Worried I was going to fall on my butt a few times

Last night, again, the thought of running at the gym (this time for over an hour) gave me the shakes. Plus (and this may be TMI for some folks) I was feeling…gassy. There I said it, now the whole world (in theory) knows that I had gas last night. (Sorry mom.) Anyway, I didn't want to be like Amy, so I went home and headed out in the rain. I hadn’t thought of where to run, and sort of assumed I'd just go up to the reservoir. But when I got to where I would turn to head that way I decided to keep going up the mountain. Once I got to the park I remembered why I don’t do that this time of year. Once you are off the streets and inside the park, the frequency of streetlamps goes way down, making it hard to see speed bumps, piles of slick mouldering leaves, and crazy people laying in the street talking about Nirvana (don't know if they meant the band or the state of ultimate enlightenment). And although there are still a surprisingly high number of runners, dog walkers, and bikers out and about in the winter darkness, I can't help but feel nervous in the unlit areas. So I didn't go all the way to the top, just looped around the back and to the reservoir, where I finished up with laps. It was incredibly windy on the more exposed south side – I felt like I was running up against a linebacker. I didn't really track my mileage, just did seventy minutes, so it was probably a little over 7 miles. I felt really good.

Singing in the rai- wait, the sleet... no, now its snow

I had an interesting run last night. I couldn’t face the treadmill, not yet, so I ran outside. I started at my house down at the base of Mt. Tabor (~200 ft. elevation) and ran up to the track around the reservoir (~530 ft.). At my house, it was raining. At 55th Ave, halfway up, it was sleeting (ouch). And at the reservoir it was snowing. The snow was beautiful, big old flakes, and it wasn't sticking so I could enjoy it without worrying about sliding around. I descended through the weather again on my way home. Very cool.

I'm scheduled for 17 miles on Saturday and its making me nervous. I will never flake on a long run, and compared to the last few weeks I'm feeling good. But its supposed to rain all day, and 17 is creeping awfully close to 20. I guess its just daunting. Plus I had a dream about it last night in which things kept coming up and I couldn't run until nearly sunset, plus I'd forgotten my water and gels. It was unpleasant – I need to have a talk with my subconscious about making me more nervous than I already am with these nighttime shenanigans.

Sidebar: I've been upping my carb eating the past few weeks. I'm a veggie-tarian but I was still on the light side when it came to starchy carbs. I eat a lot of fruit, cheese, veggies, yogurt, cheese. Cheese. But given how tired I was feeling after my long runs I decided some dietary tinkering was necessary. I'm hoping a 7:30 bedtime won't be necessary again this Saturday. I'm willing to make certain sacrifices for marathon training but going to bed at 7:30 on party night? Not acceptable.

I admit, I wimped out

Saturday morning dawned cold & icky (a scientific term). It was raining/icing steadily, and I made the call that it would be silly to put myself through another long run in miserable weather. Plus, parts of the sidewalk by my house were slippery enough that I nearly went toes over ass while walking on them. Thus to the gym I went, to complete twelve grueling miles on the treadmill. Shudder. Yuck. Blarg. I really hate when I have to restart the treadmill. I don't know if this is a 24 Hour Fitness thing or is universal, but all the treadmills at the gym have a max of 60 minutes per session. Even if I do a separate warm-up, that's a max of 6 miles, give or take a few tenths. Ergo, if I want to do more than 6 miles I have to let the treadmill come to a complete stop, furiously press the "restart" and "speed up" buttons, and try to get back into the groove I was so ignominiously booted out of. I realize that in the grand scheme of Life's Inconveniences this one ranks pretty low, somewhere in the vicinity of changing the oil in your car, but way below flossing or the stomach flu. Still. Oh, and another thing I've come to dislike about doing long runs at the gym is that I get funny looks from people while swallowing gels. I get that most people on the treadmill at the gym are walking or running 2 or 3 miles, and have most likely never run long enough to need a gel. I get that it might be weird to see the gal next to you trying to subtly ooze some goo out of a tube into her sweaty face while simultaneously trying not to fall off the back of the treadmill into the guy behind her. But do ya gotta stare?

To look on the bright side of the gym thing, I wasn't on one of the machines that faces the wall, and I got to watch most of Paycheck, a completely forgettable action movie from the 90s that I vaguely remember seeing at the drive-in with my two best friends in high school. We went to see it because we had a thing for Ben Affleck, who spends the entire movie looking like an insurance salesman with tanorexia and a pomade fixation.

Notes from around

Last night = fastest four miles EVER. I wasn't super-motivated or energized, oh no. It was just late and ASS COLD outside (for Portland, I mean). I literally sprinted up the first half of Mt. Tabor in an effort to stop shivering. Brrr. I know that it really isn't that cold here, in the grand scheme of winter. Where I grew up we hit ten below a few times a year, and in Moscow it got down to maybe -20, consistently (it was all Celsius, so who really knows?). But its all about what you're used to, and in Portland we're used to 45 degrees and rain, not this 27 degrees and sun thing. When I was in college I studied abroad junior year, Prague in the fall and Singapore in the spring. I left Prague on January 1, spent 36 hours at home in New York, then flew to Singapore. The temperature gradient was about...hmm…sixty degrees. My first ten days in S'pore were miserable, just awful. I was sweating buckets every time I left the sweet embrace of the AC. But then my body figured out that I was no longer in the middle of a Central European winter and hey, maybe I shouldn't sweat out every ounce of moisture I ingest. After that I found the climate quite pleasant (if somewhat boring). Anyway, my point is, it was cold last night and don't make fun of me just because I've been softened by this easy Pacific NW living. I still got out there and ran.

So, a digression: I've been striving for real honesty about my training, and how difficult it is. I have a tendency to sugarcoat things in hindsight, and I want to make sure that I don't do that here. (In case I get the crazy notion to do this again.) The past couple of weeks have been trying, to say the least. But I also don't want to give the impression that this training is nothing but a torturous exercise in masochism. That's just a small part of it. :) In that spirit, here are a couple of notes & shout-outs from my training thus far:
1. To the men who ride their bikes along the Springwater Corridor on Saturday mornings: thank you. Y'all definitely improve the scenery, especially from (ahem) the backside.
2. Thanks to Portland Parks and Rec for creating & maintaining the SC. It's great to be able to go for 40 miles (in theory!) on a smooth, safe, straight trail.
3. A baseball hat is my absolute best friend when running outside. It keeps the sun out, the rain off, and the sleet manageable.
4. Memo to the guy next to me at the gym: if you rest your entire upper body on the sideguards of the treadmill, it doesn’t count as running. Sheesh.
5. Hammer gel is yummy, especially the raspberry and apple-cinnamon flavors. I have not yet figured out how to eat Sport Beans (Beanz?). Do you eat them while running? One at a time? Where do you put the opened pack if you don't eat them all at once?

…Now I just have to steel myself for tomorrow's 12 "Wintry Mix" miles. Prepare for some whining about that one...

Here's hoping

I completed my 15 miles on Saturday. It was hard. I thought ten miles in the rain was bad, then I went fifteen in the sleet & hail. In all honesty it wasn't coming down the entire length of the run. But it stung my face and hands and made the path slippery. The last three miles I increased my pace: one) to see if I could; and two) because I just wanted to be done. I was tired, and that night I went to bed at 7:45. Last week was my first 30-mile week, and it took it out of me. I think/hope I'm still wrestling with a cold, because I could easily go to bed at 8 every night, and I refuse to let this training take over my life.

Today it was sunny and completely beautiful in Portland. An extremely rare day for us this time of year, and I jumped at the chance to run outside on my lunch break. It is runs like the one I enjoyed today that remind me of why I like running in the first place. I was going along the Springwater Corridor at a perfectly comfortable pace, my legs felt good, my breathing was perfect, the sun and wind were on my back, the river was sparkling. I felt a great amount of joy, and it was remarkable to think that this is something that I would seek out – that I would consider running to be a… relaxation activity. It's hard to explain, but I think anyone who feels the need to coerce themselves into exercising knows what I'm trying to get at. Today's run was like a break, like a mini-vacation in the middle of the workday. There is nothing that I could have done that I would have enjoyed more than running four miles in the beautiful sunshine.

That feeling has been missing these last few weeks – this great run came at the perfect time. I've been feeling worn down, and the lingering hip thing has cast a pall over running the past 6 weeks or so. Running was a chore, something to get out of the way so that I could spend the rest of my free time doing "fun" things. But today running was a fun thing. I need to capture that spirit and bottle it so that this weekend, when the rain and snow are due back, I can face my long run with a smile and not a grimace.

Hoping 15 miles on Saturday won't kill me

My seven miles last night was a mixed bag. On the positive side, my hip didn't hurt at all. Excellent. My toe hurt a few times, but mildly. Good. On the negative said, my right leg hurt last night. WTF? Assuredly not good. I'm just praying that it was getting sick of compensating for a weak left leg, and that now I'm working on the left leg the right will stop complaining. Either that or I'm taking up swimming. Seriously. I pretty much told myself that I would train as long as it was fun and I wasn't hurting myself. I had and have every intention of finishing the marathon, but not at the risk of doing long-term damage to poor little legs. They're trying hard, but I have to respect that they might have limits under 26.2 miles. I don't want to...but if it comes to that I will swallow my pride and throw in the towel. Of course that will be my absolute, dead-last resort, because I have a feeling that my legs are a lot less sensitive than my ego.

Oh left leg, why can't you be more like right leg?

I went to see a chiropractor this morning, for the first time ever. The pain I've had in my left hip has not been getting better, and I figured better nip it in the bud now before it becomes really severe. Dr. Awesome (as I'll be calling him) was great. He's a runner too, so he had some ideas right away about what could be causing it.

It's his opinion that the hip pain is actually caused by my foot and how it strikes the ground. Because of a weak arch it's twisting too much and causing the rest of the leg to sort of swirl counter-clockwise, which ends up putting a lot of torsion on the hip. And that leads to "ow." I have a bunch of exercises to do, every 3-4 hours (not quite sure how I'm going to do them at work…), to strengthen the foot, ankle, and thigh. Fingers crossed, they'll strengthen the weak muscles, thus taking stress off the hip.

My four miles yesterday (on the treadmill) weren't pretty. I felt like I was unconsciously favoring my right leg over my left (which I know is bad), then trying to consciously stop. It was excessively awkward. Plus I'm still feeling a bit worn, so I wasn't able to go as fast as I've gone recently. On the positive side, I decided to turn it into a kind of half-assed hill workout and cranked the incline to 5 for a few minutes at a time. That made the time pass relatively quickly, and by the end I was pretty much pain-free. We'll see how things go tonight - I'm hopeful.

Pardon my French…

...but there is no way to express how truly awful my run was on Saturday except through cursing: it was a fucking nightmare. Seriously, from start to finish it was a total CF. I came thisclose to scrapping the whole thing after two miles, but managed to convince myself to use it as a pre-marathon test to see just how much pain and misery I can endure. Which is a lot, apparently. What was so horrible about it? 1) I think I had a fever; 2) My throat hurt and my body ached even before I laced up; 3) it rained on me again; 4) I had a kink in my right calf that never really went away; 5) I brought a Strawberry-Banana Power Gel with me and it was so vile I nearly gagged; and 6) MY IDIOT TOE HURT. I don’t know why my stupid left big toe hurt but OH DEAR GOD I never knew a toe could cause so much pain. That was the killer. Every other step I contemplated stopping. I did stop once to take my shoe off and make sure the damn thing wasn't broken. Jeez, I'm still all jittery and strung-out about it. After I hit the 10-mile mark I practically had to crawl the half-mile back to my car. On Sunday I was so feverish & tired that I passed the majority of the day on the couch watching football (okay, in all honesty I probably would have done that anyway)(go Giants!). Ugh. I feel better today (doped up on Dayquil).

I'm truly concerned about the toe thing – even though it isn't broken (I don't think) it still hurts, though not as badly. I'm going to take it easy again today, and hopefully my run tomorrow won't be another exercise in masochism. Shudder.

Stop the presses!

miles: 3.1 indoors
total program miles: 213.2
pain level: mild, with stiffness and light cursing

I had a good three mile run yesterday! I can't believe it. I ran on the treadmill during my lunch hour, and I kept waiting for that familiar discomfort to rear its ugly head after the first mile - and it never did! I felt rather elated.

Today, on the other hand, I feel like crap. I'm fighting an icky cold that's going around the office and I basically feel like a lump, plus I'm really sore (still) from my Monday exercises. There is an explanation for that, and like most explanations in my life it has its origins in unabashed laziness. On Sunday my plan was to go the gym and lift weights. Yeah, didn't happen. I spent most of the day sitting on the couch eating waffles. So instead I lifted weights Monday, and tried a new approach. I had a nebulous idea that free weights were better for you than machines; I'm not sure where it came from, maybe I just absorbed it via osmosis from breathing in gym air.

Anywho, I read an article in Health over the weekend about machines that aren't really good for you because you can easily use them incorrectly & hurt yourself, or they induce movement that is unnatural. Most of the machines I use were in there, natch. I've never hurt myself lifting weights but I thought I'd give a new approach a try, shake things up a little. (I know! I'm a crazy person, somebody stop me.) Also, in the interest of full disclosure there is another reason why I resist free weights: I don't like the free weight area. It intimidates me, with its wall of mirrors and 10-to-1 guy/girl ratio. I'm just not comfortable standing there staring at myself lifting little ten-pound weights with what I'm sure is unfortunate form. And I know its paranoid but I always get this feeling like someone is watching me, which I think is rude, but in order to check I'd have to look around at all the other lifters and thus be that rude person and, well, basically the free weight area is a shame spiral waiting to happen. I tried Monday but I still felt very awkward. The end result is that I spent most of the time doing squats and forward lunges. Um, ouch. Yesterday I was walking almost bowlegged, it was comical. But to come full circle, I think that it helped me have the good run yesterday by really stretching out my hips and glutes. We'll see how the six miles goes today.

<--This is from the Ho-Ho 5k back in December. I finally got around to looking at the pictures. Note my festive, seasonally appropriate attire and deep discomfort at having my photo taken.

I now consider myself hardcore

Seriously. Saturday I ran 13 miles, ten of which were completed in the pouring rain. On Friday night the forecast was for scattered showers Saturday morning, and when I got up the sky was pretty clear. Now I shouldn’t blame the weather people for deceiving me – I've lived here long enough to know that the weather can pull a 180 in minutes. Really I have only myself to blame. I thought it would be nice to run outside, and if I got sprinkled on, well, that's good experience right?
As I drove down to the Springwater corridor in southeast Portland, it wasn't raining. As I warmed up it wasn't raining, and when I started to run it still wasn't raining. It actually looked as if it might clear up. But then I hit 3 miles, struggling as always, and it started to rain on me. Little piddles at first, then harder and harder until it was seriously pouring. It did that for the next ten miles. What surprised me was that it honestly wasn't that horrible (of course I may be blocking some things out). I think the worst part was that I'd unwisely worn cotton socks, and I was preoccupied that like, at the turnaround point I'd start to get blisters or chafing and have to decide whether to run through it or stop and walk the 6.5 miles back to the car. But it never happened, even though by the end my feet were so wet that every time they hit the ground little jets of water squirted out the front and sides. Other than that I was relatively comfortable. I was wearing breathable capris and top layers that didn't chafe, and a baseball cap that kept the rain out of my eyes (although it got so saturated that water started pooling at the edges and dripping down). I never felt any pain anywhere, although I was really tired by the end. On Sunday (thanks to another horrible ice bath) I was fine, a little stiff. One odd thing was that as soon as I stopped running (oh blessed relief), my knees hurt. Like they were actually tender. After the ice bath they felt pretty much fine, but it was strange that I felt totally fine while running and then had problems walking.
As I mentioned above, the first 3.5 miles pretty much stank. It seems to be my pattern that once I get past the warm-up miles I can settle in and cruise along pretty comfortably. It's hard though, to start off feeling really terrible, and questioning whether you can finish 13 miles when you can't even do four, blah blah blah. It's a mental struggle to keep going. But I do, and then before I know it I'm at the turnaround point. And then I'm done - 13 miles!! A half-marathon!! And I did it in about 2 hours and four minutes. Oh, and no i-Pod! Go me!

They finished with a win! Yahoo!

So I'm sure that no one is aware of this outside the greater NY/NJ metro area (unless maybe you live in Kansas City and are currently huddled under a rock to hide your shame), but the Jets actually won their last game of the season to end with a Not-Rock-Bottom 4-12 record.
But they almost blew it. It was overtime, they'd won the toss, and managed to string together a respectable series of carries. They were in relatively easy field goal range for Mike Nugent, or as I like to call him, "Nuuuuuuuge". (To get the full effect of that nickname, when you read it picture a drunken frat-boy in a toga, waving an MGD around.) KC calls a timeout. I swear at them roundly for prolonging the season by 30 seconds. Nuuuuuge kicks...he makes it...the crowd (all 23 hardy souls) goes wild...aaaaaaand the yellow flag drops. Holding, offense. 10 yard penalty. &#$*(%?!?!? #$(%(#$*'in holding???? I threw myself onto the floor to express what all the curses in the world could not manage. They line up again, now 43 yards away. The crowd holds its breath...aaaand....KC calls a timeout. From the floor, I loudly wish that I had a teleportation machine so I could right this instant kick Herman Edwards in the crotch. Another 30 seconds tick by...Nuuuuuuuge kicks...AND IT'S GOOooOooOOOoooD!
Thank goodness another season is over with.

2008: Year of the Marathon!

Happy New Year!! I had grand plans that while I was on vacation I would write long and fascinating blog posts, and then I never turned on the computer. I did keep running though, logging my first double-digit run of ten miles the Saturday before Christmas. I ran on the rural-ish asphalt roads around my parents' house in upstate New York. It was gorgeous scenery, and the run was as close to a piece of cake as ten miles can be. I got totally into the zone in the last few miles, and when I got to my stopping point I was actually disappointed. In addition to my first ten miles, I also had my first ice bath that day. YOWZA! It was way, WAAAAY worse than the run. But I felt myself getting stiff after I stretched out, so I figured it would be a good idea. And it was – on Sunday I felt completely and totally fine. No soreness at all. So I am now an ardent supporter of the ice bath, even if it does approach the height of masochism to exhaust yourself running and then climb into a bathtub filled with frigid water and ice cubes. I almost laughed at the absurdity. This weekend I'm up to 13 miles…eep. I have to say I'm intimidated. That's basically a half-marathon. I've already started psyching myself up and drinking lots of water and tea. Thirteen miles!!

So, when I started this site I got the little counter deal on the right side because it seemed like a good idea to have a reminder of when this whole deal was going down. When I first put it up the days remaining was like...170 or something in that range. Some safe, large number. Now I look and its below 100, which sort of wigs me out. But I'm still confident & feeling good about my running. Since I started training, let's say 70 days ago, I have doubled the length of my long runs from five to ten miles. Now, I have about 83 days (not counting taper) to double it again and get comfortable with running for hours.

To kick off the New Year on a positive note: I know I can do this.