Catching Up, Part 2: Lessons Learned

Hello again friends. Welcome to Part 2 of our latest catch up, en route to, yes you heard right, a ✨👟marathon race report👟✨ (by which, just to be clear, I mean a race report about a marathon, not just, like, a **really long** race report).

Catching Up: Part 1 (icymi)

Where were we? Oh yes! End of July 2025; missing out on Tracksmith SF 5000; recovering from a horrific back strain. Let us move on to late summer.

In general, the plan was:

• Mid August ➡️ train for & run a one-mile time trial on the track
• Late August ➡️ Tahoe vacation with family
• September ➡️ Start training for CIM

AUGUST

In which the future was still so bright (in many ways). My back continued to feel fine; I continued to rip fast workouts on the track without worrying too much about building overall mileage. Having run a 6:28 mile on the roads in May with, like, two weeks of mile-specific training, I was very curious what I could manage on the track in spikes having spent the summer doing honest-to-gods speed work. 6:20? 6:15? Faster?? I tried getting a group together for a time trial day (mostly for my own selfish rabbiting purposes) but at that point people were mostly busy getting ready for other things so I ended up going it alone. On a weirdly humid August 17 I drove to the track, did a little warm-up and some strides, put my spikes on, and did my best to flog myself to one all-out mile, with not-terrible results: 

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.

The Art of Racing in the Rain (er, an Utter Deluge)

The year was 2012.

I'd run my first marathon a year before in what I thought was a pretty decent time for me, considering it was my first and *especially* considering that I'd been sick recently & run the whole thing with an asthma attack. 2012 had been a pretty epic year for me running-wise; in spite of not really training all that hard, I'd PR'd the 5K, 10K, and half marathon, and could not wait to take my second crack at the full. Since CIM had been so good to me the year before, I saw no reason to mess with any other race and signed up to run it again the first week of December.

Fast forward to the night before the race, with forecasters using words like "winter typhoon" and "atmospheric river" and "pineapple express". Weather people predicted multiple inches of rain between 5am & 10am (so, like, *right* during the race window) and 20-40mph headwinds. Several of us stayed the night before the race with Courtney's parents, just a short car ride from the start, and were definitely feeling more than a little trepidation about the weather.

This shot of Heather's will never not be the one I include
in any discussion of CIM 2012. Because, no. NO, SERIOUSLY.

Evolution of a Distance Runner: How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love Going Slow

I've wanted to write this post for a while now, but it's not the kind of post you can really write while you're in the middle of multiple years of being injured & not being able to train & DNF'ing and DNS'ing. Now that I've managed to cobble together something of a reasonably successful season, though, I feel like writing it finally makes at least some kind of sense.

For the first few years of my distance running "career," I didn't own a GPS watch & didn't race, so I honestly had no idea what my pace was. If I was going on a run of x miles, I had a vague idea of what to tell people regarding when I'd be back, but I really had no concept of whether I was running 7:00 miles or 12:00 miles. I even ran my first few races watchless, and although I did get my official finishing times, they didn't really mean anything to me and it never even occurred to me to go back and calculate my pace. (I was a sprinter in school and sprinters don't really talk in terms of pace, so it wasn't part of how I thought about running.)

The first time I can remember ever thinking about pace was when I started training for the Kaiser Permanente Half Marathon in fall of 2009. I would plot out my route using MapMyRun to find the distance, run with an old-school stopwatch, then do the math afterward. Even then the number didn't mean much to me. As I recall, at that point most of my easy training runs were somewhere in the 8:30-9:00 range, depending. I honestly had no idea what kind of race goal time was reasonable, but I sort of arbitrarily decided that trying to run under 100 minutes (so 1:40) sounded nice & round & calculated that I'd need to run about 7:38-7:40/mile to do it. (I ran 1:47:10, ~8:05 pace, in case you're curious. I overdressed and went out waaaay too fast & paid for it with an utterly miserable death march down the Great Highway & Back. SO MANY LESSONS!!)

lol what even is that outfit
(also, that dude behind me tho)

Kaiser '10 was an utterly miserable experience, so naturally, I immediately turned my thoughts towards another half and getting that completely arbitrary sub-1:40. Knowing really nothing more about training for distance races than what I'd learned from Hal Higdon, I concluded that duh, obviously, if you want to race fast, you darn well better start training faster. (Though to be fair to Hal, I should probably point out that he never said this. It just seemed obvious to me.)

I trained and trained and trained kinda sorta in retrospect really not that hard at all but it felt like a lot at the time, did get a good bit faster, watched my PRs drop like flies, nailed that elusive sub-1:40 no less than three times, and by summer 2014 was running my "easy" runs in the 8:00-8:15 range (basically, my goal marathon race pace). Some friends started calling me fast and comments admiring my speedy training paces occasionally dotted my Strava feed.

In a way I felt super baller but in other ways I was frustrated. I was mostly happy with my performance in shorter races, but never seemed to be able to translate those times into the marathon times on the same row in the pace chart (or even remotely close). Positive marathon splits were par for the course. Long runs made me feel like death, so I found excuses not to run so many (or didn't fight too hard to find the time), and every time I tried to sneak my average weekly mileage above the 40 mark for too long, I ended up hurt (whether shin splints or tendinitis or something a lot worse like a stress fracture or torn muscle).

In retrospect, it's hard to remember where or when I started to see or hear more about the wisdom of slowing down. Or, maybe it was always out there and I just didn't want to believe it. "That's not me, I can legitimately run those paces, not like people who try to race every workout." "Oh, those guidelines don't apply to me in the same way; I have a naturally high max heart rate." "No, really; this IS easy pace for me." It makes me cringe a little now but I remember a co-worker on my Ragnar(ish) team asking if I thought I could manage 10:00 miles and I swear to god I sniffed a little & said something about how if at any point I were running 10:00 miles it was because I had a broken leg.

{"Wow, you were a snooty bitch." Yes, but an OBLIVIOUS snooty bitch! That's better, right? No?}

So it's sort of fine and good to be snooty and hoity toity about how fast you run your training runs until you suddenly realize it's been nearly two years since you've run anything like a PR or even managed to string together a single successful training cycle. At that point you kind of have to take a hard look at what you're doing & ask if maybe, just maybe, it isn't all dumb luck and maybe all these experts and coaches and people who actually do this for a living know what they're talking about when they say things like "80% of competitive recreational runners are sabotaging their races by doing training runs too fast."

Probably one clue that this whole "go-slow-to-go-fast" deal wasn't complete bullshit was the sheer number of running/endurance sport experts out there recommending it. People talk about it different ways and the exact recommendations vary depending on who you're reading ("You should run xx% of heart rate reserve" "You should run x minutes per mile slower than your marathon race pace" "You should run easy enough that you can carry on a conversation in complete sentences") but the basic concept showed up over and over and over again. It's one thing if it's one fringe dude saying people should do something that sounds counter-intuitive, but when it's the majority of them, you should probably at least check it out and make an effort to make sense of the science.

So between fall 2014 and spring 2015, I decided I didn't have a whole lot left to lose & dove in.

I dug out my heart rate monitor and calculated my heart rate reserve. I took all the 'pace' fields off my watch, and for months and months and months did nothing but run for time, based on nothing but my heart rate and effort level. The recommendations, at first, seemed ludicrous--"There is no way I can run 10:30 miles for my easy runs, that's barely a shuffle." "OMG there is no way I can do easy runs at 142 bpm, that's like fast walking."--but then I'd think to myself, "Yeah, maybe, but what you're doing now doesn't really seem to be working, sooooo...????"

ca. 2011, ie, the bad old days of chest strap heart rate monitors

And little by little, it got easier. I discovered that yes, 10:00-10:30 pace was actually still running. And, what's more, if I wanted to keep my heart rate in the right range, I actually had to run more like 11:00 miles at first. o.O

(Then again, Phil Maffetone describes working with relatively fast runners whose aerobic base fitness was so bad that they had to actually start with walking fast in order to stay out of the anaerobic zone; at least things weren't that bad for me!)

A couple months back Cat gave me her copy of 80/20 Running by Matt Fitzgerald. I'd first learned about the book long after I was already sold on slowing down so had never sought it out, but decided I might as well give it a read. It was a lot of stuff I already knew, but also a ton more that I didn't!

Two bits I found particularly intriguing were:

1) If you ask a bunch of "recreationally serious" runners to run at their normal, comfortable training pace and then rate their level of effort on the Borg Scale (which goes from 6-20 for a dumb reason), the overwhelming majority will rate their level of effort right around 13, which the Borg Scale calls "somewhat hard."

2) If you ask just about any runner to run for a while at a comfortable pace with no access to GPS or other pace/speed information, they'll almost always end up running at about the same pace, AND if you explicitly ask them to start out slower, they'll still gravitate back toward their usual pace, whatever it is.

Ie, we are incredible creatures of habit, and we very quickly come to perceive our usual level of effort as "comfortable," even if when asked we describe that effort level as "somewhat hard."

Thinking back on my own experience, this wasn't at all surprising. Going from running 8:00-8:30 miles on my easy days to running 11:00s felt like crawling, and if I didn't pay close attention to my heart rate, I would very quickly find myself gravitating back towards those low 8:00's while my heart rate climbed through the roof.

Now, this is the part where people will often say things like "But you have to train fast to race fast!" and "Your body does what you train it to do!" and "You have to make your race pace feel normal!" and start yelling about the Specificity Principle. I know, friends. These things felt truthy to me too, once. And the reason they feel truthy is because they all do contain some element of truth. But not necessarily the way our brains intuitively want to apply them.

I won't repeat all the science here because many, many people who are actually experts in this stuff have already explained it far better than I can and I'm sure you know how to use Google. The bottom line is that there is science, quite a lot of it. When you're a relatively new runner (say in your first few years of actually putting some consistent work into it), it's easy to get faster. Most of us have so much room for improvement in so many areas that literally any amount or kind of running is going to make us faster. But once you've picked a lot of that low-hanging fruit, it's not uncommon for recreational runners to find ourselves plateauing. Then what?

Thanks to science, we do know for a fact now that running mostly slow, probably way slower than you think, makes you race faster at just about every distance. There are piles and piles and piles of evidence to prove it, both on the biology side and the real-world results side. The more reading I did, the more I believed that if you train mostly at 8:00-8:10 pace and then manage to race a marathon at 8:00-8:10 pace, you are likely cheating yourself out of a significantly faster race time.

So, I dutifully ran my 11:00(+) miles and worked hard to get my heart rate to stay down in the 140s.

And after a few weeks, a funny thing started to happen. Instead of feeling like I was crawling, running 2-3 minutes per mile slower started to feel...normal. At first you might be tempted to think that indicates I was losing fitness, but my heart rate data disagreed. Whereas my early runs in the 10:30-11:00 range often resulted in an average heart rate in the 160s, I was soon running that pace in the 150s, then the 140s. And then I started to be able to keep my heart rate in the 140s, but run just a little faster.

Something else happened, too.

Back in 2012, I wrote a post entitled "A Confession," which included gems like the following:

"Friends, I do not enjoy the act of running.

I don't. It's not fun. I do not find it enjoyable. Most of the time, it's a chore I pretty much have to force myself to do. Nine times out of ten, I would SOOOO prefer to sit on the couch and read or watch X-Files reruns or--gasp--get some extra work done.

And really, can you blame me? It's physically uncomfortable. You have to breathe hard. You sweat. Your various little aches & pains get going. It's hot sometimes. Or cold. Or it's raining. Or you have afternoon brain coma. This is why I find it funny when someone is like, "Oh, I wish I was a runner, but I just REALLY HATE running." Well no shit, Sherlock! I want to tell them. Of course you hate running. Most of us do. It kind of sucks.

Of course, I understand that some people really do enjoy the actual act of running. I think I'm friends with a lot of them! And I'm super jealous of those folks. I mean, yes, very occasionally I do enjoy it, if I'm feeling really good and the weather's nice, or if I haven't been able to run for a few days, for example. But most of the time, I can only dream of mustering the same enthusiasm for my runs as I do for a lazy afternoon Dr. Who."

Oh.

My.

God.

These days, those words kind of make me cringe in a combination of horror and pity. If a runner friend were to tell me something like now, I'd immediately be like "Then Christ, girl, give it up already & go do literally anything else! Learn to paint or some shit." I don't even recognize that person now, and that's a good thing.

Do you want to know what changed?

I stopped trying to do my "easy" runs at goal marathon pace or just-slightly-slower-than-GMP. I made myself go slow, until slow felt easy and comfortable and--GASP, you guessed it--actually pleasant.

"It may seem odd that runners do not naturally choose to train at an intensity that feels more comfortable. The reason, I believe, is that humans are naturally task oriented. When we have a job to do, we want to get it done. Of course a twenty-minute workout is a twenty-minute workout, regardless of how fast you go. But humans evolved long before clocks existed, so we think in terms of covering distance rather than in terms of filling time even when we are on the clock." -80/20 Running, p. 16

"Runners typically are not aware they are working somewhat hard when running at their habitual pace until they are asked to rate their effort. As a coach, I know that if I tell a runner to run a certain distance at an 'easy' pace, it is very likely the runner will complete the run at her habitual pace, which is likely to fall in the moderate-intensity range. And if I ask the runner afterward if she ran easy as instructed, she will say that she did. In short, most runners think they are running easy (at low intensity) when in fact they are running "somewhat hard" (at moderate intensity." -p. 17

Some other things that happened:

• I could mentally handle more miles because I didn't hate it.
• I could physically handle more because I got hurt less (except for the time I tried to do three 20+ milers in three weeks after only about five weeks of running ~30 mpw & got a stress fracture because SMART LIKE THAT).
• I went from 8:00 pace requiring a heart rate of 190+ bpm to it requiring about 180 bpm.
• My running economy went through the roof.
• I ran a marathon just for fun at 8:50 pace and it wasn't even hard (5 months of going slow).
• I ran a marathon at 8:04 pace, it was the easiest 26.2 I'd ever run, and I finished feeling like I could have run at least 2-3 minutes faster (2 years of going slow).

Running economy, CIM 2016 training (June through November)

Now, let me be very clear--I did not give up speed and tempo work, except for that initial 6 month hardcore base-building period, which I needed to do because my aerobic fitness was so underdeveloped as compared to my ability to run short and fast and hard. But since then, my training plans have pretty much followed the traditional thing where you have one speed workout and one tempo workout per week. (That would be the "20" in "80/20" philosophy.) The difference is that if I'm not doing a workout, I am taking it really, really easy.

I learned a few other interesting things from 80/20 Running as well. For example, I've known for a while that VO₂ max, while an important factor in endurance performance, has a relatively low ceiling. But I did not know that many highly competitive runners (say, top college runners or emerging elites) max out their VO₂ max with just a few years of serious training. Paula Radcliffe, for example, reached her lifetime best VO₂ max just two years into her college running career, yet she continued to run faster and faster for many years afterward by improving her running economy.

Running economy seems to be mostly connected to sheer training volume, though the exact mechanism is still not 100% understood. Mostly likely it's a number of things, including the following:

• Cardiovascular improvements. This is the part I already knew a good bit about (and I'm sure most others do too). The more miles you run, the more and larger mitochondria you grow, the more red blood cells you grow, the more your blood plasma & overall blood volume increase, the more your body learns to metabolize fat more than carbs, etc. What a lot of people don't realize, I think, is that these benefits come from bathing your cells in lots of oxygen and not much lactic acid, which means mostly zone 2 (ie, 60-70% of your max heart rate, which probably means ~2-3 minutes slower per mile than your marathon race pace).
• Neuromuscular improvements. Basically, your brain just gets better and better at figuring out the most economic way for your body to run--literally practice, practice, practice. The more you do it, the better you get. (This is also where sleep comes in. You don't reap even close to the full benefit of neuromuscular adaptations unless you're consistently sleeping 8+ hours a night. For more on this google sleep spindles.)
• Increased fatigue resistance. This part seems to have both physical and psychological components, but one of the major players seems to be a cell signalling compound called IL-6. IL-6 is generated by muscle cells and contributes to fatigue. However, the release of large amount of IL-6 also seems to trigger the body to release less IL-6 in future workouts, thereby kind of "fatigue-proofing" itself. And how do you generate IL-6? By depleting your glycogen. And what is best for that? Hours and hours and hours on your feet. And since running faster puts more stress on your body parts, and IL-6 release is affected by time and not intensity, the best way to maximize this benefit is through lots and lots and lots of super easy miles.

So, yeah. Like I said; the science is out there & you can certainly find plenty to read simply by googling. But if you're the type of person who is more interested in personal experience, I am here to tell you that no, running your non-workout days at goal race pace or close to it will not make you race faster in the long-term, and no, slowing your easy days way, way down will not cause you to lose fitness or make it harder to run fast. Living proof, right here.

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.

SRM WEEK 5 OF 20: DFL > DNF > DNS & Other Lies

We have, of course, talked before about how pithy motivational sayings are sometimes big, fat lies that might inspire you to work harder but also might inspire you to make really dumb decisions that do more harm than good.

Case in point:

I don't know about you but this one is up there with "Pain is
temporary, pride is forever" on my eye-roll-o-meter.

As with all the pithy motivational memes, I understand the point people are trying to make. We're trying to remind people that finishing is an accomplishment, and you should be proud of it even if you're DFL, because lots of people DON'T finish. And, if it turns out you don't finish for some reason, then, hey, at least you put in the effort to start and give it a try, because the vast majority of people don't.

I get that. I do. But can we also agree that there are many, many circumstances where it's just not true? Because *man* I am regretting running that half marathon last Saturday. I regret getting up at 4 a.m. on a Saturday. I regret losing the sleep. I regret spending five hours in my car & using 200 miles worth of gas.

Now, all of that would have been worth it if I'd been able to do what I'd planned (13 comfortable miles at marathon pace). But the weather didn't cooperate, and in a desperate attempt to get *something* out of it, I ended running a lot harder than I'd planned, and that's thrown a bit of a monkey wrench into my plans this week.

Having finished my 4 weeks of hill prep, I was supposed to start the 4 weeks of speed prep on Tuesday, but it turns out that I ran too hard on Saturday for that to really be an option. I've felt like poop all week and my always-questionable, injury-prone right leg has been nagging me non-stop. I got in two short, easy runs, but even that, I think, was probably too much. Also, I'm planning to run Bay to Breakers 12K & pace a friend to a sub-one-hour finish this next Sunday, and the fact that I'm still limping a little is making me kind of nervous about that.

Ohhhhh so very, very false.

So yeah; in all honesty, I wish I hadn't even gone, and barring that, I wish in mile 3 once I realized how miserable things were going to be that I had just called it a day. It's not like just finishing a half is any sort of real accomplishment for me at this point, and I certainly didn't need another medal.

You know those internet campaigns where people tweet-o-gram or insta-face or whatever pictures or descriptions of them doing "uncool" or taboo things, like not wearing make-up or telling their salary history, and there's some sort of clever hash tag? Part of me kind of wants to do this for DNF-ing / DNS-ing races. BREAK THE SILENCE!! RAISE AWARENESS!! DESTROY THE STIGMA!! #yesallquitters #talkdnf

Because, really. There are good reasons to push through discomfort in races and keep going, but there are also many very good reasons to quit, and if I had a nickel for everyone I ever met or talked to who pushed through the pain and didn't quit and ended up injured or sacrificing a bunch of recovery time for lackluster results or just plain feeling blah about the experience and like it wasn't really worth it, I'd at least be able to, like, I dunno, buy some ice cream or something.

(On a related note, I ran across this post the other day. Clearly the author is my people. :) )

~*~*~SRM WEEK 5 OF 20~*~*~

Grand Total: 10 miles, all easy + 3 strength workouts

Monday: a.m. strength / p.m. karate

Tuesday: 4 easy.

Originally scheduled for this day was an 8 mile progression run finishing in the 7:30 range, but I could tell as soon as I started running that nothing faster than ~9:30 miles was even remotely on the table. I felt completely worn out after two miles so decided not to push it any further.

Wednesday: a.m. strength / p.m. karate.

Soooo thanks to some hideous Bay Area traffic and an attempt at running some errands on the way home to save time, it took me 3 hours to get home from work. Don came home feeling sick & so decided not to go to class, and there was just. No. Way. I was getting back in a car during rush hour. So instead we went to get Indian food.

Thursday: a.m. strength / 6 easy.

The original plan called for 8 miles with 12-15 x 1:00/1:00. I suspected I probably would not be up for the full 8 miles yet but hoped I'd at least be able to give some of the fartleks a shot. But, running still felt tough even at easy paces, and when I started having pain in my right hip/hamstring/adductor (the sketchy one), I knew it was a bad idea. I should have turned around at 2 miles but then decided I should "tough it out" one more mile (so really two), and regretted it as soon as I got home because I putting weight on my right leg was incredibly painful. I tried rolling it out some, but since rollers can't magically repair damaged tissue, that ship had pretty much sailed.

Friday: Rest. I hoped if I gave my leg a day to heal I could do a short run on Saturday & a long run as scheduled on Sunday.

Saturday: Rest. Still limping & wanted to see if one more day off would save the long run.

Sunday: Rest. It still hurt enough that I knew running on it for any amount of time would make it worse, and I actually think I made it worse by doing a lot of standing & not moving at a birthday party & then a concert.

At first I was thinking "Meh, last week will just end up being a recovery week, I'll start the speed stuff this week." But, I kind of don't want to push my leg too hard this week and also want to make sure I'm fresher than usual for Bay 2 Breakers, so I think I'll probably just take it easy this week & try to get in some solid, pain-free miles rather than get overly ambitious with the speed work.

The week wasn't all bad, though! We had a lovely dinner party with friends Saturday night (not running gave me time to clean my house), met another at our local Beer Garden for birthday drinks Sunday afternoon, & then saw They Might Be Giants at the Fillmore on Sunday!

As Don put it, Nerd Rock FTW.

Every sold out show in The Fillmore's nearly 100 year history has its own poster hanging on the walls, and they give out the posters for free after the show.

Greetings From Sunny Vancouver + I kind of hate myself

Sooooo it was my intent to get this posted earlier this week but it turns out that when you get sent to an international conference people expect you to, like, do stuff or whatever for your income-generating day job (WHAT).

...like looking REALLY excited about giving poster presentations!!!

In any case, if you've never been to Vancouver, I can't recommend it highly enough. It's gorgeous & clean & progressive & one of the friendliest places I have ever been. My first trip to Vancouver was at the tail-end of our Alaska trip back in 2010, when we hung out downtown for 2 days & had tasty burgers, delicious cocktails, and chocolate fondue.

Chocolate fondue at Mink, July 2010

My second trip to Vancouver was not so much a trip to Vancouver as it was a trip through Vancouver on the way to Whistler-Blackcombe in 2011, which, again, if you haven't been and love amazing gorgeous outdoors/nature (particularly skiing), deserves a spot high up on your list. All you IronMan Canada athletes & loved ones making a side-trip, you are in for a treat!

I am was back again for a research conference last week and also apparently marathon training since we go everywhere together now. Nelly recommended Stanley Park as a sweet running venue, so I kind of felt like I won the lottery when I looked at a map & realized our hotel was less than a mile away. The place is apparently a paradise of running trails (dirt, paved, hilly, flat, adventurous, mindless, you name it), so as soon as I realized how close we were my optimism re: actually getting in the miles this week improved substantially.

After we settled in & got dinner I decided to explore the park via the Sea Wall Trail, a flat, paved path that followed the edge of the park right along the water. I was supposed to do a 10-11 mile speed workout involving a set of hard 800s, 20:00 at marathon pace, then another set of 800s, but the trail was moderately busy, not super wide, and involved a good number of blind curves, which did not make me feel super comfortable about that (especially since getting taken by surprise & leaping out of the way in this case could potentially mean falling into English Bay / Vancouver Harbor).

Another fun thing I learned on this trip is that one of my colleagues just signed up for her first 10K at the end of August, and our PI, who right now is in the habit of running ~3 miles a few times a week, just signed up for her first half marathon in January as well as a series of 5Ks & 10Ks over the next few months to keep her motivated to work up to the distance. What this means is that people tend to be more understanding than maybe would normally be the case of my need to free up a couple of hours most days & come back disgusting & sweaty.

Now....here is the part where I hate myself. On Wednesday I had to fit my eight miles in between the end of work stuff & dinner reservations, which meant I was pressed for time. Not really that pressed for time, but I felt like I was, so as a result I wasn't paying as careful attention as usual to how I was running & where I put my feet, etc., and around mile 6 I tripped & came down really wrong on my left foot in a way that made my Achilles feel like it was about to snap. I stopped & walked it off & it seemed okay, so I finished the last two miles, but towards the very end it really, really started to hurt & I was limping on it a little when I got back to the hotel.

The next day it was sore but not as bad as it had been towards the end of the run. For most of the day it ached a little on & off, & then towards the evening started to feel better. The weather was gorgeous so I decided I'd jog around on it a little & see how it felt, & if it was more than the tiniest bit uncomfortable, I'd call it a day in hopes of being able to do my 17 mile long run on Saturday.

After a couple of easy miles, it felt completely fine, so I kept going, and when I still had no pain after ~3.5 miles I went, "Sweet!! Totally good to finish the 8 mile loop." But then, as inevitably will happen when you are a dumb-ass & don't bring money or card for a cab, I'd barely passed four miles when it started to ache. This made me nervous but was by no means awful, and since I was now 4 miles from the hotel, I just kept going. By five miles, it was pretty painful & I absolutely would have stopped if I wasn't 3 miles from the hotel in a strange city in the almost-dark. By six miles I was pretty much just going, "Bad idea. Bad idea. SUCH a bad idea. Worst idea EVER," & during the last two I was just kind of hoping my Achilles tendon didn't snap before I got home.

My easy runs usually average between 8:05 & 8:20ish & my last mile was ~9:30 which gives you some idea of just how bad it was. To me the reddest of all red flags has always been needing to modify your stride to compensate for pain, and there was definitely a lot of that going on.

I made it to eight miles without my tendon snapping, which left me about six city blocks from the hotel, which was close enough that I felt okay walking it in the dark. (Which, btw, still REALLY hurt.) By the time I got back I could not really put weight on my left foot without pretty significant pain, and both plantarflexion and dorsiflexion were extremely uncomfortable. Needless to say my 17 mile long run did not happen and I will probably need to stay off it completely until it's completely 100% better, which with a tendon strain is kind of anybody's guess.

So yeah. I'm kicking myself pretty hard because a) I should have given it another day before testing it out, b) I should have known better than to go out so far with a sketchy leg, c) I should have brought cab money so that I wouldn't have to choose between walking a bunch of miles in the dark or running them & making the injury worse, d) I worked so, so hard to arrange & schedule things this week so that I could get all my miles in around my work stuff, most of which ultimately went to waste, and e) everything has been going just so, so well up to now in terms of marathon training. ARRRRrrrrRRRRrrrrRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!

I've been trying to think about what I would tell someone else if this happened to them in week 10 of a 15-week marathon cycle, which mostly includes things like, "What's done is done. The best thing you can do is give it complete rest & let it heal," & "You can only make it worse at this point; resist the temptation to rush it," & "Yes, the lost mileage is annoying but your training so far has been really consistent, & in the long term this probably won't make a difference, especially if you cross-train for all you're worth until it heals." Because for some reason when it happens to someone else I'm able to be rational and calm and keep things in perspective. When it's me, though, somehow these things always feel like the absolute end of the world, and although I know all those statements are true, I kind of don't really care, because in case you missed it, THE ENTIRE WORLD IS ENDING.

(Okay not really, but that's totally how I felt Friday night.)

As of Sunday evening, I am safely back home in SF, and have no pain at all just walking around. Still, I'm going to give it until at least Tuesday without trying to run on it, and if that works out okay, then I'm going to get down on my knees & thank my lucky stars that three days and 33 miles was the only sacrifice the Marathon Gods demanded in exchange for my stupidity. Next Sunday is SFH2M, and even though I'm not "RACING"-racing, I still need to be able to run 18 miles without feeling sketched out.

Three Cursed Marathons

So, once upon a time, I decided to quit rolling my eyes at full marathons & give it a shot, giving myself full permission to hate everything about both the preparation and the event itself, and never do it again if it turned out to just not be my bag (which I highly suspected it would not). Then and now, I felt like there was too much emphasis in the recreational running community on marathons (particularly running as many/as frequently as possible, regardless of quality) and not enough emphasis on just running better in general. But after twenty years of 5Ks, 10Ks, and half marathons, I just felt like it was something I should do once so I could speak with some small measure of authority on the subject.

("Oh, you're a distance runner!"
"Yep!"
"Neat! How many marathons have you done?"
{Mental face palm.}
I cannot even tell you how many conversations I have had with non-runners that went exactly like this. Cannot. Even. Tell you.)

And thus I came to Marathon #1: Cal International Marathon, in December 2011. Based on my long runs & other workouts, I felt confident I could run a ~8:00 pace comfortably, but since I was completely new to the distance, I wasn't all that attached to a particular finishing time--I just wanted to finish strong, feel good, & be able to say, "Yes, I have run that freakish, outsized, monstrosity of a novelty distance they call a marathon."

Then about 3 weeks before the race, I came down with an upper respiratory infection that made a lot of important activities (running, sleeping, breathing, etc.) incredibly difficult. I spent the week of Thanksgiving in bed at my mom's, sucking on my inhaler every hour or so & basically just trying to keep myself out of the emergency room. A week later I was doing a lot better, but still having asthma problems & using my inhaler quite a bit, and had been able to run maybe twice in the three weeks since I'd gotten sick. I thought very seriously about DNSing but then decided "Hey, maybe I'll be fine! And if not I can always quit."

Well, I did start. And immediately had an asthma attack. And I suck at quitting things. So I wheezed my way through an otherwise perfect race, sucking on my inhaler every two miles and trying not to black out, & finished in 3:47, which under the circumstances I felt was pretty respectable.

And weirdly, instead of walking away from that race as I'd planned going, "Ugh, that sucked, glad I don't ever have to do it again," I left with this nagging unsatisfied feeling. I knew I'd done the best I could under the circumstances, but I also knew I could do so much better if I had a shot at it healthy. Maybe just one more, I found myself thinking. Just to see.

So I spent the first part of the year running shorter races, & then in the summer signed up for round 2.

Marathon #2: Cal International Marathon, December 2012

I actually ran fewer miles in preparation for this race than for CIM 2011 but was finishing all my workouts much stronger and racing WAY faster at shorter distances. I'd had more and longer long runs and was finishing them more strongly and really felt like ~8:00 / mile should be a cake walk. Then 3 weeks before the race on my last long run, I finished completely unable to put any weight on my right foot. I limped home, called my sports medicine doctor & was instructed to ice & rest it & stay completely off of it until there was no pain whatsoever, and maybe I'd be able to run.

It did get better, but very slowly and very-two-steps-forward-one-step-back, so just like the year before, I ended up getting in maybe 2-3 short runs in those last three weeks. Going into race weekend the pain was totally gone; on the other hand, the forecast called for Sacramento to be pummeled by a freaking monsoon on Sunday between the hours of 6am-9am, and Jesus Christ did it ever deliver. For a second year in a row I seriously considered not running (though I wasn't alone this time), but once again decided that "Maybe it'll be fine! And if not I can always quit."

Long story short, the wind, rain, & standing water on the course made it a tough race as it was (we had 20mph headwinds in some places, I think), and by mile 11 I could barely put weight on my right foot again, which made me compensate with other muscles that eventually began shutting down in their turn. This was the closest I've ever come to quitting a race, and there was a LOT of stopping / limping in those last 12 miles. My gun time was ~3:55; I didn't even get a chip time because apparently the section of the starting mat I crossed shorted out thanks to the three or so inches of standing water at the start.

From the Sac bee

I still love this shot of Giraffy's, because it
just captures the entire experience so exquisitely.

Thankfully the pain in my foot turned out to be really bad tendinitis & not a stress fracture, but I was still in an air cast & not allowed to run for a month after.

Obviously, I could not let this be the last marathon I ever ran. So in January 2013, I started all over again.

Marathon #3: Mountains 2 Beach Marathon, May 2013

Why no, not hobbling across the finish with a torn muscle at all, what are you talking about

This cycle was definitely the best marathon training I've ever done, up until I started having problems with my right hip flexor ~4 weeks before the race. Once again, instead of running, I spent that last month desperately trying to fix a health issue & was barely cleared to run before I got on the plane for Ventura.

This was definitely the closest I've come to having the race I felt like I'd trained for. Up until mile 20 I averaged 8:06 / mile (including a 1-2 minute stop to deal with my foot going numb) at a pretty comfortable level of effort. But after that my hip was done, and between that & the heat it was all I could do to walk/jog/hobble my way through the last four miles & try to stay upright. (Later I'd learn that I'd torn ~40% of the tissue in my previously-strained hip flexor.) I finished in 3:36, an 11 minute PR, but still very far from the race I wanted & felt like I'd trained for up until that last month.

Going Forward...

So yeah. I doubt I will ever be a marathon junky, but if I could just get one good one under my belt, one solid race where there are no injuries or illnesses or acts of god to make running 26 miles at the absolute edge of my ability any more difficult than it already is, I think I could get over it for a while & go back to my core competencies. But right now, I'm still after that one.

One thing I know for sure is that I am through with the "Maybe it'll be fine/I can always quit!" mentality. I think it is quite clear by now that in a target race situation where I'm still physically capable of moving forward, I can't trust myself to make the smart decision & walk off the course. I've had enough of "giving it a shot" only to blow my training on a lackluster/disastrous race. Peak marathon fitness is too valuable, too hard-won for that. Yes, I had $300+ in reg fees, hotel, & rental car invested M2B, but in the 10 months since then I've spent over $1000 on doctor visits & physical therapy & another ~$170 on three races I couldn't run, so you do the math.

So that's my new resolution. If circumstances (health, weather, etc.) aren't reasonably close to ideal, marathon = not happening. I am extremely fortunate and thankful to be in a position where I can write off a couple hundred dollars now and then without sweating it (especially since that has definitely not always been the case); given that, it just makes a lot more sense to me to skip a race I paid for than "Give it a shot!" under sketchy circumstances and end up either too injured or burned out to run another one any time soon.

Marathon #4

I don't know how soon I'll have the fitness to run another marathon, but I think August is as soon as it's likely to be, so right now I have my eye on the Santa Rosa Marathon (8/24). It's close, the fee is reasonable, ($125 before April 30), and I've run the half before & so I know it's a well-organized race. In previous the years the course has been two monotonous loops along the gravelly-in-places Santa Rosa Greenway, but this year it's been changed to a single loop around town / local roads, so gravel should be minimal. While I'm not an elevation diva, I can't say I'm exactly *crushed* by the flatness of the course, and the 6 a.m. start means you stand a chance of decent temperatures. (We are talking August in wine country, after all.)

I think I have a good shot at being ready to run Santa Rosa if everything goes perfectly for the next few months--no injuries, no last-minute travel plans, etc. My plan is to continue building up my easy mileage & keep up my strength work & cross-training, ease back while we're in Italy (though I'll probably have to do some running there, just for maintenance), then jump into actual training with Coach Tom (no way I'm doing this alone) in mid-May. That leaves me ~15 weeks, which, if I can get to ~25-30 miles a week by then, is completely respectable in terms of a marathon cycle.

And if I get to May & August just isn't looking reasonable, there is certainly no dearth of sweet fall marathons; Wineglass, Steamtown, and Fox Valley have been on my radar for a while, and there's a handful of less flashy local options as well.

Learn From My Mistakes. PLEASE.

"The difference between school & real life is that in school, you get the lesson first and then the test, and in real life, you get the test first, and then the lesson." ~Someone I can't remember right now

Oy. I'm not ashamed to admit that in the last few days, it's been incredibly challenging to bring my own weather to the picnic. Not because of my running--now that I'm done being sick & out of town & absurdly overbooked & all that, the running has been going reasonably well. But running is tangentially related to the suckiness I'm about to describe, and it's kind of all I can think about right now, so there you go.

I've been doing my track workouts at Kezar Stadium more or less once a week for the last four years or so. When I first started going I'd bring only my keys, inhaler, water bottle, & flats out to the track, tuck them inconspicuously behind a bench, & leave everything else locked in my car. After a while that seemed silly since the benches are right out in the open in broad daylight, & the only other people around were other runners. So I started just leaving them out on the bench. (Because really, who's going to steal any of that stuff?)

Then I started sometimes wanting other stuff, like different clothing options depending on the weather, sunscreen for reapplying on hot days, extra Nuun tablets, etc. So I started carrying it all around in a bag, & whenever I head to the track or a race, I just grab the whole thing because I know everything I could possibly need will be in it. After a while having a different bag for every athletic pursuit (running, karate, gym, pool, CrossFit, whatever) got annoying so I started keeping everything together in one bag, & I would take that bag to the track, & leave it on the bench.

Then I started taking my phone down to the track, because hey, something might happen, or I might want to snap a picture, or whatever. Part of me kind of thought this might not have been the greatest idea, but I was always sure to tuck it deep in my bag, & hey, it's been *years* & no one has ever bothered my stuff.

Until this past Tuesday night. Thankfully I've been in the habit of putting most of the extra stuff I take to races into another, smaller bag which I can throw into the big one but don't routinely keep there, & I haven't been keeping much else in the bigger bag besides some of my karate stuff. But I did have my phone in it, along with my only set of car keys, house keys, & work keys.

You can probably guess where all this is going.

According to my Garmin, I started my first interval at 5:02pm, which would have been right after I changed from my regular shoes into flats. After four ninety-second 400m's & four ninety-second recovery jogs (so a grand total of ~12 minutes), I jogged back to the benches to change back into my other shoes, and my bag was gone.

What ensued at that point was a half hour of hysterical panic in which I jogged every inch of the track & stadium asking people if they'd seen my bag or anyone near it, searching trash cans in case it had been dumped, & verifying that whoever had taken it hadn't fished my keys out & used the electronic fob to locate/pillage/steal my car (which was parked right by the stadium gate, & had my purse & wallet in the trunk). After that I gave up & jogged to the police station (thankfully there is one right at the stadium), made a police report, tried to call Don, & promptly fell apart right there in the precinct.

(Pro tip: If you're ever going to lose the only set of keys you have while your car is parked somewhere that becomes illegal in four hours, try not to do it two days after your significant other's car has spontaneously broken down.)

Ultimately, I called AAA, who was able to tow it to their storage lot & then to the dealership in the morning where I could get two (count 'em, TWO) new sets of keys made, which only cost me $100 for the overnight storage & $500 for the keys. (*Vomit*. Pro tip #2: Keep track of your car keys. No luxury anything for me until 2014.)

I've also never gotten the theft protection or extra insurance on my phone & also never done the (FREE) Android thing where you can set up your phone to be GPS tracked and/or remote locked and/or wiped, so the best we could do was disconnect & blacklist it (no one can use it, even with a new SIM card). I am still 1.5 years from an upgrade, but because I've been a customer for so long AT&T said that they could give me an upgrade now. (I don't understand why, but certainly appreciate it.) So on the bright side, a new phone similar to what I had will only cost me $200 instead of ~$500. Which is something.

That's really everything I *have* to replace right now.

When all this was happening, it was interesting to note the thoughts running through my head. Obviously there were things like "I can't believe this is happening" and "How stupid can I be" and "There are so many ways this could've been prevented." At the same time, though, were a bunch of other thoughts, like "No one is hurt or dead" and "Almost everything is replaceable" and "My car is still here & intact" and "At least I was smart enough not to put my effing *wallet* in the bag too." As awful as it was when it was happening, I still found myself extremely cognizant of how much worse a terrible night can be. To be honest I often find myself rolling my eyes when people talk about having gratitude in the face of bad situations, but completely unexpectedly, I found that I did. I literally sat there on the curb while my brain scrolled through a giant list of everything that I did still have & how much worse it could have been & all the things that hadn't happened tonight.

I wasn't trying to feel grateful & thankful for all that; I just did. This, I think, is the payoff of consciously practicing bringing your own weather to the picnic. It doesn't mean I didn't still feel horrible & kind of hated myself for making such an expensive, easily preventable mistake, but I think it did keep me from wallowing in self-pity & -disgust for days on end & feeling like it was the complete and total end of the world. Today, my brain is doing this bizarre thing where it keeps ambushing me with positive (????) things about having my bag stolen. I'll just be doing whatever, & out of nowhere it's like, "You know you only bought that bag eleven years ago because it was cheap & you were poor. You always thought it was kind of tacky-looking." (Which, okay, there is some truth to that, although after 11 years with an inanimate object--it's spanned 99% of my karate career--you do start to develop a weird attachment.)

God, they were hideous. Still, I'll kind of miss them...

Or, "As much as you liked those Mizunos, they were really old, and you know they were ugly as sin." (Which...true.)

Or, "Now you don't have to deal with all those random, outdated keys that had collected on your key chain! Cross THAT off the ol' to-do list!"

Or, "Sure, those were $100 sunglasses, but they never really fit right, & you were only keeping them because you felt bad about the price."

Or, "You always hated that crappy phone case. Somebody else's problem now!"

Once we'd dealt with the immediate aftermath of the situation, Don & I kind of melted into the couch & didn't move for a while, except to drink more, & started listing all the super important things we know we reeeeaaallly ought to take care of but have put off for long enough that we've convinced ourselves that it's not that big a deal.

"We should put together an earthquake kit."

"We should write our wills."

"We should get LastPass set up." (Okay, fine, that was just me....Seriously, I've had the tab open in my browser window for months. I finally got CrashPlan set up a few months ago, so at least I've got that going for me.)

"We should make copies of all our important documents & stash them somewhere."

"We should, like, *find* all our important documents." (Fine, that was just me too.)

Suddenly I find myself a lot more highly motivated to do all that stuff.

Dealing with getting the car re-keyed today was an even bigger headache than I thought it would be, & over the course of the day I had some pretty low moments. In the spirit of bringing your own weather, I thought I'd share this quote from Caitlin Moran's "My Posthumous Advice for My Daughter," which was mostly what got me through it:

"Life divides into AMAZING ENJOYABLE TIMES and APPALLING EXPERIENCES THAT WILL MAKE FUTURE AMAZING ANECDOTES. However awful, you can get through any experience if you imagine yourself, in the future, telling your friends about it as they scream, with increasing disbelief, ‘NO! NO!’ Even when Jesus was on the cross, I bet He was thinking, ‘When I rise in three days, the disciples aren’t going to believe this when I tell them about it.’"

It made me laugh every time I thought I was about to completely fall apart again.

Hope your week's going better than mine. :P

When Things Don't Go As Planned

One of the greatest lessons of adulthood that I've learned is that we have more control over our moods and feelings than we think. Sure, particular events may initially make us feel sad / angry / depressed / anxious / worried / etc., but it turns out that if you'd really rather not feel that way, it's mostly within your power.

Becoming aware of this has probably changed my life more than anything else. Yes, it takes practice to make it a habit and it's easier in some situations than in others, but there's a great sense of security and calm that comes from knowing that you're the one in control of how things affect you, rather than believing that your emotions and attitude are at the mercy of whatever happens to you in life.

As with most other parts of my life, this way of thinking has changed *everything* about my running. In high school, I treated my runs / races / training weeks / seasons / whatever the way football teams treat the outcomes of games: there was a 'W' column and a 'L' column, and everything went in one or the other. It was either a "win" or a "loss." Good run / bad run. Race to be proud of / race to be disappointed in. Training week that left me feeling great about myself or training week that left me feeling terrible about myself. I got it done, or I didn't.

I think this attitude is no small part of why I quit running competitively after high school and barely ran at all during my first two years of college. Looking back on it now, I'm reminded of a quote from my teaching years:

In those days I defined success so narrowly and so specifically that I spent a lot of time feeling like a failure. It wasn't until I was able to expunge from my vocabulary the phrases "bad run" and "bad race" and "bad week" that I was able to redefine for myself what successful running looked like in a broader way, and get back to engaging with it in a way that didn't put me at risk of feeling unhappy or disappointed with myself every few weeks or so. Because let's face it--

• Runs and weeks and races that don't go the way we wanted are inevitable.
• Feeling bad about them--unhappy or disappointed or ashamed--is optional.

Optional, but--speaking from experience--pretty destructive in the long run.

* * *

This week did not go at all the way I'd hoped. I'd been feeling kind of wrecked the week before--my muscles felt worn out, I wasn't recovering well day-to-day, and my glutes and hamstrings in particular just felt like they weren't firing, no matter how much effort I put into my form. I got in my 22 miles for the week, but my last two runs (including the 8.7 on Sunday) were Just. Utterly. Exhausting. I know that was partly because of the weather, but I also could feel the same exhaustion in my muscles that I'd had for days.

Monday:

Karate / light strength only. I skipped a.m. spinning to give my glutes & hamstrings a little extra recovery time, which was apparently a smart move because I was barely out of bed before I realized that my hip flexor--the one that I originally wrecked back in May--was definitely unhappy. I actually really wanted to go to lunchtime yoga and stretch it out but couldn't make it because of a meeting. I still felt tired and achey and broken at karate.

Tuesday:

4 easy + light strength. Risking a track workout seemed like a bad plan, so I reasoned I'd just do a few easy miles as long as my hip felt okay. I got through them, but they felt significantly harder than they should have, and about an hour after, my hip was aching again. At that point I decided to get aggressive about rest days and not run again until it felt completely, totally fine.

Wednesday:

a.m. strength work (including ~1.5 miles of accidental running), p.m. karate / a little more strength work. On Wednesday, I went to Coach Robert's 6 a.m. (gaaaaaaah) strength class for runners for the first time. The hour sucks ass, but unfortunately I can't make it to Nate & the Triathletes every Thursday morning because of work. So on those weeks I've decided to see how well my body tolerates going to bed early (hahahahaha yeah right) & getting up at the ass crack of dawn before dawn.

The class is about half devoted to runner-specific mobility & stretching (sitting in a squat for a while, aggressively opening the hips & hip flexors, grinding out quads/glutes/what have you) & easy strength work (push-ups, sit-ups, KB swings, etc.), & half devoted to running-specific strength work. Unfortunately, it turned out that there was more running that day than I was expecting (5 x [300m run/8 KB squats], no rest), and not wanting to wuss out at my first class, I (stupidly) did the whole thing & just tried to focus on my form & not to push too terribly hard. If nothing else, it was at least gratifying to beat every other woman there except one as well as most of the men, considering I didn't really know what we were doing at first & just kind of followed everyone else. My hip, however, did not thank me. Ow.

Thursday:

6 extremely unsatisfying bike miles. Having vowed not to run for the rest of the week, I decided to try to bike 10 miles after work on Thursday just to get *some* form of cardio in. Unfortunately, the best thing I can say about this workout is that I did, technically, break a sweat. (A tiny, tiny one. As in I wasn't entirely sure my clothes counted as dirty.)

Given that after 25 minutes my hamstrings were nearly incapable of continuing to pedal while my heart rate was barely elevated, my original assessment seemed correct: I've been pushing the posterior muscles hard and asking a lot of them, and they're just worn out. I finished 6 miles in 30 minutes, which is probably equivalent to running like 2 miles.

Friday:

Rest / bake (since that's what I do when I can't run)

Don requested these pumpkin chocolate chip squares & was a big fan of how they turned out. So that was a bright point at least!

Saturday:

Light strength work / house cleaning / laundry / watch Stanford kick the living shit out of WASU.

Yup.

Sunday:

5 easy. With nearly 4 non-running days under my belt, I decided to give it a try Sunday & see how my hip felt. Something is still definitely not quite right, but I did make it to 2.5 with only a little tightness in my hamstring. It loosened up some on the way back so I probably could have gone to 6 or 7 without too much trouble, but didn't want to push it.

Grand Total: 10.5 miles, all easy

This is not what it looks like to train for a half marathon in which you are sub-seeded. But right now, it's reality.

So I have a choice. I can be high school me and write it off as a "bad week" and spend this one feeling nervous about my two upcoming races and disappointed that my hip hasn't healed faster and frustrated that I haven't been able to build mileage more quickly.

Or I can do as Harlan Coben says and "bring [my] own weather to the picnic." This week & the hip issues happened, and feeling crappy about it won't make them un-happen. Instead, I choose to tell the story this way:

• September makes four months of increased mileage in a row.
• This is only the second week during that time that I haven't increased mileage.
• Cutback weeks are healthy under normal circumstances; they're probably an even better idea when you have an injury that is not fully healed.
• I have been teaching half of the karate classes this week, which probably means I did a little more than I should have given how run-down I'd been feeling. Lesson learned; this week I'll take it easier.
• Doing the running Wednesday morning was probably not a HUGE deal, but also not the best choice. Lesson #2 learned; this week I'll be more careful.
• I haven't been to my PT for a while because of some insurance drama. Time to go back & get an updated opinion now that that's all sorted.
• It's still 3 weeks until Let's Go 510 & 8 weeks until Berkeley Half, which is a good chunk of time.
• Just finishing these two races will be a huge victory.
• The real prize is NVM in March--don't compromise that by trying to do too much now.

Hopefully it's clear that choosing your attitude about a given event or situation is not a matter of denying the facts or simply telling yourself to "cheer up & be positive!!!! :D" It's about digging into the facts and letting them be complicated, rather than simply "good" or "bad," about understanding the situation, analyzing it, and seeing it as an opportunity to learn and move forward constructively.

So I don't feel bad. I refuse to write this week off as a "bad" one & just stick in the "L" column. Instead, I'm putting it in context and seeing it as part of a bigger pattern. I choose to be optimistic about my running in the long term (even if it's hard to be optimistic about this week or this month), regardless of the parts that aren't going like I'd planned.

I have one more quote for you.

The first time I heard this (or something like it), it made me want to gag, so I won't blame you if that's your reaction at first as well. But when I ran across it several years into Real Adult Life^TM, I kind of went, "You know.....that's really true."

So as difficult as it is sometimes, I invite you to try it out the next time you have a week or a run or a race that doesn't meet your expectations. Instead of writing it off as "bad," try to think through it in a neutral, non-evaluative way, & then see if you can re-write the story of that experience in a way that's constructive and forward-thinking rather than evaluative and backward-looking. I know for a fact that if I hadn't learned this skill, I would not still be in this sport, and I plan to be in it for a long, long time.

Fighting My Quad Dominance, As Always

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I ran three miles today, which is a personal distance record for June / July. (Woo!) More importantly I ran it at *actual* marathon pace, mostly comfortably, and with no pain in my hip flexors at all. It was beautiful. Beautiful, but a lot of work (which is where the "mostly" in "mostly comfortably" comes in).

Let's back up a bit --

The first time I was in physical therapy & put on a treadmill for gait analysis, I learned I was "quad dominant." Basically this means that I was relying more on the (relatively) small muscles in my hip flexors & quads to generate power rather than the larger, more powerful hamstring & glute muscles. On video, this looked like driving my knees forward with each stride, leaning forward only 5-10° with my torso, failing to extend my hip joint fully & close the angle between my torso and hamstring, and shin/calves not quite making it to parallel with the ground on the back swing.

While I don't have any video footage to share with you, some very informative, extremely high-quality photographs were taken during the session:

As you can see, this is an *extremely* professional blog.

Quad dominance is apparently very very common in recreational runners (one of the biggest reasons for this is the amount of sitting we all do & the deleterious effect that has on the glute muscles), but it can be fixed. After several months of strength training for my hamstrings & glutes & lots of drills focused on learning to engage them more, I got the thumbs up from my PT to return to regular training. I was *amazed* at how much faster I was able to run with the same level of effort, just with that one change.

For a while, all was well.

Toward the end of 2010 I stopped running for a while because of a hip injury; when I was able to run again and my PT put me back on the treadmill, my hard-won posterior power seemed to have melted away, and I was back to starting from scratch again. After a few weeks of the same drills & strength work (including a lifting regimen of squats & deadlifts), though, all was well again.

Now that my leg is healed enough that I can run several miles without pain, my current PT decided it was time to throw me back on the 'mill. I will give you one guess as to what he saw.

He explained that he wasn't really surprised, with all the hip flexor drama I've had going on. Tight quads & hip flexors make it that much harder to engage your glutes & hamstrings, particularly without arching your back (never good for running). Afterward he put me back on the 'mill & had me just work on consciously trying to engage my glutes & hamstrings more. "Think about doing butt kicks, just not all the way up to your butt," he suggested.

The good news is that I was able to do it, and consciously correcting that one thing pretty much made everything else (knee drive, torso lean, etc.) fall into place. The bad news is that it was HARD -- I wasn't even trying to run fast, and I was still breathing as hard as I might be during a tempo run after only about ten minutes.

This didn't seem to surprise him, either.

"This is what you need to work on on your runs," he told me. "For the next few weeks, there won't be any easy runs for you. It's just going to be hard for a while."

I'm also supposed to continue rolling my quads, hip flexors, & glutes, stretching my hip flexors out three times a day, & keep doing all the strength work designed to rebuild my hamstring & glute strength & remind all those muscles how to fire together correctly.

Back to my three-mile run today. My goal was to keep the effort level easy, but my PT was absolutely right--as long as I focused on the butt-kick feeling & engaging my posterior chain muscles, there was just no way to keep the effort level at "easy." The cool thing was that that translated to a (just barely) sub-8 pace; if I tried to slow down at all, keeping up the butt-kick feeling got much harder. Hopefully that will change as my muscles get stronger & my endurance comes back, though. As neat as it felt to see sub-8 miles on my watch for the first time since M2B, I can't have every workout feeling like a tempo run!

* * *

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In Which I Double My Mileage*

*Not nearly as dramatic as it sounds.

"Okay, just try to relax everything," says my PT as I'm getting into position for our bi-weekly Thomas test. I lay back and pull my right knee up to my chest, letting my left leg dangle off the end of the table at the hip.

He gives my left leg a pitiful look. "That's relaxed?"

Ideally in the Thomas test your shin hangs passively at a 90° angle to your thigh. 60° means there's work to do re: quad & hip flexor tightness. Mine is hovering close to 45°, as it has been for months now.

"I'm rolling my quads for 10 minutes each most days."

He raises his eyebrows. "Don't stop. Switch sides."

I switch. He regards the pathetic angle of my knee with disdain and shakes his head. "That right hip flexor is still terrible. Just terrible."

"I've been using the Lacrosse ball on my hip flexors pretty regularly too. I can only do it about once every three days or so, though."

"Why is that?"

"Because for the next couple of days, they feel super, super tender & bruised. Like I've been in an accident or something."

"You deserve it," he replies straightly. "You've been beating them up like this for years & never stretching them out. That's the price."

We've been seeing one another for nigh on three months now, so we've developed the sort of dynamic where we can be a bit snarky with each other. And he is, of course, completely correct.

* * *

My sister J & her friend C have been hanging out with me in San Francisco this week:

When she was here a couple of years ago, we did a bunch of the usual tourist stuff together, including the eastern section of Golden Gate Park. Don & I thought that this time she & C might enjoy seeing the rest of the park, either on foot or via rented bike / Segway / go-cart / etc. On our way back from Sonoma Sunday evening, we drove through it via JFK drive so they could see where some of the key attractions were (like the de Young Museum, the Academy of Sciences, the rose garden, & the Japanese Tea Garden).

I was wholly unprepared for the experience of driving through that section of GG Park. It's where I do a lot of my running (like 75% of it), and all I could think about as we drove through it was, "I want to be running out there." In the past five years I've racked up hundreds and hundreds of miles on those sidewalks and trails (maybe thousands? I don't even know), and to drive past them after a seven-week absence in cool, overcast, perfect running weather was gut-wrenching in a way that running things rarely are for me.

As soon as I'm up to it, I told myself, I am coming down here and running the SHIT out this park.

When I went to dig out a spare set of keys for J & C, I realized that we'd never made an extra one for our new outer door & I'd need to go have one cut. The closest place that does it is about a mile away, and as I've been advised not to drive my car until I replace the tires (unless I want them to explode), I started toying with the notion of just running there & back.

My hip has now reached the point where, if I were a normal, sedentary or near-sendentary person, I'd probably say it's completely healed. I can walk fine, I can go up & down stairs with no problem, I can do 95% of karate stuff at 95% intensity, & I've even been back to doing a bunch of the eccentric loading strength stuff. I've been running one mile most days (followed by ~20 minutes of elliptical), which is when I can tell that it's not 100% yet. There is a little soreness and some pain with impact that tells me I shouldn't get too ambitious any time soon, but overall it's been going pretty well & doesn't seem to be slowing my recovery.

Yes, two miles would be a 100% increase in my daily mileage, but since one mile + 20 minutes elliptical had been going well for nearly two weeks now, I decided to give it a shot.

The nice thing about recovering from an injury is that every new accomplishment--no matter how insignificant it would've seemed a couple of months ago--feels like a HUGE step. Running .6 miles at a 10:16 pace on July 1 was the highlight of my week. Running a full mile a few days later felt like slaying the Kraken. Running TWO whole miles (with a short rest in between at the hardware store) felt like--er, I don't even know. Something more awesome than slaying the Kraken.

The Oatmeal metaphorically slaying the Kraken with a run.

(Sidenote: If you've somehow managed to go this long as a runner on the internet without seeing The Oatmeal's five-part series on "The Terrible & Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances," just go read it. Go now. I'll wait.)

I also want to point out that clearly the hours and hours of cross-training I've put in have clearly not been a complete & utter waste of time. In the past when I've been sidelined for a month for an injury, it's taken at least that long for 8:30 to feel like an easy, comfortable pace again. So I'm optimistic about my ability to get back into racing shape before the next millennium. #progress