And on the weekends, yes, you're talking hours, but whatever. It's not like you have anything better to be doing, really. Look, I know I want to do this. I want to be physically able to run 26.2 miles (in a row, dammit!), I want to have that sense of accomplishment and yes, maybe I do want the T-shirt and the medal too. And I feel like less-fit people than myself have done it. So basically, I just need to make a plan and stick to it, no excuses and no wimping out. If you know that you won't be able to run after work, you WILL get up and run before.

The moment of truth

I think I might have finally made up my mind to do it. Forget talking about it and thinking about it. I'm going to throw my hat in the ring. I found a marathon up in Washington in April that just looks gorgeous. It's the Yakima River Canyon Marathon, and basically the course just follows along the river at the bottom of an amazing high desert canyon. It's smallish, about 500 runners, with a good mix of fast and slow runners. As an added bonus there aren't a lot of spectators, which I think will be fine with me. That marathon is on April 5. I copied Hal Higdon's training schedule into an Excel spreadsheet and compared it to my upcoming schedule. I'd have to start following his calendar the week of December 3, meaning I have a good six weeks to work on getting my mileage up over twenty and my long run to 8+ miles. Totally doable. I might have a slight hiccup in the middle, since I'm flying back to NY end of December, but luckily the flight out is on a rest day and the flight back is at 7:20 PM, so I shouldn't have a problem fitting in a run in the AM. I am a tad concerned RE: snow at home. It hasn't been terribly snowy the past couple of years, but it easily could snow which would, of course, drive me inside. And I don't think the Vassar indoor track is open during Christmas week. Hmmm. I guess that is something to worry about closer to the date. Maybe I could find an open gym and just get a temp membership or something.