Nothing Like a Deadline...

I think I may have been coddling myself when it comes to running. See, I read somewhere that it's important to do some warm up laps and start nice and easy and slow, so I was doing that. I would start out at a pace that got me an eleventh of a mile in about 90 seconds. This pace would get me a mile in about 16 and a half minutes if I stuck with it that long, but I normally don't. I speed up, generally to the leisurely pace of a 12 minute mile, and I'll sometimes push in the last set of eleven laps to get under 11 minutes. 

I've wanted to get faster. The other day at a health fair, I spoke to a personal trainer about how to get faster, and he emphasized proper bio-mechanics as the key to speed, explaining how his girlfriend, who, he emphasized, had never run before, went from a 32 minute 5K to a 24 minute 5K just by working on bio-mechanics. I was skeptical, and never did ask if she had been otherwise athletic, but I suspect she was. Still, I tried incorporating his tips. I dorsi-flexed my ankles and tried to lift my knees to push my body off instead of pulling it.

 

Nothing happened. (Okay, I did think for a while that I'd run a mile in closer to 9 minutes than 10, but then I figured out that I'd only counted ten laps instead of eleven for that time.)

I was still running in my sweet spot of 11 to 12 minute miles. I figured I would just need to take time to get used to the new way of moving, and the speed would come. 

Last night, I worked on a paper until about 7pm and then headed to the gym. I didn't know it was closing at 8pm until I was just getting ready to head upstairs to the track and an announcement came over the PA system to inform gym patrons that they would be closing in thirty minutes. 

I hurried upstairs after that and had a choice to make. I could go at my normal pace and probably finish before the gym closed, if only just barely, or I could go for it and try to get 11 minute miles and be done in 22 minutes. 

I went for it. 

My warm up lap was faster than an eleven minute mile pace, and I felt good. I felt like I was flying on the track, not so much pounding my steps as bouncing. I wasn't sure how I was doing it really, but I was, so I decided to go for a bigger goal and try to be done in a mere 20 minutes. 

2 miles in 20 minutes isn't great, I know. It's a pace my brother-in-law would scoff at, a pace that would set no records and just barely make a qualifying time on a Navy fitness test (the one that requires 1.5 miles in 15 minutes, max). But it's a faster pace than I have run since 2011, and I wanted it. I wanted that benchmark, to prove to myself that I could improve my time and run faster. 

I wanted it, and I almost got it. 

The first mile came in at 7 seconds over 10 minutes, and I was still feeling good. My body wasn't protesting the extra speed, and my legs felt light. 

About half a mile later, it started getting hard. I'd been breathing hard from the beginning, but as I pushed harder to get that final mile under 10 minutes, my lungs began to complain. When I push myself past where I'm comfortable aerobically, I tend to get a little scared. It hurts to keep trying to breathe to keep up with the demands of my muscles, and I have had a tendency to consider it a bad pain and quit. But if there's one thing I learned from TurboKick, it's that I can push myself harder than I think. 

The last three laps felt like torture. I promised myself that I just had to keep pace, I didn't have to go faster, just keep pace, keep going. I knew that once I stopped, starting would not be easy, so I held my fear and panic in check and forced my way to the last lap.

I like to pretend I'm ringing a bell as the last lap starts, my own personal bell lap. But I didn't have the energy to spare this time as I tried to speed through the final lap as fast as I could, huffing and puffing and scared and amazed. 

It's typical for me to have a lot left in the tank, so to speak, on my last lap. Not this time. After pushing myself for 21 laps, I found it hard to go even a little bit faster on that last lap. I wanted it, I could almost taste it, but what I had left wasn't enough. 

I couldn't quite get in under 20 minutes. 

20 minutes and 5 seconds is my new time to beat. 

And I wouldn't have done it if the gym hadn't been closing. 

Maybe I should go there late more often.

No Rest for the Wicked

Last week I was feeling under the weather (and the weather itself has been getting worse, cold and wet). I'd been doing well with my running, so skipping a day or two wouldn't hurt was my rationale on Monday.

Tuesday I have class in the evening, so no running. 

Wednesday, I stayed home sick from work, definitely no running. Thursday, it was all I could do to drag myself through work and Friday is a standard rest day for Ambrose and I so it was Saturday before I ran again.

I could feel my right hip getting stiff by Thursday, but I thought once I started running it would smooth out.

It didn't.

For the first time in months, I felt the ITB pain flaring up. My right hip had gotten all scrunched again and I could feel my steps pulling my body out of alignment and into pain.

But even if I haven't gotten past this issue, I have at least learned how to deal with it. I didn't stop running until I'd run the two miles that was my plan for Saturday. And although I didn't time it, I started faster than I normally do, which was probably not the best idea when I knew I was feeling stiff. But I didn't want Ambrose to beat me, and he'd had a head start!

The first thing that I started adopting from Chi-running was the pelvic tilt. It involves rotating the pelvis forward so it is more level, as if the pelvis were a vessel trying to hold water. I actually encountered this concept way back in college when I took belly dancing classes in Santa Fe, only they called it "holding your basket." And I didn't get it at the time (though it would have been nice if I had).

That technique has been my foundation for addressing the ITB issue, and it's the one I have to focus on the most as I run. It hurts for my right hip to be stretched like that, but it isn't a bad pain. It's the pain of a sore muscle being worked back into shape. I worked for years to make a habit of the way I hold my hips while running, and, like Ambrose always says, it's going to take me a long time to break a habit it took me a long time to make.

But I didn't expect it to regress so quickly. I've been trying to be conscious of what I might be doing when I'm not running to make my right hip so much more stiff than my left, and I've been watching my walking gait. I think sitting at a desk all work day doesn't help either of my hips, and maybe it affects the right more since it is already messed up. But for now, I'm going to stick to a strict diet of running at least twice a week, spread out over the week. Experiencing that backslide tightness is not pleasant, but it is a good reminder that I am still rehabilitating my body from the bad habits I started with.

I'll worry about whether or not I'm causing this stiffness through other habits, like how I walk, sit or sleep, when I can string together a few sub-ten minute miles.

Baby steps. I ran three miles Sunday and three miles Monday. The leg still hurts, but I can feel it improving and loosening.

I hate baby steps.

Stay on the Trail

Back in my entry on the trip that Ambrose and I took to Stump Lake, I mentioned that I was intending to write a blog entry about trail markers. I haven't done that, and I won't be doing it. Instead, I made an e-book out of it and self-published it through Amazon. It normally costs 99 cents, but will be free tomorrow and Friday (11/14 and 11/15).

Stay on the Trail by Jeanne Bustamante

If you don't have an e-reader, but want to check it out, you can download it and also download an Amazon Kindle app for PC or Mac for free in order to view it. It's actually easier to see the pictures if you use an app on the computer instead of using a Kindle reading device, or so my reviewers state. One of them anyway.

I have plans to do some updates to the short book, but if you download it now, you can download updates for free later, so go on, download it! It might help you stay on the trail.

Although, I must confess, I wrote this the weekend before I went on my solo hike and promptly got myself lost... The book can't guarantee that you stay on the trail, you still have to use common sense.

Running

The other night, in the pre-class chatter, I overhead the instructor talking about running. Specifically, that it doesn't ever get any easier. It always makes her body sore. I was glad to hear words about running that confirmed my own experiences. When I started running, it was hard, and now that I've re-started, in some ways it's even harder.

I had a dream last night in which I was speaking with this slim, athletic, blonde young woman about running. I told her that I had to focus on my form while I ran. She waved off my concerns about form and insisted I should just run naturally, that my body would figure out the right way to do things. Then I explained that I'd already tried that method and it got me two years of running in pain, followed by two years of figuring out why it hurt my knees so much to run.

I may as well have been talking to an attitude out of my past, though I have never been slim, athletic or blonde. Before I began to run seriously in 2009, I did some research, including asking my husband questions since he had run when he was young. And while, there were options for running systems, including the Chi-Running that I'm trying now, I ended up going with the school of "you're body already knows how to run." And I did run a half marathon by following that school, but I never was able to run for more than fifteen minutes without the ITB pain flaring up. And I've never been able to get fast.

In the early days of my running, I subscribed to a magazine, Runners World. I thought it would provide helpful tips and ideas and for a while, I enjoyed reading it. But then, the regular feature about a newbie runner had an article about his first time timing his run. And this so-called newbie was running 7 minute miles without even trying.

I could run a single 8 minute mile if I was ready to collapse immediately after (back in 2010 - I'm still not back there yet after addressing my issues). My fastest 5K was about 29 and a half minutes, or an average of over 9 minutes per mile. And this guy - this guy I'm supposed to relate to as a fellow newbie - was running 7 minute miles and he didn't even realize it until he got his magical little stopwatch?

There were other factors that contributed to my letting the subscription lapse, but that was definitely one of them. I had had doubts from the beginning about whether that magazine was for me, and that, along with my increasingly painful knee issues with running, confirmed them. It wasn't for me. Their world of runners was not one in which I could find a place.

Everyone's path is different, and I guess the path I'm on doesn't have enough people to sell a magazine to. Although I'm enjoying trying to do the Chi-Running, there are no instructors of the technique within a few hundred miles of Boise, so my husband and I are working on it with only each other for feedback and the DVD from the library for visual reference. Supposedly, in the end, running will not be painful anymore, but instead be meditative and refreshing for the body and the mind.

Not so much right now. I'm avoiding the ITB issue, which is fantastic, but I still get sore, and out of breath and it is hard on my mind. I can't just think about anything while I'm running at this point. I have to focus on keeping my right hip elongated, my feet pointing forward, my lower abs tight, and don't forget to keep breathing and speed and time and not running into people who can't read the signs that the inside lane is for walking, not the outside one, can't they read? Lately, my shoulders have been getting tight, so I've added a lap of loose arms every fifteen minutes in my runs. It makes me feel like a doofus, running around the track with my arms swinging limply, but it has been making my shoulders feel less like they've been trying to attack my ears.

A common simile for multi-tasking is juggling, but I don't juggle, so I can't be certain that it's accurate. For me, right now, running requires me to pay attention to multiple facets of my body's functioning, forcing myself to break old, bad habits and avoid making new, bad habits. As soon as one part gets easier and more natural, there's something else to add in. I still want to be able to run faster, but my fastest mile since my reboot hasn't even broken the ten minute mark. It's like driving stick-shift in traffic, paying attention to the world around you while making mechanical adjustments for speed and direction and also keeping in mind your destination. It's involved (or it should be), and subject to the same perils of distraction.

Running is hard on my body, hard on my brain and a trial for my patience (why can't I be faster now?).

But I still love it, and I'm glad to be back on the track... even if I do get passed by everyone else running on it (even my husband, now and then - but only if he's doing a sprint lap and I'm in the middle of a long run, and I do always catch him back, I swear).