Holy Cow! I Finally Feel Like An Actual Runner (or Jogger At Least)

I was originally supposed to do a half-marathon today (as part of my ramping up for my marathon in a month), but because of my earlier Achilles' injury this fall (and because no one ever replied to my email to answer my question about pace times), I ended up not signing up like I had planned. But that's OK, because today I ended up having the best run of my life (so far, I hope) and it was two whole miles longer than the half marathon would have been.

For the past year in a half (or maybe a little longer, I tend to block out the painful running memories), I've been struggling to run. I've done a bunch of 5Ks, a few four mile races and even a half marathon last February. But through all those things, and all my training, I never was able to consistently run (or jog) for the entirety. While I do believe in Jeff Galloway's Run-Walk-Run method, and it has gotten me far, I really just wanted to have that feeling of truly going the distance running the whole way.

I've been working with my trainer Tara at the gym to do some intervals to help me increase my speed, but today's run wasn't about speed (good thing, since my miles ranged from 11:30 to 14:30 in pace), today's run was about trying to run for as long as I could. Tara and my dad, have both been telling me for ages that the reason I end up running for a mile and then walking for a bit, or running for 5 minutes and then walking a minute, wasn't because of my conditioning or my athletic ability, but because of my brain. All my "but my legs hurt" or "I can't breathe" are just apparently excuses from my mind, according to them. It does make sense, as I was the kid in high school who sucked wind finishing the obligatory mile around the track, and maybe once or twice hid behind the bleachers so the teacher would think I'd done more laps around the outdoor track than I actually had. I never cheated in academics, but gym was not my thing.

So while I've been doing a bunch of training "runs" leading up to the marathon, of varying lengths, today's was the longest... at 15.1 miles. It's the furthest I've ever even attempted, even doing a run-walk method. I mean, I did hike about 25 miles a few weekends ago, but that's slow and walking and a totally different medium. There's something different about the repetitive pounding of running on the multi-use path near my house for over three hours. I'd rather climb mountains. Or do anything. Really anything. Me and running, we may have come to a mutual tolerance, but its never going to be my sport of choice. Its always going to be a chore.

My goal going out today wasn't to run the entire 15 miles. And yes, according to my marathon plan I should be up to 18 at this point, but my training is all messed up because of injuries and whatnot, and now I'm just trying to the best that I can, in order to get as good as I can before marathon day on Nov. 18th. Anyway, my goal for myself was to run three miles straight, not worrying about speed or anything, just running without taking a break for walking. And I did. I kept my heart rate pretty low, around 140, and noticed that when I got up around 155 or so that my breathing got more labored, and decided that today was about endurance and not getting under an 11 minute mile. So I jogged along. And at the 5K mark (3.2 miles) I was feeling good. Not fast, but good. So I kept going, and decided I'd try to get to 5 miles.

At mile 5, I still felt good, so long as I didn't rush my pace too much, when I did push it, the achey knees and heavy breathing started up. But at mile 6, I had to make a quick pit stop where I refilled my water, sucked down a GU energy gel (my new savior) and made a fast dash into the potty. I knew there wouldn't be another chance for another 8 miles. So I walked for a few minutes out of the ladies, to get my legs back in gear, and then after about 30 seconds or so, got back to my slow and steady pace.

At mile 8, I actually felt awesome. Perhaps the elusive runner's high that I've never truly experienced, or the sugar rush from the energy gel (I'm betting its this one), but I was honestly thinking that maybe I'd extend my run beyond the 14/15 I'd planned to the full 18. I know, craziness. But I felt great, and looking at my Nike GPS breakdown, I did some negative splits at that point and was running about a full minute to a minute and a half faster than the 14:00 I'd been doing for a few miles. It was probably the best I've ever felt running. I was smiling at people passing by in the other direction, singing along to my music on my headphones (yes, I'm aware this makes me look/sound insane) and feeling pretty fantastic.

At mile 9.5, I saw a woman wipe out and stopped to check to make sure she was OK (she was) and then about 2/10s of a mile later, my hamstrings tightened up. Lesson learned? Don't stop, it hurts more to restart. I did some lunges and stretches, and felt pretty OK. Well, until mile 11.That's where I felt like I was going to die and just wanted to stop and walk for the rest of the four miles back to where I'd parked my car. Side note: I hate that I have to drive to go running, but the paths are so much nicer than running the dangerous streets around me that it is worth the 15 minute drive... at least until I have to get my legs to function to drive home.

And I could have walked the rest of the four miles, and still felt like I'd had a successful day. After all, my goal was to see if I could run for three miles straight, and I'd well surpassed that. But the idea of walking for four more miles, and tacking on probably at least another 15 minutes to this long journey didn't appeal. I just wanted to be done. So I grabbed a second GU (which I hadn't planned on using, but kept in case of emergency), did some quick hamstring stretches and got back on the track after less than a minute break.

Then I slow-jogged (like a slow jam for the running set?) the rest of the way (unfortunately, these last miles is where 90 percent of the hills (which aren't big, but are still hills) on this path are. And I kept jogging at a snail's pace, but did manage to pass a woman with a cane and a motley crew of kids wobbling around on their bikes, so I'll take that as a small victory. And then I started cursing at the inanimate mile markers on this path. Why do they need to be every one tenth of a mile? Why couldn't they be at the half or quarter mile points? I felt like the markers were somehow taunting me making me seem like I was going nowhere really slowly.

But eventually, I saw my car. And nearly started crying with relief. To go from run/walking to doing 15 miles in one stretch, took quite toll on my legs... and my spirit towards the end. But I did it! And I'm super happy about that, as I sit on the couch with my legs screaming at me even four hours later. Which means that I may have broken through that mental barrier that was keeping me from actually doing more running than walking. I can't wait to tell Tara and my dad.

The upside is that I feel better about doing the marathon than I have since I signed up. I really imagined that I'd get shuffled to the half marathon end because I couldn't keep the 16 mile pace up for 26 miles, but my GPS told me that only once (around mile 11, did I even get close to hitting 15:00. So if I keep up my random Angel schedule of training for the next month, I believe I may finish this thing without getting a DNF. And given that this may be the only marathon I ever do (unless I go crazy in my late 40's and do a full Iron Man), it would be awesome to have that medal as proof that I went 26.2 whole miles and ran/jogged the whole way, instead of walked the majority of it.

Training Just As Much As I Can

I've read a ton of guides on how to train for a marathon, and even a bunch on how to juggle busy schedules, but none of them really take into consideration the single mom. While I can drop my 6-year-old off at the gym babysitting area for an hour on occasion, that doesn't really do me that much good. So instead of being able to train the recommended days a week for running, I'm lucky to squeeze in two or three days with my hectic life.

 That's not to say that I don't do other exercise on the other days. On the early mornings and nights that my daughter is with her dad, I usually get in a bootcamp class or a training session to help with my overall weight loss goals. A yoga class to help with my sanity. An interval running session with my trainer once a week and then usually a long run and another short run if I'm lucky.

And my daughter and I walk home from school, or all around town to go to the library or the movies, or hiking. So I'm more than active in my non-work/commuting time, even when I do have my child, but I don't have the luxury that most of these training manuals do. They all suggest getting up early to run. Love it! But what am I supposed to do while my kid is asleep? They all say to enlist your spouse to be on baby duty. Not an option and I'm pretty sure that child protective services would have something to say about me leaving my kid and running 4-6 miles in the morning while she's snoozing. Or even leaving her so that I could go down to the gym in my building's lobby.

I have an elliptical trainer in my house that I can use, but that's not the same as the pounding of running, and honestly I can't afford a decent treadmill at this point. So I'm doing my best. I don't know if it will be enough. I'm not a natural runner at all. I still do a lot of walking, as I can really only run for about 5 minutes before I need to slow down.

The interval training is definitely helping, and everyone around me seems pretty confident that I can do this marathon in the allotted 7 hours, even if I have to crawl at a 16 minute mile pace across the finish line. I just worry that between a recent injury to my ankle and my abbreviated training, that I won't be quite at the same level as everyone else come race day. Then again, I did manage to finish my triathlon with the aforementioned tendon issue, in a slower than I wanted, but not totally unrespectable time last month. Maybe I'm just worrying for nothing, but I've got a feeling that I'm not going to get much of a good night's sleep in the weeks before the Philadelphia marathon arrives.

The Low Iron Woman

Lately I've been feeling sluggish and had a real negative outlook on the chances of me actually being able to finish my marathon in November. Running just seemed next to impossible, and even my speed walking had slowed to a deathly pace. And while I can normally function pretty well on 5 to 6 hours of sleep a night, even 8 didn't seem like nearly enough. And halfway through any exercise, be it my yoga or training or whatever, I just felt wiped out. This was not the Angel I've fought so hard to become over the last two years.

And, as I mentioned recently, my weight loss had pretty much come to a standstill. In talking to my weight loss consultant, she suggested that I go get bloodwork done (which I scheduled, despite my lack of interest in doctors). But during our conversation, she told me about another client who had a similar problem, but turned out to be anemic. Well, at that point in the conversation my ears perked up. I have such a healthy diet filled with beans and green vegetables and some red meat that it could be a problem. In high school I survived on pizza, doritos and ice cream, so iron deficiency made more sense. I was later telling a friend that if I wasn't single, someone would probably think I was abused because I'd been getting crazy bruises really easily. Like a mere graze against a book shelf and my arm is black. Also, a major sign of iron deficiency.

So while I'm adding lots more spinach to my diet (trying to make up for all the watermelon I was eating this summer, which is apparently high in iron and maybe kept my levels up), for the next few days I'm also taking a supplement. In only five days, I feel so much better and back to my normal self, though I'm still keeping my upcoming doc appointment just to make sure there's not something else weird going on.

I may have my energy back, but I'm still having mild anxiety attacks about the marathon though... Is it normal to wake up at 2 AM in a cold sweat thinking you should be out running?

Remembering The Fat Old Days

Been feeling a little bummed lately about gaining a couple pounds and struggling to lose them again, despite all of my exercise and ridiculous endeavors. But looking back on a picture like the one above (from about 4 years ago) actually made me take a breather and remember how far I've come. So while the scale may say three pounds more than it did earlier this summer, it's nowhere close to the nearly 70 pounds more I was in this photo. So I'm putting this picture as my desktop background, in hopes that it will keep me going through marathon training (which is going terribly) and through the winter when the mere idea of going to the gym seems like a struggle.

It's Only a Flesh Wound

I came back from a day hike with my dad and had some scratches all over my leg and a giant bruise. I jammed my leg into a rock, and tangled with a small pine tree while doing some scrambling. My daughter saw it (it was a lot bloodier when she saw it, the photo was taken post clean up) and said, "Mommy, you come back from all your adventures with boo boos." Yup, that's me. Super clumsy.

My mother always used to call me Calamity Jane because if there was a table to be run into, or a bottle to knock over, I'd be the one to do it. But since I've gotten more adventurous, my injuries have become more frequent (thankfully I've never broken anything more than a toe). In Costa Rica, I ended up with a third degree burn on my leg from an ATV. While hiking in Virginia with my brother, I stumbled off of trail, landed on some rocks and my ankle got all swollen and I had a nice abrasion from wrist to elbow. I went for a bike ride near my friend Maryanne's house and ended up falling and scraping up my leg and arm (same arm as during hiking)! I got a nice gouge in my leg from my 100 mile bike ride. In addition to the bump this weekend, I also slammed my little toe into a rock during my triathlon and maybe broke it, but at the very least cut it open so it was bleeding (didn't notice until after I completed my race). And that's not even counting all of the bumps and bruises that are constantly covering my legs and arms. Sometimes I feel like I'm dressing like an Amish person, in order to cover my assorted injuries at work.

But again, while I'm always a little bit banged up, I've been extremely lucky to only have surface wounds. Some of them hurt more than others, and some of them really sucked, but they all healed up in time (though I've still got a couple lasting scars). It's probably a bad sign that my 6-year-old, who freaked when I came home from Costa Rica with a giant burn on my leg, has just started writing off these flesh wounds as normal, but at least she knows her mommy is made of some pretty tough stuff and that a few little bangs aren't going to slow me down (or not for long, anyway).

Rain, Rain, Go Away!

I stayed up pretty late last night doing laundry and watching the Olympics (I'm a sucker for gymnastics), so 5:45 on my alarm came pretty darned early. I was trying hard to pull myself out of bed, when all of a sudden the skies opened up and it started torrentially downpouring. Now I'm not one to let the weather get in my way of exercising most of the time. I've run in icy cold Maine weather and in the Texas heat. Usually a little drizzle doesn't bother me. In fact, I've had some of my better runs when there's a cool rainfall coming down. But this? Combined with exhaustion? I just couldn't face. Of course the shower lasted only about 40 minutes or so, but it happened at the exact time I have to run. It's nice NOW, but that does me no good as I've got only a few minutes to get ready for work. I enjoyed the extra 20 minutes of sleep this AM, but I'm already planning on how to make up for it later tonight. I hear today is national burpee day...

Tour de Chocolate Town: My First (Almost) Century Ride

There was just something epic sounding about riding my bike 100 miles. I liked the evenness of the 100. It just had a lovely ring to it. Sure if I'd realized at the time of my sign up that the 65 Mile option was 100 Kilometers I might have considered that, but just, the idea of going 100 miles in a day was definitely on my list of things I wanted to do.

Leading up to the big day on June 3rd, I didn't have a ton of time to train on long rides, but I did do some pretty intensive 20/30 mile days that had a lot of hills built into them. For me, I can be on my bike all day and not care. I love it, but hills are definitely my weakness, and I wanted to make sure that even if I got to mile 90 and hit a great big hill, that I wouldn't be hopping off and walking because I wasn't prepared. And in the end, the only hill I had to walk part of the way up was the one where I hit my knee and started bleeding, so I suppose practicing going up some beasts of climbs all around NJ actually paid off. As for the reason I didn't quite make it the full 100 miles, well, that's some human error at play.



I got up about 2 AM, so I could leave my house by 3 and get to Hershey by 6 AM, so I'd have time to fiddle with my bike, get my packet and get stretch a little before we were allowed to start the ride at 7 AM. And, though some pesky deer did try and jump up out in front of me at one point, the rest of the ride was rather uneventful. So I got there, chatted with a few people (most of whom were shocked I had driven so far) and got ready to go. Mostly this meant studying my map, since there were several routes to choose from, a 17.5, a 35, a 65 or the 100. And I made sure to pay attention to people who had like colored wristbands, knowing they'd be going my way. Once it started at Hershey stadium, we wended our way around the parking lot, and then through the actual Hershey Park. I got to ride through most of the park, before we were let out a secret exit and then on to the streets of Hershey. We rode up through some Hershey sites and then over to the college, mostly the same route as the cute little trolley tour that you can take.

Once out of Hershey land, we were into farmland and countryside. I learned that while corn looks flat, its not, there were so many rolling hills, that by the time I got to the first rest stop around mile 15, I'd begun to wonder what I had gotten myself into. That turnoff for the 16.5 mile ride looked tempting, but I forged on. Then about three miles out of the rest stop (which was packed with snacks and most importantly refreshing ice water) was when I was riding up a big hill and fighting with my low gears (a problem that has since been fixed at my bike shop), when my gear shifted unexpectedly and wrenched by leg up so that it hit my bike pump and gouged my knee. I walked to the top of the hill, put some of the ice water on it, grabbed the bandaid I had remembered to pack in my small backpack and slapped it on and kept going. After all, I had 80 more miles or so to go.

So up and down over all the rolling hills, each time I had to really get up a big hill my knee was killing me, but at another rest stop I found a lovely person with some advil. Around mile 30 or so I met up with a lovely woman whose husband was clearly itching to really power fast through some miles. He was moving fast and then would get about a mile up and wait for her. So we told him to go on to a rest stop and we'd meet him there. It was at that crucial rest stop that I made my big mistake. There was a sign there for the big 35 mile loop that took off and differentiated from the 65 mile. I grabbed a yummy PB&J from the volunteers, as I was starving and had been riding for several hours. Then took off, since my newfound friend was doing the 65 mile ride. So we separated after they both marveled at the fact that I was attempting to go the full 100 miles on my hybrid bike, when most of the riders doing the long ride were on sleek little road bikes that were far lighter.



So I headed off, but for some reason there wasn't a big group leaving the rest stop when I was, and I missed one of the little stickers that were on the road indicating which way to go. I misread my map and ended up on a strange but beautiful road, that after about 7 miles, connected back with what I thought was the loop I needed, but turned out to be the road back to the rest stop I had just left. So I biked back, tried to go down the proper road, and made it about 5 or 6 miles or so (I really need to get one of those handy odometers), when some guy passed me and said that he felt like he was on the wrong road, and he turned around, so I turned around with him, and ended back at that same rest stop.

At that point I began to worry I wouldn't finish by the four o'clock deadline if I attempted the same route for a third time... and I was running out of gas. So I opted to hop back on the return route to Hershey, which was still a good 30 miles away. Turns out, that the hardest part was on the way back, an enormous hill with huge elevation gain, but it was the prettiest (aside from 3 Mile Island). Once I started nearing Hershey and seeing familiar sites, I was so delighted. Even though I'd long stopped seeing people who were doing the ride. But the bike path that leads around the hospital out there was just gorgeous (seriously, ride it if you are in the neighborhood). But about 5 miles from the end, and with only an hour left before the cutoff, it started pouring. But not just rain, thunderstorms. I can deal with water, even on my bike, but thunderstorms? Lighting when I'm in an exposed area, or riding around rollercoasters is more than a little disconcerting. And what's more, I saw a guy on a motorcycle totally wipe out in front of me because of all the water. As the storm ended, I finally arrived in the stadium, and got my t-shirt and pin and they threw a ton of food at me (since I was one of, if not the, last people to finish), but weirdly no chocolate. That's probably my biggest complaint about this ride. Anyway, I had seen a couple around the mile 90 sign, and they had told them that I was still behind them, so the volunteers knew I was still coming. All of the volunteers were impressed that I did the century (or anything close to it, since I told them my getting lost saga) and were extra impressed that I finished in the rain. But I still had nearly three hours to drive home, before I could truly relax.

I was happy that I made it anywhere near 100 miles, since it was leaps and bounds over what I'd done before. I'm quite into challenging myself, and this was indeed that. I know better how to look for the signs and pay attention the cues Now that my bike is fixed (apparently the gears were off, even though the young kid at the shop told me it was my imagination when I went in to get it checked at the end of last summer), thanks to my dad getting it a nice tune up. If (more like when), I go it again, I'll have learned a lot and be way better prepared. I'd be curious to try out a road bike, just to see how it effects my speed... maybe I'd be able to ride 15+ miles an hour instead of closer to 10/12. I also feel like I could kill at 65 mile ride, with no problem, so next spring, I might add a couple of those to my to do list, and maybe another century as well to make sure I did the whole thing. Maybe even this one. I don't think I have plans next May 19th...