Catching Up, Yet Again: Part 1

Heyyyyy friends 👋👋👋 Long time no post. Such is life; things take crazy turns and suddenly writing about one's hobbies on the internet no longer falls into the top ten most critical tasks to be spending ostensible free time on. However, I HAVE JUST RUN A MARATHON and I feel that needs to be immortalized in these digital pages one way or another, so I'm making time.

But first, we need some context. This series of catch-up posts ends in a race report, but it's a race report that won't make a ton of sense without quickly (well, relatively quickly) buzzing back through the last seven months. So, without further ado......

Where We Left Off

Last we spoke, I had just run a pretty solid track 5K in Oakland (June 19), with plans to spend four weeks getting even faster, then run another track 5K in San Francisco on July 19.  Things went okay for a couple of weeks, and then, in retrospect, I started getting a bunch of messages from my body that ** Hey we are not okay, maybe take a few days off here **, but none of them were ever, like, BRIGHT BLINKING RED and/or I was just so distracted by everything else going on in life that it never really hit me all at once the way it should have.

Behold, a rough timeline of what it can look like when your body is like "PLEASE STOP friend, nothing is catastrophic YET, but it 100% is ABOUT TO BE". For your convenience, I've added in all the red flags that I missed at the time and yet in retrospect formed a glaringly obvious pattern (as red flags in retrospect tend to do):

July 3-6 ➡️ A lovely long weekend with friends up in Sonoma. I did my track workout before we left on the 3rd and a short easy run when we got back on the 6th before heading out to a friend's birthday party, which just left me one seven-mile easy run I needed to do while we were there. It was HOT up there, hitting the triple digits every day, so on the 4th 🚩I dragged myself out of bed at 7:30am 🚩 to get it done while it was still a brisk 70F or so. 

Btw, Sonoma does not suck:

Everything was going great until, about a quarter mile from the house, I managed to trip over my own foot and swore for a moment that I'd just broken my ankle. Once I could put weight on it again I walked it out a bit, then jogged the last quarter mile just to reassure myself that I hadn't done any serious damage. It didn't feel great for the rest of the day, but it didn't swell or anything and I didn't find myself walking differently, so I didn't worry about it too much (though I did take the next day off). An easy four miles on Saturday (🚩squeezed in between getting home from Sonoma and heading out to our friend's birthday party 🚩) felt fine.

Sunday July 7 ➡️ On the schedule was 14 miles including 4 x mile @ tempo effort with 3:00 jog recoveries. 🚩I did *not* feel great Sunday morning 🚩 but I dutifully ate my pancakes & headed out. After six and a half easy warm-up miles I started the tempo intervals. The first one felt better than I'd been expecting, but the second felt significantly harder, and 🚩the third one was an all-out fight to maintain the pace 🚩. 

Now, I *am* sometimes smart enough to recognize when a hard out is just coming across as much much harder than intended, in a way that is very probably doing more harm than good. (As in: upon finishing interval three, 🚩I collapsed on the sidewalk for a bit with my head between my knees, willing my gelatinous noodle legs to reconstitute themselves into something resembling bone and muscle 🚩. THAT'S NOT WHAT TEMPO PACE IS SUPPOSED TO FEEL LIKE, FRIENDS!) 

I did finish the distance but 🚩even that was a real struggle in a way that didn't, on the surface, make a lot of sense 🚩. 🚩I felt like a zombie for the rest of the day and fell asleep at like 9pm 🚩. (Also: While my ankle felt fine while I was running, it started to really hurt again later that evening.)

Monday July 8 ➡️ Woke up feeling MUCH better (sleep for the win!) and went to my normal 10am gym session. 🚩Deadlifts were a bit of a struggle so we lightened the weight some 🚩. Then, while doing single-leg lunges (not even with all that much weight!), I managed to somehow move in *just* the wrong way -- I stepped forward with my right leg and 🚩suddenly something in the right side of my lower back went CRUNCHRIPZORP 🚩. 

I gasped and saw stars and my only thought was Eek well that wasn't right at ALL. After a brief pause and experimenting with the motion a bit, it seemed okay, so I finished the set, and the set after that, and the set after that. For the rest of the day it was basically, Hmmmm yep definitely tweaked that a bit, but it wasn't debilitating.

Tuesday July 9 ➡️ 🚩Woke up feeling super tired again 🚩. Back still felt a bit tweaky, but not in any way that was alarming or anything. That evening I went out for the easy eight on the schedule; my back felt okay but my ankle felt pretty painful, actually, and just from an effort/energy perspective, 🚩 by the end of this "easy" eight-mile jog I felt like I had logged twenty miles, and was just really fighting block-by-block to get it done 🚩. Truly, the effort was *unreal* . 

Wednesday July 10 ➡️ Friends, I woke up and could. Not. Move.

Well; I could move. But trying to get out of bed was excruciating, and walking would have been hilarious if I hadn't been in so much pain. I truly was shuffling like an elderly person with osteoporosis, wincing with every tiny mincing little step. Sitting down and standing up were multi-minute processes that I might call an 8 out of 10 on the pain scale, with just ambient existing hovering around a 6 out of 10. I couldn't find any way to sit or lay that relieved the pain in my lower back, and it was so bad that a lot of the time I couldn't even focus on work. I virtually *never* take pain medication and I was scarfing down 3-4 ibuprofen at a time as often as the bottle allowed. I was also having shooting pains down my hips and legs on both sides but worse on the right, which I could only assume was some sort of related nerve issue.

So, yeah; none of these red flags, taken on their own, is necessarily super alarming; sometimes you're just tired and you have a tough run. Or a workout really a lot harder than it should. Or you wake up feeling worn out. The important thing that just didn't hit me at the time was the pattern of it all; taken together, all these many, many red flags should have alerted me that currently, overall, I was doing more harm than good and needed to stop squeezing things in and toughing things out and powering through and instead shut it down for a few days and reset.

As for why all this was happening? No idea. Not a clue. Like most runners and athletes and recovering Type A's, when bad things happen, I want explanations and reasons so that I can conduct a proper SWOT analysis/post-mortem and get my ducks in a row for pre-morteming the next catastrophe (that I will thus be able to avoid).

But sadly, the truth is that we don't always get to know. Sometimes you can look back and see the root cause of things but, as it sadly took me way, WAY too much of my adult life to learn, bodies and athletic performance are extremely complex systems with kajillions of interacting factors, and being able to reliably identify a root cause when something sub-optimal happens is the exception, not the norm. 

Moving on:

Thursday July 11 ➡️ It was a bit better by Thursday evening, but then I made it worse again by getting too confident and bending over the wrong way to pick something up. After that things started to very, very gradually improve, though by Sunday or Monday I started to lose hope that I'd be able to run at all (like, even jog) by the track meet on Wednesday. By Tuesday, I was much, MUCH improved and no longer in constant excruciating pain, but still couldn't even walk quickly without sending sharp pains up through the right side of my back. Sigh.

No real significance to this photo except that it was the first time (Tuesday night) that I felt okay enough to put on real clothes and leave the house. 

Wednesday July 17 ➡️ On the plus side, by Wednesday evening, I was walking a lot better, enough that I felt like I could at least show up at the track and take some photos of my teammates. 

Friday July 19 ➡️ By Friday I was really starting to feel, not 100% completely normal, but more like I'd just kind of slept wrong on the back and thought, "You know what, I think I could try just a litttttle tiny bit of jogging pretty soon."

Saturday July 20 ➡️ Finally able to start running again! 🎉🎉 Nothing fancy, just two VERY slow miles (with walk breaks) to the gym where I did 30 easy minutes of elliptical, and then another two VERY slow miles back (again with walk breaks, but fewer).

Over the next ten days I did several more short, easy runs that kept feeling just a *little* bit better and just a *little* bit faster (though I was not at all trying to push the pace or run actually fast; I think my body was relaxing a bit more little by little & I was just running smoother and less locked up as things improve).

Tuesday July 30 ➡️ I did some (very light) speed work! Just 9 x 1:00 fast / 1:00 jog on the track, but it felt much better than I was anticipating, having not done any speed work in 27 days. After that I started to cautiously ramp things back up on the track, with my back occasionally feeling a bit sore but never *remotely* close to the sharp, debilitating pain I'd had a few weeks ago.

So, yeah; was I super bummed to miss the SF Twilight 5000m **again** by racking up a last-minute injury almost a year later to the day? Yes. BUT, I still really enjoyed being out there taking photos and cheering on my teammates, and it made me so incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to run the Oakland race. You just really never do know what's going to happen next month, next week, or tomorrow, and there is really something to be said for seizing the moment and just doing the thing when you have the opportunity, because you really just never can be sure that the next one is coming (or how long it will be).

(Also that month, I was supposed to run the 1500m at Masters Outdoor Nationals in Sacramento on Sunday July 21, which also obviously did not happen.) 

OK Here Is The Upshot

Even if you're not actually hurt or feeling sharp red flag pain, **it is a very, very bad sign when you feel significantly more fatigued during runs than seems explainable for multiple days in a row**. 

In a well-designed training plan, there are certainly key workouts that are meant to feel pretty hard and blocks where you are starting to do that functional overreaching in order to peak, but that is **on purpose** and you should know when it's supposed to be happening and when it's not. Being so tired you have to cut workouts short (or seriously think about it) **regularly** is NOT a feature of ANY well-designed training plan.

Analogy:

Investing a bit of money you have & don't need immediately so you can gradually grow the nest egg over time:

Geordi says, "You son of a bitch, I'm in 👍."

This is what's happening when you do *A* hard workout or *A FEW* days/weeks of higher volume in order to peak. As long as you do all the good recovery things (eat lots of carbs & protein, hydrate, put your feet up, get plenty of sleep), you'll come out of it a bit fitter.

Investing all the money you have to the point of not being able to pay your current bills, then borrowing MORE money and going into debt at an interest rate that is higher than the rate of return on the investment:

Geordi says, "Now hold up, boss 👎."

This is more like what's happening when you're pushing through and pushing through and pushing through, yet so exhausted you have to keep cutting it short or take big unplanned breaks and every hard workout feels like a race and every long run feels like the end of a marathon, and no matter what you do it seems like you never quite recover. This is not making you fitter. It's just making it take longer until you can start getting fitter again.

I had kind of started to notice this for myself over the past few years--that the times I had an injury, particularly a big one happen kind of "out of the blue," it usually came on the heels of starting to feel just wrecked and exhausted from an energy perspective--workouts being harder than I knew they were intended to be, and feeling like I simply could not keep up with recovery. And not necessarily because I was doing too much training or even kind of a lot of training; sometimes I think it's been some perfect(ly bad) combination of plain-old-normal training, travel, and stress. 

Since then I've learning about relationship between rate of perceived exertion (or "Modified Borg CR10 RPE scale" as the kids call it) and injury. RPE is a pretty simple yet incredibly powerful idea for quantifying physical effort or strain: You simply ask someone, "How hard did that feel on a scale of 0-10?" where zero is sitting on your couch eating ice cream and 10 is an absolute all-out max effort. (Like, a race where you really go to the well and leave no crumbs would be a 10.) You wouldn't necessarily think this kind of subjectivity would make RPE such an excellent research and training tool, but it's been studied pretty extensively and repeatedly validated as a reliable way of quantifying physical effort.

I found this table from physical therapist and USATF running coach Eric Oliver particularly helpful:

From the research literature, it seems like the optimal RPE for improving your fitness or endurance or strength of just about *whatever* it is about your physical fitness you're trying to improve is the 6-8ish range. (Just to clarify, we are talking about workouts here, not easy maintenance runs, which should feel--wait for it--EASY.) Ie, people tend to make the most progress when they finish most workouts feeling like "Yep, felt that!" but are still upright and have a couple reps/pace miles left in the tank and have not utterly buried themselves. ("Most" meaning that some workouts will accomplish exactly what was intended at a slightly lower RPE, and *very* occasionally maybe you have a tough one in the 8.5-9 range.)

So, lesson learned. Have I gotten ✨perfect✨ at implementing this one? No, but as we will see, I have gotten a lot better.

Stay tuned for Catching Up Part 2 coming soon.