Posts from — March 2010

So the March Winds have blown in and brought with it another Spring.  In past years, I usually start to feel the stirrings of a springtime depression, but not this year for some reason.  My head is clearer right now than it has been during this season for the past several years.  It feels good.  I am attributing the abeyance of my springtime malaise to newfound interests and desires.  These are keeping me focused and on track to reach the goals I’ve set out for myself.

I seem to be over the bumpy start that March gave me in regards to my running.  My mileage for this month is significantly less than January and February, but perhaps those months saw too much.  I will say that I am obsessed with my mileage.  I want to reach 2,010 miles in 2010, which means I have to go a little over 5.5 miles per day.  This is a lot harder than it seems, especially when I’ve been going large distances on the weekends.  I didn’t keep up in March and it looks like I will be behind with the end on month mileage goal.  Realistically though, I probably shouldn’t just tally how many miles I need in a given month to come out at exactly 2,010 miles.  I’ll probably be doing much more as I draw close to the Vermont 100, back off right after it and then even out as the end of the year approaches.  Maybe, I should even plan it out.

I feel like I have things to look forward to for the first time in a long time.  I need to be careful and not obsess on them too much.  They will come to me all in good time and in the meantime I will enjoy the ride.  I’ll take it one day at a time and see what each new day brings me.  There is no point in rushing the future and hence your life away.  It will all come soon enough.

I have no doubt that I’ve made a lot of errors when it comes to my training.  However, I have high expectations of myself and I need to stop making them if I am ever going to live to my full potential.  I find though that sometimes I can’t help myself.  There are things I want to do and others that I want to pursue, but I have not been willing to sacrifice one for the other.  I want it all.  I’ve always wanted to have my cake and eat it too.

I need to decide though which cakes I want to eat.  Cake can be so moist and delicious and you have so many varieties to choose from.  One cake that you have to eat; the catalyst for all others is sleep.  Without sleep the body is unable to function properly.  The body does heal, recover or rejuvenate.  You don’t have the energy the next day to pursue that which you want to do.  However, some things are only available when sleep is inconvenient.  What are you supposed to do when you can’t rearrange your schedule to accommodate that issue?

This past weekend it felt like my body completely broke down.  I woke up early on Saturday morning with the intention of running the NYRR 8000.  For the first time in my life, I made the conscious decision to blow off a race.  It was cold and raining very hard and I felt very groggy and completely not myself.  I think that if I tried to stand up I would have fallen.  I wasn’t sick per se and I probably could have shaken it off, but I just decided to hell with it.  The comfort of my bed sounded much more appealing.  I fell back to sleep without too much guilt, but did wake up later with regrets that I didn’t go.   I am pretty sure I made the correct decision though.  It would have been awful to be walking on the wrong side of Central Park in the cold, wind and rain.

Sunday I fared no better.  I had gone out on Saturday night with a couple of friends and drank and ate too much.  I stayed up late again when I got home even though I was tired and should have taken a sleeping pill to force myself to sleep.  To make a long story short, I eventually got out of bed around 10:30am, made my son and his guest breakfast and then headed out with a friend at 11:15 to do a longish run.  I didn’t make it far.  I ran about 1.5 miles and was dragging badly.  My hips were hurting (where that came from I don’t know) and I couldn’t generate any pace.  I told my friend to go on, turned around and started to walk home.  I couldn’t even make the walk.  I saw a can idling by the curb and hoped in for the mile ride home.  I knew I was so done with running this weekend as I sat in the car and thought how good I felt to just be sitting down and watching the world go by as the car drove me home.

This is not the way I want to be.  Perhaps I am at rock bottom or perhaps I will sink lower.  I guess the key is moderation.  Either that or cut something out of my life.  The number one candidate for elimination is work, but until I win the lottery that is not going to happen.  Recently I started organizing my life around the house.  Old papers were shredded and discarded and things straightened out.  I need to do that with my body as well.  Perhaps I’ll write a schedule and a diet plan and post it here for all to see.  Then I can blog about that and see if I stick with it.  After all, aren’t most goals only reached after making a well thought out plan?

So for the first two months of 2010 I ran 333.3 miles.  This is 8 miles ahead of schedule.  I had been feeling good until the last week of February, when my legs finally started breaking down.  It was a combination of muscle fatigue and shin splints.  There was nothing to do about this than other than to rest, which I was forced to do last week when I pulled my back out by sitting down on my bed.  Yes, I hurt my back with the simple motion of turning to the side while sitting down and something went dreadfully wrong.  I was wracked with a pain in my lower back that rendered me completely immobile for about 5 minutes, while I tried to figure out how to move without causing the most supreme agony.

Anyway, I suppose it was the best thing that could have happened to me.  It forced me to take the next 5 days off from training.  During that time my legs has a chance to recover (as well as atrophy) while I concentrated on healing my back.  I went to my Chiropractor – Dr. Fenster in Manhattan, and underwent therapy (electro stimulation) and adjustments for the next 4 days.  I also went for a massage that concentrated on my lower back.  By Friday afternoon I was about 80 percent better and had high hope for running this weekend’s Caumsett Park 50K. 

On Saturday before the race, I still wasn’t 100 percent better, but I decided to go for the race anyway.  I got to bed early, ate well and woke up feeling refreshed and only slightly stiff in my lower back.  I didn’t think it would be a problem for the race.  I was more worried about my legs, which had barely ran in the last two weeks, with nothing during the last 5 days.

My friend @aristorat drove to the race and we arrived with only 10 minutes to spare.  There was no stretching, no warm-up run and not even a bathroom break.  It was straight from the car, to the baggage area and then to the start.  I had no running in 6 days with a miserly 10 miles in the past 8 days, but here I was starting a 50K (31.07 miles) completely cold.  Stretching is overrated anyway and who needs to warm up when you are running 31 miles?  It would be interesting to see how my legs would fare.

I tried to run with @aristorat, but he was running a pace I could not keep, so I settled in for a long solo run.  However, soon into the race, a firefighter from Danbury CT named Seth caught up to me and we began to talk.  We were running compatible paces so I ran almost the entire race with him.  We discussed the various races that we’ve done, but in truth, I listened more to all the races that he did.  Seth is under 30, single with no kids and a girlfriend that races with him all over the country.  I can’t even begin to remember the names of all of the races he mentioned.   I always thought it would be great to have a GF/Wife that liked to run with you, or at a minimum show an interest.   Seth is a lucky fellow.

In the beginning of the run I had high hopes of breaking 5 hours and possibly my 50K PR.  I discovered early on into the race that this was clearly not going to happen.  I went into survival mode early and just hoped that I would have multiple second winds.  For the most part, my body cooperated and didn’t give me too much trouble.  I was glad to be running with Seth however, as he definitely kept me moving.  I have no doubt that without him next to me I would have slowed down and probably walked.  After the race, Seth mentioned the same thing to me.  It’s amazing how when you put two people together in a race, that the two of them are able to do better than they could individually.  It’s not like we were drafting off each other.  It has to do with the competitive nature of putting two humans together.

There is not much more to describe about this race.  It’s a 3.1 mile loop course, so you get to see the same things 10 times over.  Not much changed except for the direction of the sun and the amount of miles remaining as the day wore on.  The miles seemed to tick away, except for the 26^th mile which seemed to take forever.  Possibly because that marks marathon distance, but I attribute the slowness of that mile passing more to my Polar GPS missing it’s signal for a time and therefore making the miles between 25 – 26 take forever.

People think it is amazing that I can run such distances.  However, what I am doing is nothing compared to the real ultrarunners out there.  I am a little concerned with how sore I am with running this distance considering all of the miles I’ve put in lately.  I figured I would have been able to run it faster and come out in better shape.  I was beat up after the run and just wanted to rest.  I am not sure what this all means as I train for the Vermont 100.