'A' Race Time Predictions!!

If you've been following the drama the last few months you might recall that I've been having some annoying issues with my left side, from my lower back/SI joint, through my hamstring, all the way down to the plantar fasciitis (which is chronic) in my foot. It was sort of at its worst a week before OktobeRun but a week off magically healed me enough to get through the race at a pretty okay pace, though the hamstring was pretty unhappy after.

I had some forced rest (thanks, travel & weather!) after that, which probably ended up being for the best because in spite of basically no training between OktobeRun and Oakland Turkey Trot, I had a significantly faster race.

Riding the high of that race, I told myself, OK but for real now! Three & a half weeks til Santa Run! That is totally enough time to get serious about this shite & shave a few more seconds off this beezie.

And, I DID have a couple of good weeks. But then this past week/weekend I got called to NY at the last minute, & if there is anything that will eff with my training plans, it's these short coast-to-coast trips where the time zone gremlins just completely destroy whatever free time/decent sleep you thought you had happening in your life. I won't even bother doing a training log for that week, since "training" consisted of

1) Tuesday 12/4 => 3.5 warm up, 6 x 200m / 200m jog, 2 miles @ aerobic threshold, 6 x 200m / 200m jog, 3.5 cool down = 12 total

2) Thursday 12/6 => spend the whole day flying/sitting in NYC traffic & arrive in so much winter boot-induced foot pain that the 7 easy on the schedule was never going to happen even IF I'd arrived at a decent hour.

3) Friday 12/7 => Work a full day on 3 hours of sleep, come back to hotel & crash

4) Saturday 12/8 => Work another full day on maybe 4 hours of sleep, just barely rally for 2 warm up, 3 x 1 mile @ HM pace, 2 cool down = 7.2 total.

5) Sunday 12/9 => Get up at 4:30am Eastern/1:30am Pacific to catch a 7:00am plane home, land at 10am Pacific, & immediately come home & bake cookies for a party. (Again, I could barely walk this day, so there was no running; just 21 straight hours of mostly regrettable consciousness.)

It was really this last run on Saturday that was the turning point for me.

Sorry no pics this week.

I am working on doing that thing where you give it the best you've got, do the best you can do under the circumstances, say, "This is okay," and don't beat yourself up about stuff you can't control. (It goes better at some times than at others! And that is okay too.)

There are only two weeks and one race left in my fall season, so I'm a little less stressed about building up mileage than I was earlier in the fall when I was starting to have yellow injury flags all over the place with months left to go.

My feet are definitely still a bit FUBAR'd, but I think they'll make it through these next two weeks and that last 5K on the 16th.

And after that, rest.

Race Report: Redwood City OktobeRun 5K

My plan for this fall originally was to run lots of short, fast races, with nothing except RNR San Jose over 10K. Things got off to a good start with a great 10K and a super fun cross country race, but after that a combination of social obligations, work commitments, and general life stress/exhaustion took their toll and I skipped out on a couple of races I'd been excited to run. To force myself not to skip anymore I went ahead and signed up for three 5Ks (which you can see over there in the right sidebar), of which OktobeRun was the first.

Fall Speedfest, Weeks 8 & 9 of 18: Hot Mess Edition

As in, I am one. Seriously; in the last two and a half weeks I have just about completely and totally fallen apart.

You might have already read about my 'meh' race in San Jose. (tl;dr - My heart was never really in it, I woke up not really wanting to run, & managed to hold a decent half marathon pace for the first few miles before it became obvious that whether for lack of fitness, heat, or just plain lack of enthusiasm, that was all I had. I jogged the rest at an easy pace for a 1:51:30 finish.)

The worse part, though, was the aftermath on the left side of my body. I've had chronic plantar fasciitis in my left foot for years; it comes and goes in terms of the severity but for whatever reason a few hours after the race I could barely walk on it. I'd like to tell you the week got better, but...well...

Fall Speedfest, Week 5 of 18 #notracing

When I go on long runs, I get to see windmills. #goldengatepark #oceanbeach

I know my training journals as of late are boring and lame and I am sorry. It's been busy lately & it's all I can do to even pay attention to what my workouts are & note that I did them.

I was supposed to run a 5K this past Sunday & even went online to finally sign up for it last Wednesday. But then I noticed that between the internet service fee & $10 to have my bib mailed (sooooo not driving to Alameda from SF to attend an "expo" for a 5K), it would actually be cheaper to just sign up the morning of, in spite of the fact that the race price would have gone up by $5.

For better or worse, that meant that when I ended up feeling kind of sick & exhausted Saturday night, I was waaaaaay less motivated to still go run it. I laid in bed feeling like I was maybe coming down with something, going back and forth as to whether I should set my alarm for 5:30am & just go suck it up for 20-22 minutes. In the end it just didn't seem worth it (particularly the $55 for a 5K part) & instead I pulled the blankets over my head & opted for some extra sleep.

I didn't feel great in the morning but at least no longer felt like I was getting sick. So instead of a 5K race it was 14 easy miles through Golden Gate Park (as per usual). Ah well; another long run in the bank for RNR San Jose Half, which I kind of keep forgetting I'm running in a couple weeks.

On the other hand, my speed workouts have been pretty decent from a sheer speed standpoint. I am running 200m's faster and with less effort than in the past, if only by a bit. The one real downside of not racing the 5K this past weekend was that I don't have a benchmark for how things were going to compare to RTTEOS. I might run another XC race this weekend, but while those are fun, they're not really great for fitness benchmarks unless you have a mark on the same course to compare it to.

Fall Speedfest, Week 3 of 18: Crazy Race Anxiety Dreams!

Oops, running a bit behind with this week's training journal. It was a race week so pretty low mileage.

But before we get to that, gather round, for it is time for Angela's Anxiety Dream Story Hour. Friday night was just two days before Race to the End of Summer, and what better time for a crazy anxiety race dream.

Apparently, I had realized that through some kind of calendar magic, I somehow had a BQ that made me eligible to run in the 2019 race (I don't), and though I had kind of sworn off marathons for a while, I thought, "Well, you never know what could happen, I might never qualify again, I should take advantage of it! And maybe it won't be an arctic flood of Biblical proportions this time!"

In my dream this all happened like two weeks before the race, so I just kind of showed up, with no particular marathon training under my belt, figuring I can probably always *finish* a marathon, even if it's not particularly fast. Then as I was heading to the Athlete's Village, it occurred to me that sure, I could probably *finish*, but I'd probably fuck up my skin and toenails again and be in serious pain for a week, and then Don would be mad at me because I didn't tell him ("You said you were going to stop breaking yourself!"), and for a moment I considered whether this was really the best choice. But hey, I figured, why have ONE Boston Marathon medal when you can have TWO Boston Marathon medals.

Fall Speedfest, Week 2 of 18: trendy strava ennui + workouts are hard

Happy Monday!

This week was my highest mileage week since Boston training at 48.5 miles. I did ramp things up fairly gradually but still definitely felt the increase towards the end of Sunday's long run--no pain or injuries or anything like that, but definitely some general fatigue in the legs in those last few miles. Which, hey, is the whole point, so.

Happily, this week tapers off a bit for Race to the End of Summer. I know I won't be able to taper for everything I run this fall, but I want to try to use RTTEOS as a kind of fitness gauge, so I'm trying to get there as fresh as possible.

Now. Let's talk about Strava for a moment.

You know how it's kind of trendy to every few months write a paragraph-long post about how Facebook is making you unhappy and ruining the world and you are officially taking a Hiatus "for the foreseeable future" and your "real friends" will know how to contact you?

It seems like recently something similar has begun to happen with Strava (or maybe it isn't new at all & I've just begun to notice it). People will post things about how they've gotten "disillusioned" with it or "just [aren't] motivated" by segment PRs or KOHs or whatever anymore & are just gonna "disconnect" for a while by unlinking their Strava account/running without GPS/running without any watch at all.

Which, hey! You do you. But honestly, how "illusioned" were you with Strava to begin with, and why? Like, what did you expect it to do for your life besides announce your every workout to the world? Creating profound and lasting satisfaction/deep and meaningful inner happiness out of your hobby is a lot to ask of an internet app, guys.

The Great Shoe Reckoning of 2018

It's been kind of a normal-ish few weeks around here - not much travel, not too many crazy social obligations or weekend plans, which has meant plenty of time to 1) get the miles in & 2) make some progress on settling into the house.

Don was traveling for work this week, so while he was gone I took all the junk off our new built-ins & tried to make them reasonably attractive:

Fall Speedfest, Week 1 of 18: Let the Fall Season Commence!

Well, I went back to the track for the first time in four months this evening, so I suppose that means my fall season is underway!