Half Awake

The porta-potty line is not where you want to be when the they announce that there are 4 minutes left until the start of a race with 11,000 registered runners.  It’s like one of those scenes in superhero movies where the hero needs to choose between saving their sidekick and their love interest, except also their bladder is also overflowing and it’s really hard to think about anything except Niagara Falls.  Sure, there’s like 75 stalls, but when at least 15 people are ahead of you in your line, some mental math will quickly tell you that the situation is hopeless, that the porta-potty just wasn’t in your horoscope today, and that you might soon be forced to make an executive decision about just how important going to the bathroom before a race is (FYI - it’s pretty frigging important). 

So this morning before running my second Boilermaker race in Utica, NY, I made a mad dash into the woods (where I saw at least two-dozen other men and women), used the spacious facilities of Nature, sprinted to the start (vaulting over one of those ugly plastic mesh fences en route), and had just enough time to re-tie my shoes before the gun went off.

Races with thousands of runners tend to start slowly.  So slowly that it can take several minutes to cross the actual starting line after the gun goes off.  You do a lot of work initially darting into spaces as they open up in the crowd, and you get a lot of mean looks as you frantically cut people off in an effort to actually start racing.  Given the initial crawl, I wasn’t too surprised when I passed the first mile-marker and the humongous digital clock read near 9-minutes.  But after that, the speed picked up pretty fast.

I don’t like wearing watches in road races because I try to just focus on pushing the pace rather than thinking about splits.  I’ve been known to dislike wearing watches so much that if I’m accidentally wearing one at the start, I’ll immediately hand it off to an arbitary person in the crowd (with my fingers crossed that I’ll be able to find them later).  Today, however, every mile of the race had a huge digital clock burning my splits into the back of my brain, and I couldn’t help but calculate how fast each mile was.  I won’t break down the splits here, but I will say that the fourth and fifth miles were both around 6 minutes/mile, which actually frightened me a bit during the race, especially given the course elevation profile.

Boilermaker Elevation

I ran these quick miles after a pretty decent starting 5K (22:48).  Yeah, mile five is way downhill, but mile four is the steepest of the race.  After I hit the 10K (42:44), my body started giving up and I struggled through to the finish.  It is totally ridiculous and unbelievable to me that after running 90% of a race like this, thoughts of stopping will creep into the edges of my consciousness.  Why then, when the finish is practically in view?!  But I didn’t stop, and finished in a happy 62:58 (gun time), at least four minutes faster than the last time I ran this race.  The post-race party was awesome (fortuitous, considering it took me over 2 hours to find the people I drove up to Utica with).  I feel sort of tight and tired now, and I’m looking forward to an easy recovery run tomorrow!

(By the way, I’m super glad I got to write a longish blog post on Embrace Your Geekiness Day).

Where I work, I have two options for local group running:

• The old (my age and older), but really fast, group that meets daily at noon, or,
• The young (6-10 years younger than me), but really fast, group that meets daily at 6PM.

Both of these options present problems for me. The old group is great, but stuff (usually important stuff involving food) happens at noon, and it’s just not convenient to escape from work for 1-2 hours in the middle of the day, especially when that escape involves a sweaty-nasty return. The young group is also great, but they’re… well, young, and sometimes it feels awkward.

So for the past several seasons I’ve just been going it alone or with the random office mate who is willing to run with me. But I’m sick of it. I’ve been training for a long race, and that means I’ve been doing many long-lonely runs. Pounding the pavement alone is actually cathartic sometimes, but it’s really hard to get myself motivated to do that 5-6 times a week.

So today, I went out with the young group, and it was sweet. They ran fast (within my range, but faster than I would run on my own), they were fun and welcoming, and the run went by *really* quickly. So, I’m going to join them for a few more of their summer runs and see what happens. Worst case scenario, I can imagine that I’m giving them sage running advice that can only come from someone with “experience”.

I’ve been planning to write a post about winter running for a while now. However, last I checked, spring has officially started, so it seems like the time to comment on my winter running experience has passed. Long story short: I ran about 20 miles per week for the whole winter. I also had a bit of success in indoor track meets. Overall, it feels awesome to be entering April having run for the past 5 months, rather than starting from scratch as usual.

Today, I ran a local 10K. Since I didn’t do many runs longer than 4 miles over the winter, I saw the race as a long tempo run. Toeing the line just before 10:30 this morning in beautiful 50 degree weather, I decided to run without my watch, and just see what I could do with a consistent push.

The first 5K was great. I was able to keep a decent pace without tiring myself out too much. Another runner I know caught up to me and we worked off each other a lot. When we came to the 5K turnaround, they called out that my split was 19:46.

19:46 was great, but it also presented a problem. I’ve never run a sub 40-minute 10K (it’s possible that I ran one in high school, but I think I only ran one 10K back then, and I don’t remember the time). In fact, I can’t remember the last time I ran sub 44. So, I was presented with this fortuitous and spur-of-the-moment opportunity to run sub 40 here, and that meant that the second half of the race was going to get pretty hard. Almost immediately I felt like I was hitting a wall. Luckily the way back to the finish was net-(gradual)-downhill. By focusing on taking quick strides and just pushing as much as possible, I was able to get back and finish in 39:01 (a negative split!). This is a good start to the warm season; I normally start the summer with a 2-month period of getting back in shape, but now I get to enjoy working off of a decent base. Woo!

I had an MRI this morning (two MRIs, technically) to help my doctor figure out why I still get headaches as often, or as easily, as I do. I know the headaches originate in my upper back or neck, and some ergonomic fixes and physical therapy took care of a lot of them about a year ago. However, they still come a couple times a week, and often I wake up with them, or with the neck aches that lead to them, which is almost as bad a start to the day as when the cat is licking your face and telling you you missed the bus. The goal of the MRI was to see if there is anything structurally off that might be predisposing me to neck problems.

If you have never had an MRI, they are very loud, and can tend to be unpleasant, unless you like hearing the sound of a jackhammer right above your head while you’re strapped into a confined space and told to remain absolutely motionless for an hour and a half. The first one this morning wasn’t too bad. I think the repetitive nature of the ear-splitting noises actually put me into a sort of trance. During the second image, however, I started to have a sharp stinging pain at the back of my head, near where the ridge of my skull came in contact with the pad I was laying on. This pain got worse and worse throughout the exam, and a few times I considered calling the technician back in, but decided that would only prolong my discomfort and just toughed it out. I couldn’t ignore the pain, it just hurt too much, so I started trying to figure out what its source was. The best explanation I could think of involved me being secretly tagged with a micro RF transmitter by the shadow government so they could track me quickly, you know, in case I went rogue. That tag was being ripped through my cranial flesh by the powerful magnets in the MRI. If that infernal machine hadn’t been banging so loud I probably could have figured out exactly why they felt I was such a threat.

When I was finally wheeled out of the MRI, I asked the technician if that pain was normal, and she said it was not. We came to the conclusion that it was just due to putting pressure on a pointy part of my head for so long, but I think I like my origin story better.

I’ve been able to keep up my winter running so far this year. I’m hovering around 20 miles per week, and not forcing myself to go out if it just feels like to much. I try to do one speed workout per week, but it’s often not that long (e.g. 4×400, or 5×200).

At the local January Track meet, I ran a surprising 11:33.6 for the 2-mile. My goal had been to run under 12 minutes, and 11:33 was an awesome surprise. Afterwards a 5:30 mile seemed within my grasp and I started mentally prepping for that.

Yesterday was the February track meet, and I ran the mile. I had been trying to run my speed workouts at 5:20 pace to prepare for this race, but they were really hard. Even 200m at that pace felt like I was going all-out. So when I registered for the meet and entered my ‘predicted time’, I thought that my prediction of 5:25 was probably pushing it.

But somehow I did it. During the race I just focused on the huge digital clock at the start line, and made sure that every lap put me under 5:20 pace. Then with 2 laps to go I let all the rest of my gas burn and came through in 5:13!

This puts me in an interesting place going forward. I haven’t run 5:13 since high school, and my first time running that fast was probably my sophomore year (10+ years ago) . It feels like this could be the beginning of some really great racing for me. Or, it could be the beginning of a big downhill slump. In any case, 5:13 puts some new post-high school PRs in range… Eleven minute 2-miles and eighteen minute 5Ks suddenly seem possible again. That would be… That would be incredible.

I’m not too worried about the future though. I’m just going to focus on training frequency like before. I think if I can maintain a consistent schedule until it gets warm again I’m going to have a great running summer.

Last New Years, I made a resolution that I would stand up to people more consistently, and try to voice my opinion.  I think I’ve been doing a good job with that, but really it’s hard to say for sure.  I certainly tried to meet my resolution, and I guess that counts in this case.

This year’s resolution is going to be more quantitative.  I’m resolving to run 1000 miles in 2008.

This is challenging, and will rely partly on staying injury and illness free (does that mean I’m relying on luck?), but I think it’s achievable given recent statistics from 2007, which was a phenomenal running year for me, at least in terms of consistency.  First, let’s consider my yearly mileage for the last seven years:

I’ve definitely upped my mileage over the years, to a total of 740 miles in 2007.  Seeing how I ran almost twice as much in 2007 as in 2006, it’s possible that I may have hit a plateau, and that I won’t be able to run that much more.  So I took a look at the seasonal pattern over the last seven years:

In this chart, “WS” is the Winter-Spring season (January-April), “S” is the Summer season (May-August), and “F” is the Fall season (September-December). It’s immediately clear that I haven’t been running much in the WS seasons relative to the others. So there is definitely a good potential to increase my mileage by a few hundred in 2008.  Step 1 is just to keep running through the winter.

And so far that’s going well too.  In 2006 my final serious run was at the end of November, and I didn’t pick up running consistently again until April of 2007.  I ended 2007 averaging 25 miles per week, with a recent maximum of 30 miles.  I feel good about my training, and I sort of look forward to the runs even when it’s cold.  I’m not going to do anything crazy this season.  Just consistent, frequent, running to build a base for the Spring, and hopefully a foundation from which I can meet my resolution.

OK, maybe I’ll run a couple indoor track meets, too ;-).

The final race of the XC season took place Sunday. It was a gorgeous 8K at a local community college. I knew ahead of time that this would be a tough one. Since I injured my ankle earlier this season, I haven’t done a single run longer than 4.5 miles. An 8K is just under 5 miles, so I was under-prepared by definition.To my surprise and despair, it was not the distance that wrecked me so much as the humongous hill in the 4th mile of the course. I’ve been selectively avoiding hills all season, since that’s the one activity that still messes with my achilles. Luckily none of the previous XC races held significant hills, and my lack of hill training didn’t affect me too much. Sunday my luck ran out.

Since this was the championship race, I did not have the luxury of running with my most evenly-matched demographics, the masters and veteran men, who were split into a separate race. For this reason, the pack thinned quite early. Still, I felt strong in the 3rd mile, and even passed three people. Once we reached the huge hill in the 4th mile, I attacked it and managed to pass two more. But once I hit the first plateau I was destroyed. I wrote recently about angels and demons that speak to us while we race. There was none of that when I got to the top of this hill. Both the angels and demons were all dead, and all my mind could do was process the pain I felt. If you’ve ever struggled up a hill in an XC race you probably know what I mean - hills hurt in a different way from the rest of the race, and it’s scary if you’re not used to it. I spent the next half-mile chugging gradually uphill at a barely perceptible pace Finally at the 4-mile marker I seemed to remember “Oh - I’m in a race!” and pick it up until I reached the finish. I put on a strong kick and finished happily.

Since I had so much time off this season I’m going to turn instantly to training for indoors. I’m trying to commit to running consistently this winter, and that starts with a consistent basis built through the rest of 2007.

This weekend I ran a 6K race on a course that I had raced approximately 1-year ago. When I ran it last fall, I was going through some rough times, having recently broken up with my girlfriend of six years, and was generally preoccupied with desperate thoughts. I have been known to complain about not being able to focus in races anymore, but back then I had abandoned all hope of being able to concentrate on anything. I literally couldn’t even focus while tying my own shoelaces.

But I’ve healed quite a bit since then, and this time my head was mostly in the game.

At the start I went out very slowly to protect my weak ankle (nothing like going out dead last in a race that includes competitors over twice as old as you). After the initial sprint I keyed off one of the veteran runners on our team - an impressively fast man we refer to as “Coach” - who was running about 100 meters ahead of me. Coach was wearing a fluorescent yellow long sleeve t-shirt, which helped me catch up with him just over 1/2 mile into the race. Again playing it safe, I decided to just hang with him for once rather than powering past him for a mile only to be passed in a humiliating way later on.

Coach is a consistent runner, and running consistently hard felt uncomfortable to me. I imagined for a moment that I was the comic book hero Spawn, and could summon the chains of the underworld to anchor me to my enemies. From then on I was attached to Coach by steel bonds, and I didn’t separate from him for another two miles.

When you run a race, there are constantly angels and devils whispering into your ears. The angels say “you can do it! pain is temporary, glory is forever!“, while the devils simultaneously whisper “the pain is too much! nobody will know if you slow down.” I listened to them both at various points in the race, but with half a mile left to go I was listening to the devils, who were saying “if you slow down now, then that man in black ahead of you won’t be close enough to catch at the end, and you won’t have to work as hard.“

Because I tend to run races near people who are significantly older than me, I usually don’t get passed in the last quarter mile. In Sunday’s race, Coach passed me with about 600 meters to go, right after I had succumbed to the sweet advice of the racing devils and let the man in black get away from me. Something woke up in me then, and the voices of both the angels and the devils were gone. I put on a short spurt to catch coach and hang on his tail.

Coming down the final stretch I knew it was just me and Coach — I had judged from the cheering that our closest competitors were 30 meters back. With 300 meters left I was ready to drop the hammer and tear though the grass between me and the finish like an out-of-control tractor. But something strange happened. The world got quiet, and I decided to just finish with Coach. I had a Zen moment where the refractory bit of glory gained by burning down the final stretch was replaced with the satisfaction of running a smart, hard race with one of my teammates.

Maybe the devils were speaking to me then too, telling me that there was no need to work hard to pass my own teammate, but I think that I learned something important about racing, patience, and teamwork this weekend. I ran the 6K course 12 seconds faster this year, and that’s after taking four weeks off from running to heal my ankle.

After a week of exercises, my ankle feels significantly better. The pain and swelling has been mostly replaced by a constant soreness, and my focus is now on rehabbing it properly to prevent re-injury. Yesterday I went for a short 16 minute jog on a flat paved trail near my house. My left ankle was noticeably weak, but it was great to be sucking wind and moving a bit.

My one complaint is that there’s something wrong with my achilles or heel area. The physical therapist said that I might have injured the spot where the achilles connects to the heel. This causes pain in the heel and bottom of the foot when I extend my ankle fully, particularly if it’s bearing weight (e.g. calf raises). There seem to be a number of possible causes for this type of pain, but for now I think the only thing I can do is strengthen the area, stretch it out, and take it slow.

Like I mentioned earlier this week, I recently suffered an ankle sprain that has prevented me from running for almost two weeks now. At the recommendation of Tony and another friend, I made a trip to physical therapy this morning. It turns out that there is a new local law that allows patients to refer themselves to a physical therapist rather than going through a primary care physician, which allowed me to get an appointment rather quickly.

The ankle itself has healed quite a bit since Monday. My foot is still slightly bruised, and I get a twinge of pain occasionally when I take a bad step or put my shoe on too fast. The biggest problem is that it’s still swelling up some whenever I walk around too much, which gives the feeling that my whole foot is numb. I explained my symptoms to the therapist, who did a series of measurements comparing the flexibility and size of one of my ankles to the other. The range of motion of my injured ankle was down by as much as 30% in certain directions (that’s my estimate based on looking over her shoulder at the measurements). This isn’t terrible, considering that my “good” ankle is actually very flexible, but it helps establish a goal for the rehabilitation process.

She also felt my ankles up for a while to see where the sore spots were, and decided that I had stretched the posterior talofibular ligament. There are three ankle ligaments, shown in blue in the picture, and she proposed that the reason I was bruising more with this injury was that either I had never torn this particular ligament in previous ankle injuries, or I had reopened some scar tissue from previous injuries.

A lot of this is guesswork, but I feel like physical therapy is somehow more codified than, say, evaluating an ear, nose, or throat infection. The therapist prescribed an aggressive set of exercises, along with some biking and perhaps water running, and I’m going to go back in a week.

When I was living at altitude in New Mexico this summer, I would often joke that as soon as I got back to sea-level I’d run a 5K, set my ‘post-high-school’ personal record, and then retire from running forever.

I guess I should be careful what I wish for.

The week I returned, I had an allergic reaction to the dog that my roommate Phoebe rescued over the summer. Suffering an asthma attack is not the ideal way to start a cross country season, but I got on my inhalers, and once the dog was made to live outside I started feeling better. Luckily, this wasn’t the precipitous end to my running career that it could have been.

My first race back home was a nice 3 miler on a flat and fast XC course on mowed fields and some trails. I ran it in 18:16, much better than anything I’ve done since high school. It wasn’t easy, but it showed that I was in good racing shape. The following Monday I decided to go for an easy nighttime recovery run. About 1 mile into it, BAM!, I twisted my ankle on a stray piece of wood and hit the sidewalk like a wet bag of groceries. After rolling around on the ground for five minutes I stood up and began the long, awkward, and excruciating hobble back to my house. (N.B. - If you ever happen to drive by someone dressed in running clothes who is limping alongside the road clutching their leg in agony, consider slowing down to ask them if they need help).

It’s been a week since that run. After 4 days of Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation, the swelling reduced, but left in its wake some nasty bruises. Now it’s still bruised, and I can’t move the ankle through its range of motion without pain. This is the worst ankle injury I’ve had in years, and it stinks to be taking so much time off at the beginning of cross country. I feel like everything I worked for training over the summer is gone… Is it?

This summer, after fulfilling a pledge to run for 7 consecutive days, I went 68 days running every single day for at least 10 minutes. Then, while traveling in Washington D.C., I got sick and had to take several days off. After that I continued to run 5-6 days per week, and I felt great about it. The 68 day streak served as jump start into consistent training, taking me out of an nine-year-long pattern of running a few days one week, and then taking the next week off.

Now that I’m back home from my summer living at altitude, I’m trying to maintain whatever athletic benefit the persistent oxygen debt gave me. When I did my first run at sea-level, I felt like superman, bounding up and down the Seattle hills like a bunny rabbit on steroids. Things have slowed down a bit since then. Running hurts again. But I still recover from runs more rapidly now than I did over the summer. I’m going to spend the next few weeks trying to gradually increase my mileage and add more speed into my workouts.

In all, I ran 345 miles over the summer season (May-August), which is more than any summer since I was in high school.

WordPress does a nice job of monitoring what terms people enter at search engines that subsequently direct them to our blogs. It turns out that many of the searches that lead people to HalfAwake are along the lines of “how can I swim without water going up my nose”. These keywords are being directed here via my “Sink or Swim” post, where I discuss my own fear of water going up my nose, and my eventual acceptance that there’s not much you can do about it.

I’d like to elaborate on this issue a bit. First of all, as far as your ability to continue living is concerned, water going up your nose is not a serious problem unless it goes up so far that you begin to inhale it. My friend from highschool Earl could string a wet noodle into his nostril and back out of his mouth and then use it to floss his tonsils, and he seems to be OK. I don’t know anything about the physiology of the nose, but I think it’s a generally sensitive area, and that is probably why getting water up there is uncomfortable for most people (probably not Earl though). Furthermore, if you are panicked or nervous when the water does enter your nose, I think you are more likely to actievely pull it into your lungs. As I said in my previous post, getting water up my nose got less bothersome for me once I put myself through it many times. The water still goes in there, it just doesn’t make me want to call for the lifeguard anymore.

That being said, you can take steps to help prevent water from entering your nose. Here are the things that I have empirically found to help:

• Think about the position of your head when you jump in. Experiment and see if certain positions work better for you.
• Also think about the position of your head when you do rotary breathing. I’m still a very weak swimmer — I can barely swim fifty meters at the altitude I’m living at now. I don’t understand it well enough to draw a picture, but I have learned that at certain angles, my nose is much more likely to take on water during rotary breathing. If I’m careful, I can avoid it.
• Make sure you take a deep breath before going under water or jumping in.
• I’ve never used them, but my friend Paul had alot of success with nose-clips. They do keep the water out of your nose, but may also cause some uncomfort in your ears if you swallow while you have them on.
• Practice ‘bobs’ (dunk your head, exhale rapidly, come back up, take a deep breath, repeat). When you do bobs, some water goes up your nose from the force as you enter the water, and from the bubbles as you blow the air out. Start out doing the bobs slowly, and only do a few. If your can work to the point where you can do many consecutive bobs, it will probably help you learn how to avoid getting as much water in your nose (and how to tolerate that water which you cannot avoid).
• Holding your nose when you jump in helps, of course, but it’s sort of like putting a bandaid on your headache.

Let me reiterate again that I’m a terrible swimmer and certainly not a doctor of any sort. If water going into your nose makes you cough or have trouble breathing, then don’t push yourself. I’m only suggesting that water going part-way up the nostril isn’t always as bad as you may fear, and you might be able to learn to manage it better.

Author’s Note: I just saw that one search for “water up nose pain excruciating” led someone to my blog. Please, if water going into your nose is causing any pain, let alone excruciating pain, see a doctor.

I ran a 4th of July 5K, and I ran well, but the experience overall was just ’so-so’. I don’t feel like competing anymore. Pushing myself when it starts to hurt seems impossible, and in the midst of races my mind often wanders… It was bad enough when my mind would wander from the race itself to the pain in my body; now I find myself thinking about seemingly random (and usually negative) parts of my life that have nothing to do with running.

Focus in races might be something you have to practice, and I’m definitely out of practice at the moment. Maybe my ability to concentrate on racing is gone for good?

It’s over 80 F for the second day in a row, and I think I’m going to have to adjust my running schedule to go later at night (lest I break my continued ‘run every day’ streak). This heat kills me, and it’s not even that hot yet.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to best get used to exercising in hot weather? How hot is too hot?