boo hoo

Yesterday my Achilles tendon started smarting a little bit out of nowhere, which progressed into some full on pain after sitting down for an hour, more pain after another hour of class, and pain/burning after my three hour class. I call BS on this because it didn’t start hurting until I started sitting around. It didn’t hurt while I biked back to my office from downtown. What strikes me as a bit weird is that for the past month, I’ve been having little twitches in my right Achilles or lower calf when I wake in the morning (not painful, but ticklish almost), but now it’s my left that actually hurts. It is not horrible, just kind of foreboding at this stage in the game. I started taking ibuprofen and putting my foot up with a block of blue ice on it last night, wore my Cascadias all day for a little extra support instead of taking my shoes off at home, and skipped running today.

The last time I had a little mini ache like that, I took two days off and it went away. That is the smart thing to do, but it’s really hard to convince myself to take two days! If I make it through today, I’m halfway there! I was about to do a short run anyway because I got a new sports bra in the mail from Moving Comfort and I wanted to see if it was going to be the best thing to ever happen to me or not, but then I let the dog chase me around the backyard and it didn’t feel so hot on the leg…maybe I will run in the morning, maybe stick it out. I planned to do 20 on Friday, but now I feel pretty up in the air. Play a tiny violin for me.

what goes up

As good as I felt last week, I am feeling like total crapola this week. I slept through my 5:45am alarm for my long run yesterday, so it’s on the agenda again in the morning. I ran 10 yesterday instead and my legs are dying today. The run wasn’t hard. I blame it on finishing right before seminar and plopping down into a chair for hours immediately after I ran and then not getting to eat until 4pm. I hope I can get my act together by the time my alarm goes off tomorrow. It’s a game weekend, so doing my long run Saturday isn’t an option, tailgaters be damned. I only have two classes this semester (one’s 1:15, the other 3 hours), but between those, meetings, sitting at my computer working on SFMNP stuff and thesis stuff, and working at home on transcribing, I have noticed a huge difference in how generally gross my legs feel after a day of just sitting in a chair. It’s good to move when you can.

for the birds

I am trying to quiet my rage against this little spawn of Satan, who destroyed one of our living room chairs in the less than two minutes he was left unsupervised by me or our adult dogs, who are admittedly not wonderful influences anyway.

Ollie has a knack for detecting items that are expensive and/or have not been previously owned by someone else (rare in our house) and attempting to ruin them. Needless to say, he’s spending some QT in his crate this afternoon. I also looked up how much a replacement chair costs and am wondering what crack we smoked to pay almost $300 for the one we have. Surely that did not happen.

I finished out May with 162.43 miles and 24:07:27 of running, meeting my goal of increasing my overall speed from April (161.27 in 24:37:23). My average pace was 8:54 compared to 9:09. Boom, victory. I’m going to throw mileage goals out the window for June since I will start following my training plan in a more structured manner (read: at all) and will probably have to start sucking it up and doing some long slow runs.

Things will stay light today and tomorrow, when I am leaving for Hickory, NC to run the Charity Chase Half Marathon on Saturday morning courtesy of Richard at Old-Runner. I’m pretty sure I haven’t run 13 miles since somewhere during training for ING Georgia several months ago (I think the most I’ve done is 10 in the past month or two) so hopefully I don’t embarrass myself. My knees are feeling creaky today after a pretty difficult spin class and run yesterday. I started off with my lead legs and willing myself to stay on the treadmill for 30 minutes, then 45 minutes. My arms are killing me because I forgot I had done weights before class, so I’m kind of a sad sack today.

warrior dash southeast recap

So, I survived two days in the great outdoors, in case anyone was wondering. Warrior Dash was pretty fun and more or less what I expected. I’ll go into the “more or less” in a minute. We got up to our awesome campsite at Black Rock Mountain State Park around 6:30pm on Friday. There were about ten of us there Friday and everyone else came on Saturday. We stayed at the pioneer camp, which is huge and really far from any of the other campsites. Some of our friends were buddies with the park managers who were friendly and hospitable and hung out for a bit in the evening. I opted to skip setting up my tent in order to avoid having to fold it back into the burrito (bane of my existence) and slept in one of the shelters with wooden bunks instead with Trina and Miranda, plus their dogs.

Maybe I have mentioned before that I am somewhat of an insomniac and have an erratic sleep pattern at best, and that I have been an occasional sleepwalker since I was in middle school or so. It is worse when I sleep somewhere that I am not familiar with. I sort of remember this, but mostly remember that I walked into something and landed head first in the dirt. Nice. I woke up with a massive scrape/bruise on my shin and it took me about 40 minutes to figure out how I got it and why my hands were so dirty. Sadly, the bruise is huge in person and basically non existent when photographed.

People started trickling in Saturday morning. Most of us ran the 3:30 wave. The park people told us the town was expecting 13,500 people over the course of Saturday and Sunday; I’m not sure how accurate that is. I also heard that there were 500 people per wave. We donned our 80s outfits and the park folks hooked us up with a shuttle over to the race. Things at the race site were much more organized than I had expected. I thought it would be kind of out of control, but they had a lot of volunteers and none of the lines for registration or anything were more than a few people long. It was more like being at a big concert or something than a race. We got our bibs, tshirts, etc and then watched people coming out of the water and jumping over the fires at the end of the race under it was time to line up.

Pre-dash. Not sure what’s happening with my hair. And yes, I reused the same shirt from my Old Mil 5 costume a few weeks ago. The red striped shirt has now served its duty and has been disposed of.

We started in the middle of the corral. No one was taking it very seriously. I was mostly concerned that I was already hot as hell and thirsty. The course started out running on half of a road that was blocked off, so about the wide of a greenway or something similar. It was tight and even just two people running together could make it difficult to get by, so I did not really try. I wasn’t wearing a watch so it was hard to tell how fast/slow I was moving. The first obstacle was a series of planks that were underwater in a lake that you had to walk across, and then you were in deeper water that you had to wade/swim through. I’m short and it was mostly somewhere between waist and chest deep, but there were some deeper spots. After that, you ran through a bunch of tires which were full of mud and pretty slippery, then had to climb over some small walls (again, maybe waist high for me). We ran a little more and there was a water station. Before the water station, I tripped over some root and fell down at what was probably the only inappropriate place to fall down in the whole course. Nice! After the water station, there was a small angled wall that you used a rope to pull yourself up, then you ran a short distance to climb and descend a cargo net. The next obstacle was close and it was climbing over/through three or four junk cars. I’m forgetting what was after that. I think you had to crawl through some black culvert pipe type of tunnels and then the course went into the woods, which was the hardest part of the course. It was super muddy, some little steep hills, and single track, so there were points where there was no option other than to walk because there was a huge line of people walking ahead of you.

At this point, I was thinking that I was more tired out from running in wet/muddy clothes and shoes than I expected. The course wasn’t especially difficult, but the extra clothes and wading through the lake definitely didn’t help. I figured we were no more than half a mile away from the water station, which was supposed to have been at mile one. The course didn’t have mile markers, so you had to just guess. We ran through some more muddy trails and boom, we popped out at this muddy hill. We could see the muddy hill from where we were watching people finish, so I knew it was almost over. You had to run/slide down the mud into more of a water-mud bog, crawl/wade under some barbed wire, and then through more mud. There were tons of people watching, cheering, and jeering here. Cheering for the people getting the dirtiest and heckling anyone who seemed to be getting through too easy. After the mud, you jumped into a lake and climbed over four large logs that were anchored on either side. This seemed pretty easy to me, but later I watched a lot of people wipe out because the logs would kind of twirl in a forward direction until there was too much tension on the cable and then spin backwards.

After the lake, we climbed out and had a very short stretch before jumping over two rows of fire, which were big piles of Duraflame logs. The fire actually looked pretty high as you were running up to it, maybe knee height or so, but it was artfully placed after the lake so you were completely soaked. That was the last obstacle and you ran down a little hill to finish. We saw quite a few people wipe out after jumping the flames. They weren’t running a clock at the finish, which was one of the shortcomings of the event, in my opinion. It was chip timed, but the corrals weren’t that big and it would have been nice to see a general idea of what your time was when you finished. The front runners of each wave were passing the slowest finishers of the previous wave, but if they reset it every 30 minutes I think the slower people would realize they didn’t finish in 15 minutes. They had a tent with two TVs that were scrolling through finish times by gender and age group, but we checked it a couple of times and none of our times were showing on the list, so I don’t know how long it took me to finish. Alternately, make sure you wear a watch that you don’t mind getting wet and time yourself if you’re interested. I wasn’t running for speed, but the runner in me does want to know. The other miss was that the course was definitely not 3.22 miles. There’s just no way; I would love to know if someone used a GPS watch and what distance they got for the course. I would estimate maybe two miles, no more than two and a half. Even in looking at the course map provided on the website, what we ran was much different from what they are picturing there. There’s an entire out and back section that I’m pretty sure we didn’t run.

Here’s a post-dash picture of a couple of us. You can see how you can be relatively clean, semi muddy, or totally muddy depending on how much you were in the water at the end. Sue’s shirt started out light pink and I don’t think there was any amount of time she could’ve been in the water to make it less brown.

In general, things were much more organized than I expected and it was a fun event to do with a big group of people. I wouldn’t do it if it was just me or me and one other person. Nice tshirt, cool little medal, and funny warrior hat. I think only one of the people in my group runs regularly and everyone had a really good time, so you don’t have to be into running to do it and have fun. The only things I would change are to have a finish clock or other immediate access to your finish time, widening up the course, having it be the actual distance advertised, and more trash receptacles.

PS – here is a little video on YouTube that will give you a general idea of what to expect from Warrior Dash.

week in review

I am wiped the heck out after five hours on my feet, but the Festival for Life fundraiser for AIDS Athens seemed to be a raging success – lots of happy people, hopefully lots of happy dollars being donated. While driving home, I thought about how tired I was and how I could have run a marathon in the time I was there. It’s always good when you are equating things like that. In most of my races, I spend some amount of time thinking about things that would be worse than running for four hours or so, such as taking a biochemistry exam (this is my go-to mood booster – I could be sitting in a biochem exam, but I’m not), most trips to the mall, staying awake all night, riding in an airplane. It’s been so long since I’ve had a job that required me to stand for hours (probably about five years) that I forgot how much it hurts when you aren’t used to it.

Here’s what I did this past week. I decided to forgo the long run this week in favor of a longer spin class yesterday. That was pretty brutal and felt like a fair trade, even if not serving the same purpose. My run today was pretty awful; I sweated like a beast and my HR felt out of control until I slowed down to 9:30-ish miles. It was one of those runs that is less about fitness and more about a series of intense personal negotiations with yourself to keep moving. In the first mile or so I could feel the blister on my left foot expanding a little with each foot strike. The good news is, I won and kept going instead of quitting after a few miles like I really, really wanted to. Sometimes keeping track of miles is what keeps me from backing out early; I’m like, man, I do not want to write down another 3-4 mile run this week! My feet are even more jacked up, so I performed some minor surgical procedures in my car and picked up some tape to hopefully cover up the blisters for next time.

2/21 sunday – off
2/22 monday – 7 miles, 62:31
2/23 tuesday – 6.5 miles, 58:00 minutes – skated for 30-45 minutes (counted it up as 30 since it was just slow skating and interrupted for “green lightening” a couple of times) – in continuing mechanical failures of transportation news, I saw a train derailed on East Campus during this run.
2/24 wednesday – 3.02 miles, 27:53 – 45:00 spin class
2/25 thursday – 7.0 miles, 63:xx
2/26 friday – 5 miles, 45:35, 58:00 spin class
2/27 saturday – 10.14 miles, 1:35:00

total miles run: 38.66
run time: 5:51:59
total cardio time: 8:04:59

I doubt I’ll run tomorrow, so my mileage total for February is 159.94. A solid improvement over January’s 137.71 and bringing me to 297.65 for the year.

meat feet

Things that apparently become a big deal within a month of a goal race: people within 20 feet of you coughing or sneezing, blisters, and a couple of extra pounds. Brian was sick last week. I did some daytime sleeping over the weekend and avoided catching whatever he had. I hate to say it and want to knock on wood when I do, but I pretty rarely get sick. I didn’t have as much as a cold from February 2004 until May 2007 when I had shingles (and didn’t realize it until it was almost gone). I’ve only had one or two sinus/cold type things since then, but otherwise I am pretty lucky.

That brings me to blisters and my new shoes. Maybe change is not a good thing. I thought I was doing a little baby step by getting an updated version of my same shoe, but now I’ve got some updated tiny but mighty blisters on my right big toe and left ball of my foot, under the callous instead of on top of the skin. Oh, blast. Please go away and do not make me overnight a pair of my old shoes from Zappos.com. I’m pretty sure my big toe is also growing laterally, but I have very weird looking feet so I might have just not noticed before.

And then the pounds. I still haven’t dropped weight I gained over the holidays and it’s almost March, so that is kind of pathetic. I’m a pretty bad night eater, especially if I can’t sleep and I stay up doing something (as opposed to laying in bed trying to fall asleep). So, I have been trying to get ready to sleep a little earlier to avoid being up late. I had to weigh myself in kinesiology this afternoon and it wasn’t too bad, but I could still drop some kgs. It strikes me as supremely lame to complain about my weight because I am well within a healthy range and I also just feel like it’s not something you should do if you are a “nutrition professional” or grad student in my case. It does not generally come across well and seems a little judge-y. I am happy to be healthy and fit. I’m not thinking I am in the best or worst shape, but I have been in better shape so I guess I feel a little guilty that I am lacking in the motivation department lately. It is hard when you spend a huge amount of your time on food, health, body weight, etc. Not just thinking about it in a ho-hum way, but doing research, writing papers, meetings, seminars, classes all the time. Sometimes, enough is enough and I don’t want to wax poetic on it if I don’t have to, though I’ve kind of painted myself into a corner with my two favorite hobbies being running and baking. This all combined with not having a full time job is making me kind of depressed, which I finally admitted to myself the other morning and is pretty fair. I miss having a solid routine, even if I didn’t always like it, and finishing the day feeling like I did something (okay, maybe I am romanticizing work here). So, in some ways I feel like since I am not doing so hot in the financial department, I should be picking it up everywhere else by doing really well in school, stepping up my marathon training, keeping my house in order. Not sure what I can really do to fix this; I’ve been pursuing other work, but nothing is panning out. I am simultaneously underwhelmed and overwhelmed.

Anyway, sorry for the Debby Downer there. Not sure where that came from. This has been a good week. Nothing standout. I’m at 23 miles or so and had a really good spin class yesterday – which actually lasted the full 45 minutes. It never fails that I complain about something and then I feel bad about it. My long run this week is uncertain. I am thinking about skipping it/doing something shorter tomorrow because my feet are killing me, but I’ve been wearing some old shoes around the house for better support (instead of slippers or flops) and hopefully the blisters will calm down. This afternoon, I ran seven on the treadmill and my feet felt like they’d been pounded by a mallet when I was done, so doing 18 or 20 on the road sounds scary – but I really want to get two more long runs in (this week and next) before doing a decent taper. This Saturday is a big fundraiser for AIDS Athens and helping to setup/cleanup the event will probably take up the majority of the day/night.

good day for a run

I have been taking it easy this week for the most part. ING Georgia is four weeks away and it seems like about the time that I usually start feeling a little burned out. You know when you aren’t sick, but it seems like it might not be too far off if you don’t watch it? So, I have been chilling out and trying not to catch anything. I retired some old shoes with about 500 miles on them and got a new pair this week since I’ve been having some achy feet lately. I’ve done two runs in the new shoes and my feet are feeling alright so far. Usually I wear Saucony Progrid Guide 2s, but I have exhausted all the women’s color options besides white/baby pink and I bought the 3s instead after seeing them in Runner’s World, which said they were pretty much the same shoe with some minor tweaks. There’s nothing wrong with pink shoes, but I was not having a pale pink kind of week. I’ll let you know if I ever do.

My last swim class was Monday. The pool I swim in was hosting the SEC swimming and diving championship this week, so I haven’t been over to swim since. No spin, either. My gym has been having a fundraiser for Haiti this week where you pay $5 to reserve a spot in advance. Classes fill up really fast, so I haven’t had the heart to schedule around getting to class only to find out it’s full. Maybe tomorrow; I am definitely missing going to class.

This afternoon I met up with Melissa while she was visiting Athens and went for a run in the most perfect, perfect weather we’ve seen in months. Short sleeves and shorts! She was super nice and it was fun to run with someone for a change. I have to credit Melissa with making it pleasant enough that when we finished, I decided I might as well do my long run today instead of tomorrow since I was already six miles in. She has a really good attitude and I have a terrible one! I figured my feet might hurt or I might be a whiny bastard tomorrow (forecast: likely), so no time like the present to get it done. Running in town is so much different than running out here in the sticks and a lot more entertaining. Also, getting to stop at stoplights is pretty awesome. At mile 9, I stopped by Georgia Cycle Sport for two Hammer Gels and at mile 15, I stopped at the Golden Pantry for water and some Lifesavers, which were pretty much the most delicious things ever, except for the package being rife with the green flavor which immediately got chucked. Another thing that is awesome about running in town: places to buy things so you don’t have to carry them. I ended up back at my car after 18.xx miles (can’t remember exact time, average pace was 9:24) and called it done. Nothing too notable happened except that I saw the engine on a UGA bus explode on Milledge Avenue. I can just feel my student transportation fee increasing.

This is not related to anything – well, it kind of is because it’s part of why I have been stressed/not running as much – but I had my first statistics exam this week and miraculously scored a 19/20. The class is scored out of three 20-point exams so I was pretty stressed about doing poorly on the first one and having to scramble the rest of the semester. Somehow, I ended up taking this class with a bunch of people from my department even though none of us took the prerequisite course and I only had one undergrad level stat class. I’m not a math person, but I like statistics well enough; it’s easy to say that now that the test is over.

give me your miracle cures

I have had this gnarly back pain for two days. There’s a huge knot in my right trapezius that is making my posture off kilter and generally making me miserable. So far, I have tried some over the counter pain medicines (generic Advil/Aleve/etc), a muscle relaxer or three, forcing Brian to massage the knot every thirty minutes, using the foam roller, and putting a three pound hand weight on my yoga mat and using that to press into my back. The last three all hurt so much that I want to barf. Any ideas to make this go away? The pain came out of nowhere. I had a minor allergy problem on Wednesday morning (I have a peanut allergy), which made me feel pretty terrible for the rest of the afternoon, but was not really serious. That is when the pain started, but I’m not sure how the two are related. It’s not debilitating pain or anything, but it’s uncomfortable.

moving along

Tonight was my second swim class. I felt a lot more comfortable this time, though I’m not sure I actually gained much proficiency, and am so ridiculously spent. My calves are really tired and my joints are kind of sore. Am I the only person whose joints don’t mind running, but hurt from swimming? It is mostly my wrists and a little in my ankles. Not sure if I’m doing something wrong, or if it’s just because they are new movements. After I got home and showered, I made a bunch of falafel and a baked potato. The falafel was mostly so I could eat lots of Vegenaise on a burrito-sized tortilla. After I inhaled that monstrosity under my dogs’ watchful and disapproving eyes (drop it! drop it!), I took one bite of baked potato and it was over. My stomach said no more, crazy lady. I slept for less than four hours last night (fell asleep at two, woke up in between a bunch of times, moved around my house, got up at six). The best part was waking up to what I thought were children screaming outside in the middle of the night, but was probably cats fighting or “getting to know” each other underneath our house. Cats are jerks. The point of that story is please, please let me sleep tonight even though I ate some chocolate covered coffee beans before my run and then had a coffee flavored soymilk after swimming and didn’t think about what a bad idea that was.

Today it occurred to me that I have to start doing some long runs again for real since ING Georgia is in seven weeks. Why do I simultaneously hate and like running? I feel so much less motivated than most people. I might try to force 14 miles on Wednesday; I really could have done it today, but I spent most of the afternoon studying kinesiology and playing Snood on Facebook. I am what you might call “underemployed” at the moment, if you are thinking I’m a mega time waster navel gazer. I worked over the weekend and it was glorious, but short lived.

Here’s what I did last week. Hopefully this week brings a long run or two and some higher mileage.

1/17 sunday – nothing
1/18 monday – AM 7.0 miles, 62:04 – PM swim ~45min (lots of standing around in this time, though)
1/19 tuesday – off (I am really bad about doing stuff on tuesdays…)
1/20 wednesday – spin 45:00, 4.0 miles, 37:05
1/21 thursday – 8.0 miles, 81:11
1/22 friday – 8.0 miles, 82:40
1/23 saturday – 9.0 miles, 82:15 – spin class 45:00
*fun fact: on this day I thought I was getting to the gym at 3:30pm to run a couple miles before signing up for class, but actually got there and realized it was 2:30pm. Drat. A little Wife Swap? Don’t mind if I do.

totals for the week:
36 miles (again)

5:45:15 time running
8:00:15 total cardio (too much free time)

injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere

Happy MLK Jr. Day! I hope you were lucky enough to have a three day weekend (not the point of the holiday, I guess, but still a nice ray of sunshine post-winter holidays if you do). I had the morning off from school and spent it sleeping in and being pretty lazy after getting home and eating dinner around one AM last night after the roller zombies filming. It was a long day and a late night for this homebody. Getting back on skates is never as difficult as I think it might be, but it makes my back really sore afterward, mostly in my shoulders. What a weird area to hurt. I have one self-inflicted bruise. All in all, it was a lot of sitting around and not so much skating. I was thinking I was going to be really active for at least a couple of hours, but I think it would be pushing it to say it was more than 30 or so minutes of really scrimmaging/faux scrimmaging. It should be a cute movie. Want to see my zombie make up?

The red stripe was my “bout” makeup and the rest was when I got zombie-fied.

Everyone kept telling me I had a booger and I was like, IT’S LATEX! Sorry that the color is weird in the second one; I auto-adjusted to see what would happen since I took the picture with no flash and I guess it saved it because I couldn’t find the original with more normal color.

Okay, that is enough of the giant close ups of my face. I went to spin class this evening, hoping it might be less crowded if people were off work or out of town (and because my back hurts). No such luck. It took about as much time to land a spot in the class (5 minutes or so in line before they opened the sign up list, 15 until the previous class got out and I could snag a bike I wanted) as the class itself (45 minutes). Before the class started, a girl was asking me about my shirt (from the Atlanta half) and I tried to impart some feeble wisdom on ING Georgia, which she was planning to run as her first full in March (mostly to be ready for those three uphill miles around 17-20 or whatever it is and accept that it will eventually be over and she will finish). Happily, it was a really good class today and I left pretty beat. I ran an even four miles in 37:05 and called it a night so I could come home and study/eat the delicious burrito Brian brought for me; I believe it was his counter-strike to the whole wheat pizza I made for lunch this afternoon (spinach, olive, broccoli, and the dreaded red pepper, to his disappointment). Our fridge is starting to look pretty sad and it’s time for some low budget grocery shopping soon. Brains, anyone?