Announcing: Goals, MF

It always feels a bit scary to put a goal out there when you are still in the midst of a comeback and not entire sure it's going to take, but what is the point of having a blog (er, sort of?) if you aren't going to share what you're doing and what's on your mind.

So, what is on my mind, you might ask? Nothing earth-shattering; just the Kaiser Permanente Half Marathon, one of the big local SF races that takes place every Superbowl Sunday (Sunday, February 6 this year).

KP was my second-ever half-marathon & typically features a half marathon, 10K, and 5K. I've run all three distances at least once at one time or another, but for the last few years I've most often signed up for the 10K because "I won't be ready to run a half yet," or signed up for the half and then dropped down to the 10K a few days or weeks out because "I'm not ready to run a half yet."

And by "I'm not ready to run a half yet," what I meant was "I'm not ready to run a half in a time I find acceptable," where "acceptable" was probably somewhere in the 1:37-1:43 range. I've never had much interest in running races at an easy pace just to finish, except in situations where I thought it would be helpful to do a supported long run or long tempo workout. Plus, if you looked at a heat map of my long runs, you'd see probably 90% overlap with the KP half marathon course, and paying money to run a casual long run on the same route I'd probably run anyway just felt kind of....not worth it.

The last fast half marathon, 1:41:07 - October 2017. A wonderful day that I did not appreciate nearly enough at the time.

LOOK I'M TRYING OK?

OK, so. Attempting to revive the blog is definitely reminding me of some of the reasons why I gave up a couple years ago! I've probably started five or six posts since the last one, but I have so little time for it that by the time I next sit down to write, my most recent draft feels woefully outdated. Then there is the fact that we went on A FOR-REAL, ACTUAL VACATION for these last three weeks, so obviously there wasn't much happening in the way of running or blogging. We actually booked this vacation two years ago, before it was rescheduled twice. Things were not looking good in Portugal in the spring, but then by late summer the Portuguese government managed to work some kind of miracle, and by the time we left for our trip the country was ~90% vaccinated.

[Related: AMA regarding international travel in These Unprecedented Times^TM.]

Sunset in Sintra, Portugal

Dare I Write A Blog Post?

No matter how many new and shiny podcasts come out, one of my favorite will always and forever remain "This American Life," hosted by Ira Glass.

In one episode, Ira glass said something that I feel in my soul:

"Today’s radio show is about asking a grown-up for advice. I am fully grown up. And I’m older than I sound on the radio....[O]ld enough that, last week, when I read something by somebody in their 30s who said, well, of course nobody ever fully feels like a grown-up, I wanted to say, no, I actually feel like a grown-up. I feel like a grown-up. I feel my responsibilities. I feel the weight of them. I know when I have lived up to my own ideals for how I want to be in the world and treat others around me, and when I haven’t, I feel it. I feel tired in this way that I definitely did not when I was younger."

I heard Ira Glass say this and I very nearly started sobbing into my hands. Because, young people, yes, you do reach a point where you really, truly feel like a grown up, where you do not feel like you're faking it. Not all adults are just grown-up kids making it up as they go. And when you reach that age, it. Is. EXHAUSTING.

Race Report: Race to the End of Summer 10K

In my opinion 10Ks are too short and fast for wearing headphones, but warming up for a hard effort 10K is a great time for getting yourself into the zone, so I spent Saturday evening putting together a little pump up playlist to get me amped & ready to throw down on Coyote Creek Trail the next morning.

Somewhere during this process I fell head-over-heels giddy in love with this track, which in short order became Angela's Official Theme Song for Race to the End of Summer 10K 2016:

Seriously. So great.

21 Days

I pretty much always find myself rolling my eyes at blog posts that start off with an apology for not updating recently (I mean, it's not like you owe anyone anything, and highly unlikely anyone has been losing sleep over your absence), so instead I will just say HEY, I am still here and alive and NO, I have not been kidnapped or given up running altogether.

But, it has been kind of a crappy three weeks.

Remember how my most recent post was titled, "I maybe jinxing myself, buuuuut..." and then went on to given an account of my first "real" training week for CIM, post-stress reaction?

Well, it turns out I am super good at jinxing myself.

At the time, I'd been faithfully sticking to the recovery protocol my PT gave me when I had a stress fracture back in January 2014: starting with cycling, then moving to elliptical once that caused absolutely zero pain, and then once I'd been completely pain-free walking around for a week, adding in 30 minutes of walk/run intervals every other day. The progression starts out 3 x (1:00 run/9:00 walk), and then every other day you add one minute of running and subtract one minute of walking for each interval, until eventually you're running the full 30 minutes. (If at any point you have pain during or after, you have to take three days off & go back a step.) I also dutifully kept at my foot arch strengthening exercises to hopefully avoid repeating this entire episode.

All was going well, and in due time I was up to the full 30 minutes with no pain. (Side note: Every time I've been injured for multiple weeks, then finally reached the point for I can run for some non-insignificant amount of time, I'm like, "HOW the hell did I EVER complain about long runs? How can anyone ever complain about having to run MORE??" Gretchen Rubin is 100% correct that if you want to get ridiculous levels of joy out of something mundane, take it away for a while.)

Then I think on my third 30-minute run with no walk breaks, I made it about ten minutes before I started to feel a dull, sickening ache in the injured spot for the first time in weeks. I tried taking some walk breaks and was even freaked out enough that I turned around early. By the time I got home the pain was sharp and bright and I was back to limping.

Basically, I regressed two months in twenty minutes without any warning signs. After that, there was very clearly no question of trying to run again for quite a while.

I'm pretty sure that was the most depressed and hopeless about running I have ever felt. It wasn't just "Oh, look, here I am injured again." It was that, yes, but also "I just had the most brilliant training cycle of my life, got injured, got a miraculous chance at a Plan B that had the potential to result in even better training, except HAHAHAHA JUST KIDDING! You get nothing. Except probably another stress fracture. Oh, and paying for ANOTHER marathon that there's now a 99% chance you won't even be able to run, not even just to finish."

It wasn't just the injury. It was that I did everything right (I think). I followed the rules. I was patient. I switched to a new gym so I could do elliptical work on days I work from home and also elliptical "long runs" on the weekends (GAAAAH DIE IN A FIRE). It was the fact that I haven't been able to truly race something hard for over 2.5 years now because I've constantly been fighting or recovering from some kind of major injury. At a certain point you just get really tired of always being "on the comeback trail" and mustering all your optimism, again, so you can once more choke out the words, "Oh, well, maybe next year."

I don't want to get melodramatic about how bleak the situation was, but MAN, those were some dark days. It made me feel sick to see, hear, or read anything even remotely related to running; needless to say, the thought of writing about it was utterly demoralizing. (Actually, at that point, I wasn't really capable of translating emotions into coherent words, so probably wouldn't have gotten much farther than BAAAAH, EVERYTHING SUCKS, followed by maybe a depressing .gif or two.) So basically, I stuck my head in the sand & ignored the world of running almost completely, except to drag myself to the gym & back for elliptical sessions and strength work in a desperate attempt to maybe not 100% completely lose all the fitness I built up this summer.

And to be honest, it wasn't terrible timing. I've had some big things I've been working on at work and there've been some long days when getting to the gym wasn't even possible. I've had a lot of travel lately. We are planning over 1000 square feet of renovations for our house in the new year, which has been like a part-time job. There have been football games, and Don & I have started rock climbing again.

Mission Cliffs! I climbed a 5.9 on my second day, which I think is actually not at all impressive, but I was still pretty stoked to get to the ceiling without having a panic attack.

So maybe going all-out for CIM was never in the cards. Still, I haven't been able to shake the little voice in the back of my mind whispering that maybe I'll never be healthy enough for long enough to actually run a really good, hard race ever again.

But....Well, it's been 21 days today, I think, which is the longest I've ever gone without posting except for being on vacation for 3 weeks, and things are getting better, and I kinda-sorta have my act together emotionally now, so, what the heck. I figured I might as well stop being a grump and post *something*.

THE STATE OF THE LEG

Something I learned when I had my stress fracture last year was that a lot of doctors are moving away from the designations "stress reaction" and "stress fracture" because it gives the impression that those are two distinctly different injuries which are distinctly different again from the asymptomatic bones of someone who is training just as heavily. Instead, I learned, all these situations exist on a continuum which has less to do with what shows up on a bone scan or MRI & more to do with how functional/painful it is. It turns out that if you take a bunch of pain-free runners who are just starting to increase their training substantially and give them all bone scans, odds are a handful of those scans would look the same as someone a doctor would normally put in a boot for a month, just because of how the training response in bones works. You treat the patient, not the scan. So if someone comes in with symptoms of what we used to call a stress reaction or stress fracture, doctors are now more likely to just call it a "bone stress injury," full-stop, and treat it according to how severe the symptoms seem without attaching an additional label to it.

Which is all to say, I don't know if I had what they'd call a "stress reaction" or a "stress fracture" or if it started as a reaction and became a fracture, but honestly, it doesn't really matter because the treatment is all the same: stop running till it stops hurting. I did try to get a doctor appointment, just to, y'know, cover my bases, but when it was a month wait at both reputable sports medicine clinics, I figured I might as well just pretend I'd gone to the doctor and gotten diagnosed with a BSI and been told all the things I already knew they would tell me and start following the recovery plan they gave me the last time when I really did go to the doctor and get a bone scan and a $25 co-pay.

Same leg, different spot. Last time it was high and outside on the fibula; this time low & inside on the tibia.

Well, clearly, that did not work out for me. So this time, I've decided to wait until, in addition to having not the tiniest inkling of pain with walking/elliptical/karate/climbing/lifting/etc., it feels 100% completely indistinguishable from the other leg in every way. With my first stress fracture, the doctor & PT told me I was good to start the walk/run progression as long as I had no pain with walking or any other impact activity, but they were not concerned that the injured spot was still a little tender as long as it didn't get worse. When I started the walk/run plan this time, the injured spot was still a bit swollen and felt like a big bruise, even though it didn't hurt to walk. I don't know if that had anything to do with the reason I kind of relapsed, but if nothing else, I figure it's just kind of a higher standard of recovery with more time off my leg, which cannot be a bad thing.

At this point, I think it's really close--the bone feels flat again, and if I press reeeallllly hard, there is just the tiniest detectable hint of tenderness, which is really not all that different from the same spot in my other leg. I'm back doing everything normally in karate again with no pain whatsoever, even twisting/torquing movements, which were one of the things that hung me up for the longest before. So, I'm hoping that in just a few more days that leg will feel indistinguishable from the other.

(Also, I finally just caved & made a dr. appointment even though it was a month wait. Hopefully my bone injury will be totally healed by then, but it's with the foot/ankle doctor, so I'm hoping she'll be able to give me some further advice about what I can do with my weak arch to avoid something like this happening again.)

All that said, I think it's still 99% or better that I won't be running CIM, even just to finish. Even if I can start run/walking by next week, that's like six weeks to go from 30 minutes of impact to probably around four hours, which just doesn't seem all that realistic.

THE FUTURE

But all is not lost!

Because I'm still an indomitable optimist at heart, there is a part of my brain that is already buzzing with spring running plans. There are some bright & shiny races on my radar for 2016 that I think are far enough out to be doable (more about that in another post), and I'm trying to use them as incentives to stay patient and follow to the letter any advice or instructions I get from doctors and/or coaches about how to ramp the mileage back up in a way that doesn't just get me injured again. Because I've been keeping up with the elliptical work, I have a feeling I'm going to spend a good chunk of time in that annoying place where the cardio system is in pretty good shape, actually, but the bones and connective tissue that take all the impact have gotten a bit fragile, which will probably mean a very gradual cross-fade from elliptical hours to running hours through the rest of the year.

And that's fine. If I can be up to 8-10 miles by January, I think I'll be in a good place to start working towards some races in the spring.

Fingers crossed.

Three Things Whatever Day It Is

THING #1: According to random.org, the winner of The Fro Yo Run entry is ROSE RUNNER!! Check your email, lady; there's a code coming your way.

ALSO, Jen at RunningTangents also has an entry to give away, and I think hers is open until Wednesday night, so if anyone wants another shot, get over to her blog today or tomorrow!

If you're so inclined, you can still get a four-pack for $150, and there's a $5 coupon available here.

THING #2: Injury Update:

Since I stopped running three weeks ago, I've been trying to keep up my fitness by doing workouts on the elliptical. The down side is that I can only do that on week days since my gym is by my office 30 miles away, so my "runs" have pretty much been capped at about an hour. (Also, elliptical is never super comfortable for me so I doubt I'd do much more than that anyway.) Since I can't really do tons of volume right now, I've been trying to balance things out with mostly interval "speed work" instead, which has the added benefit of making the time go by faster.

My leg has felt pretty good in the last week, so this past Monday I decided to take a shot at the first step in my sensible-return-to-running plan (more or less the same program my PT had me follow with my stress fracture last year): 1:00 jog followed by 2:00 walking. The goal is to do 30 minutes (so 10 intervals), but I was definitely not above stopping if it started to hurt at all. Thankfully, though, there was no pain and I completed the entire thing. Winning! (Or, y'know, breaking even, which I will totally take.)

The idea is to do a 30:00 walk-run session every other day (as long as there is no pain), gradually increasing the time spent running & decreasing the walking. So tomorrow it's another 10 intervals, this time 90 seconds on/90 seconds off.

Even though there is no pain, I can still tell that my body is super hesitant about bearing weight on my left arch through each stride & tries all sorts of tricks to avoid it. And it's kind of funny & amazing, how every time that starts to happen, I can feel some old injury start to complain. The more I think about it and pay attention to my body, the more I honestly feel like I can trace nearly every running injury I've ever had back to this one issue, which is both awesome (there might actually be *one* root cause!) and terrifying (if I can't fix it, I'm basically screwed).

THING 3: YOU GUYS I AM TRAVELING FOR FUN!!

I haven't traveled anywhere for fun since January, so next week we're taking off for Portland/Willamette Valley. Current plans include tooling around the city drinking beer & eating ridiculous food for a couple of days, then drinking All The Wine in the northern valley/eating more ridiculous food, then hiking the Columbia Gorge for a few days/drinking more beer. I mean yes, I'm supposed to be celebrating a marathon PR, but far be it from me to complain. The way I see it, this just means I get another cool trip come January.

Portland

Willamette Valley

Columbia Gorge

And yes, if my pictures don't look *exactly* like this, I am going to be disappointed.

Legit Speed Work & No Pain!

This week I finally started doing some legit speed work, which I had been putting off because my right leg had been getting complainy again post-skiing wipe out. But after reading this article and then really focusing on my left foot and throwing down 14 pain-free miles Sunday when I could previously barely get through 8, I was feeling optimistic enough to at least try some faster running and see what happened.

I think I would probably call Tuesday's workout more of a threshold-type run than speed work. The assignment was a 2 mile warm-up, a four-mile progression run moving from 8:30 pace down to sub-7:00, & a 2 mile cool down. It was a windy day, but I figured at least I had in my favor the fact that it was a headwind going out and a tailwind coming back.

The first mile felt depressingly hard, but it gradually got easier & I was able to find the higher gears. I think I must have gotten at least a little boost from the tail wind towards the end, because I remember in the last mile thinking, "Yeah, this is hard, but I could actually do it for a while," & then being startled to see that I was already running ~6:50 pace.

It probably also helped that I was hyper-focused on what my left foot was doing. During my Sunday long run, I worked really, really hard at trying to bear my weight on the inside of that foot, over my arch, rather than more on the outside of my foot (my usual bad habit), and although it was work and made my foot kind of sore, it seemed to 100% solve the problem of constant pain in my right leg. But I think focusing on that maybe distracted me from the fact that O HAI, FAST RUNNING! You got super hard in the last nine months.

My leg seemed totally fine after that run, which was I think the confidence boost I needed to go into Thursday's fartlek workout (read: *actual* speed work) without being terrified I was about to break myself again.

The assignment was 12-15 x 1:00 fast/1:00 easy. McMillan is not super picky about how fast is "fast," and personally, I didn't want to get too caught up in trying to hit specific paces. For me, this workout was more about getting my head back into running hard and reminding myself that, yes, it kind of sucks but you'll probably survive it. So I just tried to run the fast minutes at a hard-but-not-red-lining level of effort and kept the jog recoveries as slow as I needed.

The first few going uphill & into the wind were in the 7:30-7:40 pace range, but as I got over the hill & the wind died down I eventually got down into the 6:15 range. (For comparison, RunningAhead tells me that when I've been in good shape in the past, I've done similar-ish workouts on the track in the 5:30-5:50 range, so that gives me something to shoot for. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I've never done more than 8-10 at a time, so that's new.)

True, I didn't do this workout 100% accurately in that I had to stop for traffic lights sometimes (though I tried to time it so that I wasn't stopping in the middle of fast minutes), and I definitely took a two or three minute walk break about halfway through the set. (I really felt like this was fine for my first *actual* speed workout since last July.) But my biggest fear all along was that I would have too much trouble trying to control my left foot at high speed, or that I would get too fatigued & start having pain in my right leg again later in the workout, and that never happened.

In the last couple of years, I've learned that there are sort of different tiers, time-wise, where the pain can show up. For example, I might not have pain during a run, but afterwards, once I've relaxed, suddenly something hurts. Or maybe nothing hurts that day but then the next morning I'm limping. Or suddenly it hurts when I try to put on pants. Or it hurts two days later. So I've been waiting all week for it to pop up again, but so far, so good. In fact, the lingering pain that's been there for weeks is actually getting better--I actually put on pants Friday morning completely pain-free in that leg, which hasn't happened in almost two months.

As I've been getting ready to start training for SRM in earnest, my ability to do faster, harder workouts on the regs without screwing up my leg has kind of been the last hurdle, both mentally and physically. I am definitely still taking it one day at a time & ready to back off at the first sign of (more) trouble, but I would be lying if I said getting through these two workouts comfortably wasn't a pretty huge deal to me. :)

SRM WEEK 7 OF 20: Another piece in the puzzle of my busted right leg.

Can I just say, this man is kind of my hero.

If you've been reading for a while now, you've probably heard me rant/complain at some point about the chronic problems I have with my upper right leg. It started a little over two years ago, when I was about 6 weeks out from Mountains 2 Beach Marathon, as adductor pain & tightness, which then moved around to my quad, and then during the race itself I actually ended up tearing a muscle in my quad & being on crutches for a month. SUPER FUN.

It's never quite been that bad since, but I also haven't really been able to train solidly for anything since then. It'll be totally fine for a while, then pop up out of nowhere & require anywhere from a few days to a week off, and it seems to be particularly aggravated by fast running (whether speed work or trying to race). And the really strange thing to me has always been how it's not particularly localized: it might be my hip flexor one day, my hamstring the next, or my adductor, or my quads.

Regular massages help a lot with the symptoms, but it's always been incredibly frustrating to me that after 11 months in PT, all kinds of medical imaging, and hundreds of dollars' worth of gait analysis, no one has ever been able to tell me what the actual problem is or how to get rid of it permanently. Recently, though, I feel like I *may* have stumbled onto a potential clue. I'm wary of getting too excited about it, because I've felt like I was on the verge of an answer too many times before, but this time a lot of the pieces certainly do seem to fit.

So! Let's talk internet reading (which I see you are into).

I know I can't be the only person who constantly clicks on interesting links as I peruse social media & think to myself, "I'll just keep that open in a tab to read when I magically find myself with oodles of extra time get around to it." And then one day I open my computer to find forty tabs open staring forlornly at me, with even odds as to whether I just give a little shriek of terror & immediately close them all.

For the last couple of weeks, I've had a tab open to an article from IRunFar.com called Elite Feet: Strong Strides Start At The Foot, by ultra-runner/coach/PT Joe Uhan. The reason I clicked on it initially is because it was posted by A.T., the woman I've been doing strength training with once a month or so, with a note about how in her circle of runner-oriented PTs/trainers/coaches/etc., foot mechanics had been a hot topic lately. Basically it sounds like the tendency is to ignore feet unless there's actually an acute problem like plantar fasciitis/collapsed arches/etc., when in fact foot mechanics can have all kinds of effects (including injuries) up & down the body.

Last weekend I was getting fed up with the number of tabs open in my browser & finally decided to slog through this & a bunch of others so I could finally close them. The main topic was foot strength & stability, particularly in the crucial arch/inner toes/ball of foot area.

"While our feet are designed for many motions and actions, with locomotion–-walking and running-–the most powerful and important power-generating structure is the medial arch. As such, I call it, ‘The Power Ray.’ Through this structure is where we should do all our weightbearing, footstrike, and push-off in both walking and running. [The rest of the foot] is designed more for balance and for cushioning at initial contact. Normal gait involves initially contacting on the outside, then quickly transitioning to The Power Ray engagement."

I found the foot stuff interesting enough, because not rolling through onto my arch is a problem I had pretty severely on both sides for a long time. (Probably because prior to that I had some really bad medial shin splints & dramatically "under-pronating" was the only way I could get any relief.)

The next part got into how engaging "The Power Ray" correctly is what lets us load up our most powerful running muscles effectively:

"When the foot is loaded through The Power Ray...this action creates an automatic, full-blast activation of the gluteal muscles: both the gluteus medius–-the main leg and pelvic stabilizer–-as well as the gluteus maximus, the most powerful muscle in our body. Proper foot and leg alignment allows ground-reaction force to flow up the leg through the activated hip muscles, creating a powerful, effortless, and automatic push-off."

Sounds kind of important, right?

Then he got into the consequences of not loading up The Power Ray correctly. Of course, most of us are familiar with the whole arch/leg/knee collapsing inward situation (usually referred to by the catch-all term "over-pronation") that tends to cause all kinds of yucky hip/knee/IT band overuse issues.

What caught my attention, though, was his discussion of the opposite problem:

"The converse condition is where the runner lands only on the outside of the foot. They ram down on the lateral aspect of the foot, avoiding The Power Ray entirely, either by conscious ‘fear of pronation’ or unconscious instability avoidance. In this strategy, runners over-use the lateral foot, as if the brain doesn’t trust the medial arch (or, if for some reason the arch is sore, weak, or unstable). While they might be avoiding collapse stress, the consequence is the same: the foot and lower leg are improperly aligned, and the hip muscles fail to activate."

While it's nowhere NEAR as bad now as it's been in the past, that was still sounding uncomfortably familiar.

And then, discussion of the most common compensatory injuries:

"If the leg is not pushing off as powerfully as the other side, the opposite leg has to over-reach in order to make up the deficit. This is the primary cause of landing-stress injuries, such plantar foot pain, shin pain, IT-band pain, and many others...If the hip muscles are not fully activated, the other leg muscles have to take up the slack. If that lightning bolt cannot travel up to the hips, then the lower leg muscles–-the quads, hamstrings, and calves-–do the bulk of the propulsion."

This is where my brain really started to sit up & take notice.

"Very often, runners and sports-medicine professionals alike tend to hyper-focus on the symptomatic landing leg. They will focus their treatment on stretching, massaging, or strengthening the [problematic] leg and hip in order to prevent the collapse."

Check, check, and check. During my many many months of PT, my right knee was constantly collapsing inward, yet I was passing all the hip & core strength tests with flying colors, and no one could figure out how that made any sense.

"But whose fault is it, really? It’s the [opposite] foot, for pushing the trunk too far [in the other direction]! The linchpin to the issue is the [asymptomatic] leg strength and stability. Conversely, any efforts to shore up the [symptomatic] leg usually result in only temporary relief."

Which reminded me of what A.T. had said the first time she watched video of me running and then watched me do squats--that I clearly had some kind of strength imbalance/asymmetry, but if the problem was my right leg (the one where I tore the muscle & that has continued to grumble at me on & off in the ensuing two years), then all my symptoms were backwards. (When I run & do squats, it's my left hip that drops; if the right leg is weaker, then the right hip should drop.) Her theory has always been that for some reason it's my left glute/hip/whatever that's weaker, and the problems in my right leg came from overcompensating.

The one problem with that theory was that in all the strength testing I've had off my feet in the last couple of years, neither side has ever seemed particularly weaker than the other.

So, what if the problem is on the left side, but instead of glute weakness, it's actually glutes not activating properly because of what my left foot is doing?

Uhan then went on to describe an informal experiment that he tried in his practice, involving 10 patients with ongoing leg pain in one side, who had also had a previous foot and ankle injury on the other side:

"I video-recorded the side view of each trial. No running cues were given, nor were they given any information as to why I was taping his or her foot. Hip-extension angles-–the range of motion measure correlated to push-off power–-were measured. For each subject, I conducted three running trials:
• A pre-test running trial. I tested each runner at a comfortable speed, wearing their preferred shoes.
• A supported-foot running trial. For each runner, I then kinesio-taped the previously injured foot, such that the medial arch was maximally supported and facilitated to engage The Power Ray. They ran at the same speed.
• A post-test running trial. The tape was removed, and they once again ran at the same speed.

The results: in nearly every subject, hip-extension range of motion improved by 10% with supportive foot taping. This effect disappeared when they were re-recorded, without foot support. Both the runners and I were shocked at the automatic improvement in hip extension push-off when the foot was placed in a supported, optimal-loading position. What I concluded was that simply getting The Power Ray to engage the ground was enough to improve hip activation and push-off."

And if the problem is that the symptomatic leg has been over-compensating for the other leg's lack of hip extension all this time (because of what the foot was doing), then that should solve the problem.

For the last 6-8 weeks or so, I've had more pain & tightness in my upper right leg than usual, and even though I wasn't truly racing in either case, it was definitely worse after both Parkway Half & Bay To Breakers (I'm sure because I still ran both of them significantly harder than my typical "easy" pace). I could rest it or take it easy for a few days & the pain would subside a little, but as soon as I went back to my normal amount of running, it always came back to some extent.

Case in point: This week.

~*~*~SRM WEEK 7 OF 20~*~*~

Grand Total: 32.5 miles

* 18.5 easy
* 14 long
* 2 x 45:00 strength

Monday: a.m. roll/stretch/strength; p.m. karate.

My epic 17-mile Bay To Breakers Sunday was great fun, but also kind of wrecked me for the rest of the day. When I got up Monday morning to head to the gym, I definitely had that tight, worn out feeling in my legs the next day that let me know that I had probably done some combination of too much/too fast/too soon. In particular, my right quad & adductor were #notamused. So instead of 45 minutes of strength I did more like 25 minutes of stretch & roll alllllll the things (especially the right leg) + 20 minutes of non-leg strength stuff.

Tuesday: 2.5 easy.

Prior to Tuesday, I had been thinking, "FINALLY! This week, I will start my four weeks of baby-steps intro-to-speed." Hahahaha no. Barely a mile into this run, I felt like I'd run ten, plus my right leg (quads this time) was waving the big fat NOPE banner. So, instead of an 8 mile progression run, I spent like an hour aggressively rolling every muscle in my right leg while watching The Daily Show.

Wednesday: Karate.

I meant to get up & do real actual strength work but instead I decided I needed to sleep some more. Before karate = another hour of aggressively rolling every muscle in my right thigh PLUS all the glute/hip muscles (which were feeling tight & unhappy).

Thursday: 8 easy.

This run actually would have been awesome, except for the near-constant aching in my right quad. Though to be fair I actually also kind of suspect that I may have rolled my quads a little too aggressively & so at that point they were just kind of bruised & beat up. Still - 7 miles including 12-15 fartleks 1:00/1:00?

Friday: 8 easy.

GOD. The right leg. I was so frustrated at this point. Basically it seemed like, ok, sure, I can run a hard workout or a semi- (not actually) hard race every once in a while and maybe my leg won't self-destruct if I then take like 3 rest days and roll the heck out of it, but that's not exactly what you call ideal training for a PR marathon. It felt better than it had Monday, but still, things were unhappy, in that way where you can tell they're maybe kind of threatening to do more than just be mildly unhappy.

Saturday: Rest. And to be honest, at that point it hurt bad enough that I was considering just skipping my long run on Sunday so that maybe my leg would fully recover & I'd be able to get a solid week in next week.

But. Then I read this article.

Now, I had no kinesio tape, and wouldn't know how to tape my foot in the way he described even if I did. But I do know that I tend to avoid bearing my weight fully on my left arch (my foot gets sore when I do), so I thought maybe I would try a few miles Sunday anyway, making a conscious effort to run on "The Power Ray" and not the outside/middle of my left foot as I normally tend to.

Sunday: 14 long

This wasn't easy, but WOW. Even in just the first few miles, I could feel a) my left foot getting sore and b) the glutes on my left side engaging almost without any extra effort on my part. At the same level of effort as usual (aside from thinking about my left foot), my pace dropped by 30-45 seconds per mile. And?

No pain in my right leg.

None. Not even a little.

Originally I had thought I wouldn't push it more than 10 miles, but everything felt so good that I decided to go to 14. I kept waiting afterward for the stiff, achey soreness I've been inevitably dealing with in my right leg after only 6-8 miles, but again, it just never happened. In spite of running close to double the distance I had earlier that week, my leg felt completely normal.

All I'm saying is, there may have been some celebrating.

Uhan again:

"Efficient push-off–both power and direction–begins at the foot. Simply put, optimal foot and lower-leg alignment is loading The Power Ray, with the foot straight ahead, rolling through a strong arch, and pushing the foot straight behind. 'Elite Feet' is the term for this action, as elite runners do this flawlessly:
• Loading the ball of the foot and big toe,
• Rolling straight through, and
• Pushing the foot straight behind.

It’s that simple. But to do so successfully and consistently requires focus, and a great deal of strength development of both the foot and the lower leg.

So, if indeed this has been my problem all along, I probably do need to actually do something about my left foot so that I don't just end up with a busted arch.

What To Do?

Uhan has three main suggestions for strengthening/stabilizing feet & arches.

1) Heel Raises. Like standard calf raises, but bending your knee a little so that the "Power Ray" is doing the work. (More details on exactly how to do this correctly in the article.) He suggests working up to 50 on each leg and 100 on both legs together. This seems like a pretty easy one to throw into my usual routine.

2) Ankling Drills. Apparently you can find lots of examples of these on YouTube. This one is new to me, but it looks like it would fit right in with the skips/bounding/etc. I do before track workouts. (Y'know, back when I did track workouts...)

3) Squats/Other Single-Leg Exercises/Drills. Basically do whatever it is normally, except pay close attention to what your feet are doing. Lunges/step-ups/step-downs/squats/monster walks/etc. will all work; just be sure that with every step or use of your leg, you're rolling through to bear your weight on the arch (while keeping the knee aligned above the 3rd toe, more or less). I do a bunch of this stuff anyway; I should just start paying close attention to my left foot to make sure I'm using my arch correctly.

So...yeah. For now, I'm cautiously optimistic. We'll see what my baby-intro-speed sessions bring.

SRM WEEK 14: Poked In the Psoas + What's Up With SRM

The Bad News:

I can sum up Week 14 for you pretty succinctly. After my awesome 20 miler on Sunday, I rested on Monday. I was a tiny bit sore, but not much, and not particularly in my right hip/leg.

I'd begun to suspect that the hip problems (which if you'll recall have plagued me on & off since early 2013) were related to cumulative fatigue & tended to appear when some muscles somewhere on that side had been working hard for an extended period of time (ie, days or weeks of high mileage and/or tougher speed/tempo workouts), so on Tuesday I thought I would maybe not tempt fate with a track workout two days after a twenty miler. Instead, I tried to run 8 easy miles, got about 3 miles out, and became convinced I was feeling weird stiffness-maybe-kinda-sorta-pain. Again, not wanting to tempt fate, I turned around to make it 6 very strange, "off"-feeling miles for the day.

On Wednesday everything felt fine with my leg, but I went home from work mid-day with stomach cramps & went straight to bed.

On Thursday I was feeling better & my leg still felt good, so I decided to attempt Tuesday's skipped track workout (2 wu, 1200m @ 10K pace, 800m @ 5K pace, 1200m @ 10K pace, w/ 1:00-2:00 recoveries, 2 cd), see how it felt, & stop if I had any pain/weirdness. It did start to feel a little stiff at a couple of points, but there was never any pain, and I was able to run all the intervals at the right effort level & faster than prescribed pace. In fact, that evening my right leg felt better than it had in a long time--no pain, discomfort, or stiffness of any kind.

AND THEN, I woke up Friday, & the pain was back. It wasn't awful--certainly not as bad as it was after SF2HM--and I could walk fine, but it was enough to make it completely clear to me that I would not be running that day. Which continued into Saturday, and then Sunday. Each day it's been slightly better, but when I jog down the hallway at home there is still a little niggle of pain on impact that tells me I wouldn't get farther than a quarter mile or so if I tried to do a run.

The Good News:

I saw the massage therapist Monday, and he has a working hypothesis about the underlying problem.

If you've been a distance runner for any length of time, you've probably heard about a muscle called the psoas.

On each side, the psoas originates at the lumbar spine, stretches down your torso through your hip, joins with the iliacus, and inserts at the lesser trochanter of the femur. You can see that it's a great big beast of a muscle, and the only muscle in your body that connects your spine to your legs.

The psoas does a whole ton of important stuff, which you can read about by googling the internet. Most relevant to this discussion, though, is its function as a hip flexor. It is the main muscle involved in lifting your leg forward toward your trunk, and in lifting your trunk towards your legs if your legs are stationary.

We have lots of other muscles that participate in hip flexion (quads, TFL, adductors), but they're a lot smaller and less powerful than the psoas and serve more of a stability function than a prime mover function.

"When you're running and the psoas stops firing," my MT told me, "your body will use anything and everything it can to keep moving your leg forward. Quads, adductors, TFL, whatever it can get. And suddenly you've got an overuse injury or three."

Of course he was careful to remind me that he isn't a doctor and isn't the person to give me an official diagnosis about all this, but if you assume that's what's happening, suddenly a lot of things fall into place: pain that's diffuse and kind of everywhere, with the worst of it moving around from incident to incident, that fits the profile of an overuse injury while the muscles themselves seem to be looser & more supple every time I see him, & still retaining excellent range of motion with no signs or symptoms of structural damage (labral tears, stress fracture, etc.).

What really won me over was when he dug his fingers deep into both sides of my hips under my ab muscles. While it wasn't exactly super comfortable on the left side, when he moved to the right side I was immediately howling in pain.

"Yep," he nodded. "That feels awful in there."

He also showed me how to lay on my back and externally rotate my leg so that the only way to raise it is by engaging the psoas. Again, it wasn't super easy on the left side, but I could get my leg a few inches off the table, which is apparently respectable enough. On the right side, though, it was like I didn't even have that muscle. For a few seconds I just laid there, trying to figure out exactly how I was even going to do this. I finally managed to engage something a little, but barely enough to get my skin out of contact with the table, my leg shaking all the while as I tried not to cheat by pushing down on the table with my opposite leg.

This is called "not being able to use your psoas." Sooooo....

• Good news: Strengthening the psoas & getting it to fire correctly is an easier fix than, say, surgery for a labral tear or taking 8-10 weeks off for a pelvic stress fracture.
• Bad news: It's not something you fix in six days.
• Good news: The whole thing seems to be fatigue-related, ie, multiple weeks of 40-50 miles culminating in an 18 miler was enough to render it useless, but seven days of rest got me another 47 miles, including a 20 miler, with no pain & no soreness.
• Bad news: This has been the most anemic taper in the history of ever, & I still have no idea what's going to happen Sunday.
• Good news: Better under-trained than over-trained, eh?? Eh??

By some magical voodoo I don't understand, I managed to get an appointment with my sports doc for Friday morning, so I'll be interested to run the psoas theory by him & see what he thinks.

Santa Rosa:

I am not so under-trained that I think I couldn't run a fair-to-middling marathon Sunday if my leg is pain-free & cooperates, particularly if I can do some of the exercises the MT showed me to get the psoas firing a little more reliably. I was in worse shape after SF2HM, and after a week of rest I did run a pretty darn decent 20 miles at a completely respectable pace, so there's some hope.

If my leg is feeling good by Saturday, then I'll likely go to Santa Rosa, pick up my stuff, check into the hotel, & see how the two easy shakeout miles feel. If all goes well and it's still feeling good Sunday, I'll likely start the race and see how things feel and what kind of pace I'm able to hold. If I'm in any way struggling to hold a BQ / PR pace (~8:10 or better) and I can tell that early-on, I have no problem quitting. I don't care about finishing this race just to finish, especially when my leg has been in such dicey shape. Likewise, if I ever have anything more than the least little bit of discomfort in my hip/adductor, I will totally walk off the course & not think twice about it. It's just not worth the rehab. (Been there, done that.)

If I'm able to hold the pace fine and still not having any pain (the metric I have for this in my head right now is hitting the half in the ~1:47 range), then I don't see any issue with bopping right along & seeing if maybe < 3:35 is in the cards. If I get to 20ish & can tell I'm going to lose the BQ/PR but still not having any pain, I *might* be willing to just finish comfortably for the heck of it, but only if I'm in a good place mentally & don't feel like there's any risk with my leg.

Honestly, even if I do run, because of the number of workouts I've missed lately due to the hip thing & being sick, a lot of things will probably depend on circumstances beyond my control--the weather, the course, & the luck of the draw in terms of how I'm feeling. I had a chat with Coach Tom about my goals (again, assuming I can even run) & admitted to him that since my long runs had been perfectly comfortable in the 8:15-8:25 range, I was hoping to be able to race around 8:00-8:10. Given everything, though, he thought 8:10-8:20 was maybe more realistic.

And hey, if that's how the cards fall, okay. I certainly won't be going out at an 8:00 pace. But since all my long runs have been on rolling hills & often into massive headwinds at least half the time, there's a little part of me that is curious to see if maybe I'll get some help from the flat course and (fingers crossed) nice weather. (Right now, the forecast calls for partly cloudy & 55F at 6am & 57F by 9am with basically no wind, which, hey, could be a lot worse.)

Also, I'm pretty thrilled about the lack of black top.

Desperate Miles, Desperate Measures

It's been a rough couple of weeks.

I've run many (er...several?) 20+ mile training runs in my life, but never when I've been traveling so much for work, dealing with a sketchy leg constantly on the cusp of injury, and sick for much of the week prior. On top of that we've been dealing with a tragic family situation, which has made everything that much harder. Between all that I have barely been holding it together most days. So maybe it is not shocking that for a lot of last week, I didn't really think the 20 miler was going to happen.

I mean I'm a serious optimist here, people, but I just couldn't see it. I double-dog couldn't see it when I woke up at noon Sunday morning with all kinds of aches in my feet and hips and glutes. But still, I kept telling myself it was going to happen, counting it in my mental weekly mileage tally, & even justified making the blueberry crisp I hadn't made the night before because "It'll be good for refueling when I get back from my 20." (Carbs! Antioxidants!)

Under any other circumstances, I don't think I would have done it. I felt like crap. Everything was sore. I was sad and distracted and afraid it would wreck what was left of my leg and honestly just could not muster the least little bit of enthusiasm about running at all. But with all the problems with my hip post-SF2HM/18 mile long run two weeks before, I was on the brink of waving the white flag in terms of Santa Rosa, and I knew I needed to at least try to run those twenty miles in order to see if there was any hope of running twenty-six of them two weeks from now.

Oh hey! Haven't had one of these pics in a while. Aren't you
reassured that I still have feet & don't wear the weird toe shoes?

I have never been big on running with music, mainly for safety reasons but also because I've seen the research about running with music being correlated with dissociative running, which is correlated with higher rates of injury & decreased performance. Even so, I do have a running playlist on my phone which serves as a kind of "in-case-of-emergency-break-glass" type of thing. If I absolutely, positively can't get myself out the door any other way, the playlist is my carrot of last resort. This was the second time in eight years I've had to use it.

The plan was simple. I'd start running, see how my hip felt, & go until I felt too ill/too in pain to continue ("Run Vaguer Run Faster (?)"). No worrying about pace. No feeling bad about stopping at traffic lights and water fountains. Just run with good form, for as long as possible, & find out what the leg can take.

Not exactly what it said in my training plan but close enough.

The only way I got through this run was by not thinking about which mile I was on or how many more were left until 20. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if I'd told myself, "We are running twenty miles today come hell or high water and that is FINAL," I would have given up after three because it just seemed so completely impossible. Instead it was more like, "Good job, you ran some miles & aren't broken yet! Maybe run a few more & see what happens?"

I'd even made a deal with myself that instead of running entire loops of the east side of Golden Gate Park which includes two or three big sucky hills, I could just run back and forth along the part without the sucky hills, but that proved too complicated for my brain to deal with. "NO GOING BACK, ONLY FORWARD," it insisted, so forward we went, big hills and all (and I don't know why but I swear they got easier on every lap, probably because eventually my soul just became too numb to notice or care.)

When I'd run 16 miles and was four miles from home, I knew I'd make it. Because I kind of had to, or face the shame of having to call Don & have him put a towel down in the passenger seat. Let's be clear that if I'd had to run by my house at mile 16 and keep going for another four miles, I am not altogether sure I would not have quit. I was keeping up more or less the same easy pace with no problem, but I can only carry six gels at a time & realistically probably needed nine, & that on top of still being kind of sick led I think to a kind of mild bonking that was more mental than physical.

I really can't describe the relief of getting to this moment without any pain in my right leg, and only very occasional & manageable pain in my feet.

(Not that it makes any difference whatsoever, but I'm pretty sure there were some Garmin hijinks in those last two miles. The first & last two are almost always my slowest because they're back in my neighborhood & inevitably involve more weaving in & out of pedestrians/cautiously approaching intersections/slowing to stop at lights/etc., but I don't remember them feeling particularly worse or harder than the few right before and honestly don't think they were THAT slow.)

On the other hand, apparently this is just a thing that happens now:

I don't even feel it anymore. Hooray for nerve damage!!

In case you're interested in what got me through that run (besides a shitte-tonne of emotional apathy), here's my playlist; analyze away.

Race Report: Spring Forward 5K

Holy shit I almost smiled in a race picture.

Soooo I may or may not have spent the night before this race eating a giant Italian dinner, drinking over half a bottle of wine, & staying up past midnight, and I also may or may not have been *incredibly* depressed when my alarm went off Saturday morning at 6:15 a.m., but I was pre-registered, and had plans to meet up with bt (who was running the 10K) after the race, so I sucked it up, got dressed, & drove to Mountain View.

The Microsoft (one of the big race sponsors) campus is right off the 101 & I'd been there before, so getting there was easy, & parking was no problem thanks to the campus's huge lot. I am a bit of a fanatic about giving myself plenty of extra time before a race, but since getting there was so easy I arrived an hour before the 8:30 gun. Everything was well-laid out & well-organized, & in less than 15 minutes I'd signed all the waivers, picked up my bib, hit the port-a-potties, & taken the requisite blog pics of the staging area.

I was excited to be able to warm up for this race (small victories) & as I jogged/strided/butt-kicked my way around the parking lot, my legs felt good & keeping good form felt easy. There was a little confusion about when exactly the 5K was going off (the 10K had started at 8:00) & I had a hard time at first figuring out which direction was the front & which was the back (a course map wasn't published & there were people facing both ways), but finally all the strollers migrated to one side, so I took that as my cue to go to the other one, lining up not right at the front with all the lanky cross country-looking dudes but just a few rows back & hoping I was more or less in the right spot. (There was no starting mat & the timing chips registered only at the finish, so this cost me a few seconds in terms of my official time, but whatever.)

One of my goals for this race was to go out at a more reasonable pace, which I kind of-sort of did. I ran the .1 from the start to the Shoreline Park entrance at what felt like a fast but comfortable pace, figuring I was probably around 7:00/mile & wasn't sure whether to feel annoyed or reassured when I looked at my watch & realized I was running ~6:33 at that point. It was nice, though, to let myself slow down pretty significantly and know that I was still running faster than I'd averaged at Get Lucky three weeks earlier.

My main goal in mile 1 was to keep the pace right around 7:00, so I was pleased when my watch ticked it off in 7:02. I am definitely out of practice running 5Ks, though, so there was still a part of my brain that was a little freaked out by working as hard as I was after only one mile. I know that I have a habit of slowing down in mile 2 because that's where it starts to feel uncomfortably hard, but there's still too much race left to start telling myself "only x left!" So in that mile, I wanted to push myself just a little, just beyond what felt safe and comfortable, knowing that I nearly always find something extra for the last mile. As expected my watch marked mile 2 ~0.1 mile before the marker, but I was happy to see the 6:58 split.

I don't want to say that I was comfortable at this point exactly, but there was a point not far into mile 3 where I did a quick body check & had to admit, "Nope, *definitely* not hurting enough for the last mile of a 5K." So I stepped it up a bit, started counting back from 400 (the best mental trick I know for getting through a tough final mile), & tried to just embrace the suck. I kind of felt like I could be running faster but, in contrast to how I felt toward the end of Get Lucky, had a really hard time forcing myself to dig for a little more, which I think means that I've got some mental work ahead of me in terms of getting back to that place where I can force myself to punch the accelerator even when I know it's really going to hurt. On the other hand, my third mile split was 6:52, so Operation: Negative Splits = accomplished.

There is something magical that happens once I can see the finish line; can I run any faster right before it comes into view? Positively, absolutely not. No way. But once I can see it it's like a switch is flipped, and suddenly I am sprinting close to a full minute per mile faster. Based on where I'd hit the various mile markers, I was expecting the course to run about .1 long, so I hit 'lap' when my watch hit 3.1 (0:37 / 6:10 pace) & crossed the mat at 3.21 as expected. I am definitely not one to rant about inaccurate course measurements at small community races, but I did want to know what my time was at that point (you know, to within the precision of my watch) for my own information.

Home stretch

Garmin (whole course): 3.21 miles / 22:13 / 6:56 pace
Garmin @ 3.1: 3.1 / 21:29 / 6:56 pace
Official: 3.1 miles / 22:15 / 7:13 pace

I'd run hard in the last couple of minutes & was obviously happy to be done, but if I'm honest, I knew that I felt way too good & recovered way too quickly for a hard 5K. Like, after maybe 2-3 minutes I felt completely normal. I'm guessing this is connected to that mental skill of digging really deep in the last quarter or so of a race & forcing yourself to the very edge of your ability, knowing it's going to be excruciatingly painful, against the objections of other parts of your brain. Feeling that good that quickly, I knew that physically I'd very probably had more to give towards the end & I'm just not in the mental shape to be able to do it yet.

Now, obviously the 21:29 I clocked on my watch is not official, and that's fine, but like I said before, knowing what that number was (more or less) gives me some interesting information:

• It's 37 seconds faster (!) than I ran at Get Lucky three weeks ago.
• It's a solidly sub-7:00 average pace, which I really truly honestly did not think I was up to.
• It's the second fastest 5K of my adult life, edging out PrideRun '12 by seven seconds.
• It's unquestionably the best performance-to-average weekly mileage I have ever thrown down *ever*. My 5K PR of 20:44 was set when I'd been running 40-50 miles / week consistently for at least a couple of months, and the 21:36 at PrideRun '12 happened just a few weeks after that (granted, it was a harder course & I wasn't feeling well, but still). I mean, I've been averaging less than 10 miles a week.

So, *obviously*, we can conclude that:

• Cross-training totally effing works. OR...
• Putting a shit tonne of effort into improving your form is absolutely worth it. OR...
• Consistent, high-quality strength work makes a big difference. OR...
• Getting your nutrition in line & paying super close attention to what you eat has a huge impact.

...Or none of the above & Saturday was a total freak accident. YOU BE THE JUDGE. Or don't.

In all seriousness, though, it does make me feel very optimistic about the summer, when we get back from Italy & I'm able to get my mileage back up to what I think of as "normal." If this is what I can do on ~10 miles / week plus cross-training (and consistent strength training, and improving my form, and eating really well), I'm excited to see what I can do on 40-50ish.

I hung out while the 10K-ers finished & not long after heard bt calling my name. (Apparently she recognized me by the back of my legs! Aren't blogs crazy??) We chatted about our races for a bit, went out to brunch (FRENCH TOAST OMG SOOOOO GOOD), then came back at 10:00 for the awards ceremony. Apparently my 22:15 gun time got me 2nd place in the 30-39 bracket, which was pretty cool.

Overall: 27/628
Women: 7/380
A/G: 2/86

So.........yeah. That's how I spent my Saturday. :)

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*LOGISTICAL STUFF~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

The Deal: A small charity race benefiting Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County, sponsored by SGI & Microsoft (among others). Stroller-friendly (asked to start at the back); dogs are not allowed in Shoreline Park.

Location: Mountain View, CA (staged in the Microsoft Silicon Valley campus parking lot)

Date: Early April (April 5, 2014 this year)

Price: $40 for both the 5K & 10K & $15 for the children's race, & $5 more on race day. Groups of 10 or more could get a $5 discount, plus there was an online coupon circulating for $5 off individual entries (which I used). With a discount I feel like this is *pretty* reasonable for a charity 5K, and really not bad for a chip-timed 10K even at full price. (Although, see reservations about the course below.)

Deadlines/sellout factor: Online registration closed on April 2 (three days before the race), but race day registration was allowed for $5 extra.

Field Size: 628 finishers listed for the 5K, & probably comparable for the 10K. So bigger than I was expecting for a small local race.

Staging:

The Microsoft parking lot is kind of perfect for staging a race; plentiful parking, open space for registration / bib pickup / snack tables / etc., & easy access to the Shoreline Park trail. The campus is super easy to find right off the freeway, but volunteers were still stationed at the three turns to direct people to the right place. Once in the parking lot it's pretty obvious where to go.

All the different tables one might need to visit (waiver, race day registration, bib pickup, T-shirt pickup) were well labeled & easy to navigate, & I did not have to wait long at any of them (I arrived ~7:30). On the other hand, bt registered that morning pretty close to the 8:00 10K start & said that there was a longer line for that.

Port-a-potty count seemed up to the job. There were lines pretty much from the time I arrived until the races started, but I don't think they were ever more than a few people long. I don't know if there was a bag check; I didn't see one, but I also didn't look since it was such a short walk from my car to the start area & it was easy to just throw everything in my trunk.

Starting area

"Why is that girl taking pictures of the port-a-potties?"
Because shut up, runners know what runners care about.

The Course:

Both courses (which are basically the same, except the 5K turns around sooner) are out-and-back, starting on the road in front of the Microsoft parking lot & then pretty quickly turning onto the paved trail that runs through Shoreline Park. There was mention on the website of dirt trails in some places; this must have been part of the 10K course past the 5K turnaround, because my race was 100% paved.

Of course you never know what you're going to get with small, community races & I always do my best to go in with no expectations, but it is worth noting that most of us marked the 5K course as 3.2 miles instead of 3.1 (the first/third mile was ~.05 long going by my watch, which would do it) & most of the 10K-ers marked that course closer to 5.9 than 6.2. (bt remarked that mile 3 in particular seemed SUPER short.)

Parking:

Like I said, in the Microsoft lot, which is plentiful & like ~1-2 minutes' walk from the staging / start area.

Swag:

A nice tech shirt, plenty of post-race food, and FREE HIGH-QUALITY RACES PICS FOR DOWNLOAD. They were even searchable!

Overall male & female winners in the open & masters categories got gift certificates to a local running store (I think?); race logo medals were awarded three deep in (mostly) 10-year A/G brackets.

Overall Assessment:

Not a bad little local race. Well-run & and fairly reasonably priced. I probably would not run it for a PR because of the aforementioned issues with the course length, plus there was one spot where the course actually crossed over itself which resulted in the outbound 5K leaders & home-bound 10K leaders having to run through/around each other. It worked out fine for me, but it wasn't exactly ideal.