Running Chick

I'm back, after a week of not running. I only missed four runs, so it's not like I missed an entire week, but still. Anyway, my blister is all healed and those weird muscle spasms that I was getting in my thigh/knee area have been foam rolled/massaged into submission.

This is marathon week (eeesh.), so my schedule is pretty tame. 3 miles on Monday, two each on Wednesday & Thursday.  I've been kind of antsy to get back to running, so I was looking forward to last night's run.  I debated over whether to head into town or not.  It seems pretty silly to drive my giant gas hogging SUV into town for a stupid 3 mile run that I could easily do around my house, but my goal was to take it easy and keep my left leg as happy as possible, so I decided to hit the flat & forgiving Nara trail over the hard & cambered roads in Liminga.  Screw the environment, YOLO!

As soon as I got a couple of miles from home, I realized that I left my Garmin sitting on the table so I decided to use the RunKeeper app on my phone. Only the battery on my phone was almost empty and I didn't have my spare battery with me.  Great.  I'm not really good at running by feel, I need that electronic feedback to tell me how fast & far I'm running, so I was pretty annoyed.  Anyway, Zoe and I took off. I was hoping that my phone would at least get me to the turn-around mark, around 15 minutes, which it did because Zoe took off like a bat out of hell.  Seriously, this dog is a crazy good runner.  No matter how fast I run, all she's ever doing is casually trotting along ahead, she hardly ever breaks into a run.  Occasionally she'll glance over her shoulder to make sure I'm still there and to see if she needs to stop and give me CPR. The cool thing is that I'm laying down some really fast splits running with her, the not cool thing is that she's probably is going to need to give me CPR one of these days.

Anyway, we were zipping back after the turn-around and I checked my phone to see how close we were to the finish & how much battery we had left, and accidentally hit the button which stops the activity at 2.72 miles. Gah. I ended up running what I thought was the last quarter mile and figured we finished that 3 miles in 9:30 pace or close to it.  We wandered around on the boardwalk for a bit then headed home.  Here's a foggy picture of the Pilgrim River, thanks to carrying my phone in my bra. Classy.

Unfortunately, my left leg was ticked off at me. This is what I did for the majority of the night.

And, here's what's happening at work today. 

It feels just like it did a couple of years ago, before I started cadence training.  I stopped carrying my mp3 player with 187bpm mp3 last summer because (1) it was annoying and I was always fighting with the wires to the ear buds, and (2) I have a fancy cadence sensor for my shoe and I figured I just keeping an eye on it that way.  Unfortunately, (2) only works if you consistently pay attention to it, and I probably haven't.  I suppose I'll have to start using the mp3 player again. Boo.

I don't know if I'll run again this week. I'll continue to use the ice packs & take Ibuprofen and I'll go by feel.  I'm not really worried about losing any fitness in the next few days, but I am worried about being in pain on Sunday. 

Speaking of Sunday, holy cow it's almost here.  I'm starting to obsess about things: should wear my hydration belt? (that one woke me up in the middle of the night last night) orange or purple compression socks? (yes, it does matter!). what pace should I try to keep? should I go with a pace group? Plus, a million more things that make my head hurt.

Overall, I'm feeling pretty anxious & nervous. Scared. Unsure. You know, all those feelings that make you, like, feel.  Bonus, I'm sure they'll only get worse as it gets closer. If I don't end up having a full on meltdown sometime between now & Sunday, I'll be amazed.

In other not running news, we got our first frost on Sunday night. Winter is coming.

The wheels are starting to get wobbly over here. I'll address that in a bit, but first it's time to catch up.

Monday

My legs, which had been feeling pretty creaky after my 20 mile long run the previous Saturday, were back to normal by Sunday.  My blister, however was not.  Ooh, it was mad.  Before Monday's 5 miler, I taped the crap out of it and hoped for the best.  Josh, Zoe and I parked on campus and did an out & back to the end of Peepsock Trail.  That was my first time on the trail this year, I'd forgotten how pretty the first section was. Also, how smelly the second section could be - the trail runs by the Houghton sewage treatment plant.  Most of the time it's fine, but if the wind's blowing in just the right direction .. whew.

Our run was pretty good, even though my legs were feeling pretty heavy and tight (strange, because they weren't bothering me when I was walking around).

When I got home, though, this is what was under my sock and tape:

Blood blister! I've had blisters before, it kind of comes with the territory, but never before have I had a blood blister. It was pretty painful, too. My pop or no pop blister rule of thumb is that if it's full of fluid and hurting, then I pop it.  If there's only a small amount of fluid and no pain, then I leave it alone.  I popped this one with a sterilized needle, squeezed all the fluid out, covered it in copious amounts of Neosporin, taped it up and tried to stay off of it for the remainder of the night.

Tuesday

An off night, which allowed me to perform surgery on an old pair of shoes in an attempt to figure out what was causing my blister.  My initial investigating led me to believe that the mesh upper was rubbing on my foot, so snip, snip. The first cut was the worst, let me tell you.

Wednesday

This was my experimental blister run.  In addition to the shoe surgery, I engineered an impressive (forgot to take photos, boo) tape fortress to surround & protect my blister.  Zoe and I drove into town to do 5 miles on the waterfront, and meet up with Josh, who was running in from home.  The run was okay, but as far as blister management, I wouldn't say that that result was a success (blisters were there), but it wasn't a total failure (I didn't aggravate the existing or get any new ones).  Josh showed up earlier than anticipated (speedy!), so I ended up bailing at just over four miles, which is just about the time that my blister was going "haaay!"

Thursday

I decided to do the smart thing and skip my run. Blisters FTW.

Saturday

I got a migraine on Friday that pretty much knocked me out through Saturday. My day was mostly spent watching The Good Wife on Hulu, sacked out on the couch with Zoe.

Also, in an attempt to be somewhat productive, I decided to help Josh stack wood in the barn.  We're putting the wood on a platform that's about 6" off of the ground and I stacked the first couple of pieces of wood, stepped down off the platform to get a couple more and blam! rolled my ankle. Man, did that hurt.  Like - break out in a cold sweat, feel like vomiting, can't speak hurt. All I could think of was that it was broken.  A part of me was horrified that after all the months of training and all the miles I've logged, I'd get injured doing something unrelated to running two weeks before the race.  Another part of me was like Sweet, now I don't have to run that stupid marathon!

I limped to the house, slapped on an ice pack & elevated it, took some Ibuprofen and after about an hour, it felt okay. Pretty tender, but otherwise fine.  I figured I would see some swelling, but it never did. That may be due in part to putting compression socks on soon after it happened. Who knows.

Sunday

This was my make-up day.  I was supposed to run 12 miles, but knocked it down to 8, which is what Josh had on his schedule.  I was looking for a nice, easy, very slow run, so I could feel out my ankle and blister. Phase 2 of my blister experiment was to run in my stock insoles as at this point I had eliminated the shoes.  I knew this was going to be risky. My lower legs are really finicky and they are the first things to get pissed off if my shoes or insoles start to loose their cushioning.  I was also wearing Injinjii toe socks, loaned to me by team /var/run teammate Amy.

They look weird, but I found them very comfortable.  I was a little worried that they'd take up too much room in the toe box, but once I had my shoes on, I never noticed them.  Sweet.  We went for a loop around our block which, when you live out in the boonies, amounts to over 8 miles.  My blisters, mostly healed at this point, were happy. No rubbing, no hot spots. Yay!  My lower legs, however, were pretty offended that I replaced their cushiony insoles with (basically) two tiny pieces of felt.

Monday

The final piece to the blister puzzle was my insoles.  I always buy the same ones. New Balance Pressure Relief, and I've been using them for years. I'd been running in an old pair since April, and swapped them out with a new pair in the beginning of August, shortly thereafter I started getting blisters. I never even considered the new insoles to be the problem because I've been running in the same ones for years and they've never given me as much as a hot spot before. Phase 3 of my blister experiment was to go back to my old insoles and see what happened.  I had five miles on my schedule, so Zoe and I headed down our familiar Cole's Creek - Rauhala Road - Canal Road route to my mom & dad's place.  My ankle was feeling a little tender and my lower legs were not exactly happy, but I was feeling pretty strong otherwise. Zoe was too and imagine my surprise when I kept on seeing low 9:00s on my watch when I'd glance down at it. Uh, yeah. I don't really run that fast.  Even when I think I'm running really fast, it's really like 9:30s or 9:45s. Never like 9:15s, and never, ever 8:45s.

This is what I ended up with:

These are my splits:

It looks pretty badass and all, but I'm convinced that something screwy was going on with my watch and those times are somehow skewed. Even downhill, I don't run that fast.

The good news is that I didn't even have so much as a hot spot with the old insoles, the new ones were causing all the problems. Blister problem solved, what a relief! The bad news is that this run really made my lower left leg unhappy.  It was already ticked off from the previous night's run and this just made it more mad.  Also, I've developed some muscle spasms in my lower left quad that are quite painful.  Add those two things to an already tender ankle, and you get me limping around the office downing lots of Ibuprofen less than two weeks out from the marathon. Great.

Tuesday

Speaking of badass, I met up with my high school friend Tina on Tuesday night. 

She was up here visiting her family after competing in Ironman Wisconsin a couple of days before, where she was the 1st finisher in her division, 1st amateur female finisher and 9th female finisher overall (right after the pros!).  She is an amazing athlete and let me pick her brain about my upcoming marathon.  Actually, I didn't do much brain picking as I did answering her questions about what I've been doing for nutrition and hydration, pacing and strategy.  I told her about my leg issues, and that I was worried that I'd need to skip some, if not all, of my final runs up to the race.  Her advice to me was that I made it through the hardest part of training so my job was essentially done.  I wasn't going to loose any fitness in the next 10 days and my job now is to let my body recover and get to the start line healthy.  Rather than run for the sake of ticking things off on my training schedule, I should rest. So, that's what I'm going to do.  I'll probably take the rest of this week off, maybe do a couple of short 1 or 2 milers next week just to feel things out, maybe ride my bike around the block a few of times so I don't end up feeling like a blob. I'm not quite sure yet. I guess I'll just play it by ear and see how things end up.

First things, first: I did not die running 20 miles. I had a few “Remind me why I’m doing this again?” moments during some tough middle miles, but overall, it wasn’t horrible.

The forecast called for highs in the mid-70s on Saturday, but not until the later afternoon, so I decided to sleep in for an extra 30 minutes and leave a little later.  I wasn’t going to take Zoe with me, but a friend of mine who runs up in that neck of the woods mentioned seeing bears in area where I was running, so I made arrangements with Josh (who was running a bunch of errands) to meet us after about 90 minutes and he’d take Zoe with him. 

My planned route was to head to Swedetown then take Woodland Road to Waasa Road, Waasa Road to M-203, then M-203 back to Hancock and finish somewhere around Porvoo Park.  Zoe and I took off from Laurium around 8:30 and noodled around up there for a few miles before hitting Swedetown. 

It was all pavement until Woodland Road, which turned to gravel.  It was nicely graded, so it was a fairly forgiving surface.  Added bonus, aside from a few small rollers, it’s mostly downhill.

We turned onto Waasa Road around mile 7 and after a few miles, we met up with Josh.  Up until this point, we were keeping a pretty steady pace of 10:50. It was a bit faster than I was intending, but we were trucking right along and I was feeling pretty good, so I decided to keep going with Zoe until we got to M-203 and then I’d hand her over to Josh.

We were at 11 miles when we made it to M-203. The downhill descent from Waasa Road is literally straight down.  Once Zoe spotted the truck & Josh and the bottom, she was all LETS GO! and took off.  Steep downhills tend to really aggravate my knees, so I try to take them slow & cautiously.  Zoe wasn’t having any of that, though, so I had to work hard to try to stay away from the loose gravel so I wouldn’t fall & have her drag me to the bottom. Crazy dog.  After a quick water bottle refill, Josh and Zoe headed to the hardware store, and I started on my way back to Hancock. 

The next five or six miles were pretty tough.  I hadn’t realized how warm it had gotten until I got out on the pavement and didn’t have any shade, so I was going through my water pretty fast.  The camber on the road started to bug the mostly-healed blister on my left foot so I was constantly trying to move my foot around in my shoe to find a comfortable spot.  I ran with traffic for a while to get away from the camber, but there was so much RV traffic that it made me uncomfortable, so it was back to the foot-hurting cambered side.  Then my stomach decided to act up, making me feel even worse.  I ended up stopping a couple of times in an attempt to regroup myself mentally.  Aside from my blister, my legs were feeling surprisingly good. It was just the rest of me that was feeling like crap.  Miles 15 & 16 were my worst & slowest, just under a 12:00 pace. Ugh. Also I ran out of water and was feeling really over-heated. Meh.

Finally, I hit Hancock Beach, which seemed like a fricking oasis at that point.

I made a quick stop to refill my bottles, took a pack of Sport Beans and tried to mentally steel myself for the slog up into Hancock.  Josh sent me a text message saying that he was waiting for me on the trail & Zoe wanted to finish the run with me. So, that gave me a little boost.  Also, so did the Sport Beans. I need to get more of those, for sure.  I felt pretty good making the climb, my legs were cooperating and so were my lungs.

I picked up Zoe and we finished up the last 1.75 miles. Aside from one stop to bark at some crows (which she hates, apparently), we kept up a pretty good pace and arrived at Porvoo Park. We actually ended up running past the park to the bridge and back in order to make our miles, but it didn’t bother me so much since I was feeling fairly good.

I did get cat-called by some loser sitting on the deck of the Beach Club.  I don’t know what his deal was, but I was not amused and just glared at him. I almost went over there to confront him, but Josh was one step ahead of me. He told Josh that he was hollering at the dog and not me. Uh huh. Jackass.

I ended up finishing in just over 11 minute miles, which I’m okay with.  I was hoping to keep it under 11 but those slow middle miles pretty much blew that plan. Oh well, at least it was way better then my last long run.

Also, I can’t even describe how unsettling it is to take off your shoe and see a bloody sock. I stared at it for a while. “Aren’t you going to take your sock off and look at that?” says Josh. I told him that I was scared to do it.

Eventually I did take my sock off and once I rinsed off my blood-covered toes, I found that tiny rock had made it’s way into my shoes and was digging into my toe. I have no idea when I picked it up because I never felt a thing.

We hung out at the park for a little bit while I ate a Larabar and had some water. We had errands to run so I changed in the pavilion's bathroom (gross. City of Hancock, please clean that place) and headed out. Zoe, who ended up with somewhere around 13 miles for the day, crashed hard.

I felt like doing that too, but after a quick lunch, we spent the rest of the afternoon putting a new roof on the barn.  Climbing up & down the scaffold a million times in the heat with an angry blister the size of Texas on my foot and aching legs was not fun.  But, we got the first load of wood stacked so that’s good.

And with that, I am officially in taper mode.  This means that my mileage slowly decreases to basically nothing in the next three weeks which allows my body to recover & regroup from the last three months of punishment.  Next weekend, my long run is 12 miles. A few months ago, I would have considered that a really long run, but now it doesn’t seem that big of a deal to me. I can’t decide if that’s sad or not.

I ended up with 153 miles for August, only missing one run last week (got rained out). My average pace was was 10:55.  I am 3.5 miles short of the total number of miles I ran in 2012. I think I’ll probably beat it.