Mardigras2009’s Weblog

My plan to get up early and run yesterday did not pan out as I was still lying immobilized and unconscious under the covers when I was supposed to be pounding away on the treadmill. But I did get up early today and head to the gym in the cold darkness.

Luckily, I was able to tune the TV to my station of choice, and I chose Good Morning America. It was great to watch footage of last night’s historic Obama television event. I actually felt the excitement sparking through the air while on the treadmill as goosebumps appeared on my sweaty arms. I ran a slow two-miler because it was my first run since the Great Shin Splintering of 2008.

After three full days off spent stretching and icing, the old shins were still pretty sore as I ran, but I didn’t feel like I was going to cry or spray barf on my fellow runners nearby, so I kept going. I don’t think I’ll get to all four runs this week, but that’s okay. I think it was more important to rest in this case.

This morning’s best running song was “Lose Yourself.” I enjoyed it so much I started contemplating buying Eminem’s new memoir. It’s funny where your brain goes when running. Hearing this song took me straight back to right around election day eight years ago, when my friend and I saw Eminem perform at Voodoo Fest in the midst of a hot, crowded, sweaty field of people. Memories from the day flashed through my mind and I thought about how much has changed and how much as remained the same over eight years. I was so grossed out by him that day, but I have to tell you, I love this song. I love it mind, body, and soul! And I love listening to it while I run.

Tomorrow I will attempt a 3.5-miler in order to salvage this week’s training somewhat. We’ll see how it goes.

Here’s what I think happened to my shins. I think they were sort of in shock by amping up to four runs per week. They were mildly protesting this development. Then during a three-mile treadmill run last week, I decided I would speed up a little bit for the last mile or so. Not a lot, just by .4 mph. It appears this was not a wise move. After running four excruciating miles on Sunday, I could barely walk the rest of the day or the following day. I headed to the running store to talk shoes and shins. I ended up buying a new pair of shoes after the sales clerk watched me jog up and down the street outside with my cords rolled up like a dork in several different pairs … he determined that my foot was jostling around too much in my original pair. I also talked to another employee, bemoaning my shins’ fate and declaring that I don’t want to rest or quit. She basically told me to wake up and smell the Tough Shit. Shin splints, she said, are a rite of passage. Stretch, ice, move on. I’ve iced, I’ve stretched, now I just need to move on. Tomorrow, after two days of rest, that’s what I’m going to (attempt to) do. God help me.

Oy.

So Thursday morning before last I woke up with a migraine. I’ve suffered from migraines most of my adult life, though they’ve tapered off somewhat since being treated for hypothyroidism last year. Still, they swoop right in – oftentimes when the weather changes – and knock me out. And they are the kind that come in with a big white light blurring your vision and searing pain. I can’t do anything. Coughing hurts, as does laughing or walking.

This lasted for two days. Thank God I had a root canal a couple of months ago that required prescription-strength Motrin or I don’t know what I would have done.

Then I went off and got married. And as the days closed in on us leaving for Vermont, my head was just not in the game at all. Between work and getting ready, I just … yeah. I decided not to run.

But I’m back. And I’m married. And I’m three pounds larger, but I feel like that’s small potatoes when you consider how much I ate over the long weekend. I’m starting the training from scratch because I can’t just pick up from where I left off. Of course not. I need a clean slate.

I ran three miles today. They were slow miles – mostly owing to my sinuses as I continue to have some serious issues with them when I’m running, which translates into something that feels like swimmer’s ear but has been ruled out not to be the case – but they were nice and I felt immensely awesome after they were done. Actually, today was a sunny, crisp Fall day here in Chicago so I felt immensely awesome during, too.

If there is anything I love about running, it’s how awesome it can make you feel if you’re open to it.

Note: For those of you looking for Ms. Shea, in case you haven’t heard, she went off to get married! I anticipate she’ll be back around these parts once she’s back in the real world as Mrs. Smith. Many happy returns to Erin & Scott.

I’m going to have to shoot straight with you. After two treadmill runs earlier in the week, hitting the road outside for my second two runs of the week was rather painful. As in full of pain. I managed yesterday’s three-miler, though at this point it’s kind of a blur. Today’s four-miler was so painful I am having trouble thinking of how to describe it. Here’s what ran through my mind with every step — it became a nice repetitive rhythm throughout: “Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow,” etc. It is my shins. Boy howdy. It’s not pretty. I tried to ice them after the run and stretch my calves as much as possible, since my sister tells me shins and calves are linked, but Jesu. The word on the street relative to shin pain seems to be that you have to rest, but that’s not really feasible. It’s primarily my inner shin, not the muscle that runs alongside the outside of the shin. 

Best running song of the day: Mike Doughty’s “I Hear the Bells.” I never get tired of this song. I am always relieved when it comes on. I always run a little happier for its duration. For a moment, I forgot about my shins and thought only about the bells.

Does anyone have any tips for how to deal with shin pain when it’s not really an option to rest for more than a day? The Internet says NOT to run through the pain.

Oops.

This morning’s early two-mile run began with a momentary panic, as there were no treadmills available with TVs. 3/10 of a mile in, one opened up, so I hastily repositioned myself in front of Morning Joe for the second consecutive morning. I am wondering if this show has any credibility when the hosts are always telling the guests how great they look. Today there was a lot of talk about Iran as a superpower and not a lot of election excitement, so I mostly tuned it out and concentrated on my music and tried not to think about my tremendous calf pain.

I tried to go a little faster since it was only a two-miler, and my calves protested. I kept running because I guess some pain is inevitable. Post-run, it is my shins giving me trouble, but I plan to soldier on. I know that I need to spend more time after the run stretching out these sore spots, but it’s hard to do that in the morning because I’m rushing around like a maniac. Hopefully once Daylight Saving Time ends and it’s lighter outside earlier, I can do some of these morning runs outside and save myself some driving time. This is all very fascinating, I know.

I’ve been contemplating just what is happening when my muscles get so sore. Are they trying to tell me to stop? Are they just in shock from being used in this manner on a more regular basis and adjusting to the impact and strain? Once they become less sore, are they healing and stronger? Physiologically, this interests me. Of course I wish that running would suddenly give me strong, shapely legs, but I know I’m kidding myself. I always come back to the words of trainer Krista: “Building muscle is like prying each meaty cell loose from the jaws of a slobbery dog that likes the taste of steak. It doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen in a week. You may see it in a month… or three.” (I love her whole site, by the way.)

For the past two mornings, I have run on the treadmill next to an elderly man who walks slowly while hooked up to an oxygen tank. I admire him a whole hell of a lot. The people who spray sticky sweat all over the treadmills and floor and don’t bother cleaning up after themselves? I admire them not at all.

I woke up early this morning and stumbled blindly out the door in the darkness to head to the gym. It’s always surprising to me when I get up super early to see that there are other people out and about doing their business at that hour.

But there they were, young and old, on treadmills and ellipticals and bikes and the weight machines. I planted myself in front of a TV tuned to MSNBC, which I rarely watch, and caught the beginning of Morning Joe. I have to say, watching political commentary makes three miles go by pretty quickly, especially when phrases like “sweeping victory” and “historic landslide” are being thrown around relative to Obama. One pro-McCain former secretary of state was on, saying over and over how Obama is “unknown” … which reminds me of something I read yesterday. The truth is that he is NOT unknown to anyone who has been paying attention. That is just the way I feel about it. It’s easy not to get to know someone you assume is the enemy because you stick your fingers in your ears and assume there’s nothing to find out about him worth knowing. But he’s been out there, working and writing and being written about for a really long time. He is no great mystery. That his opponents keep trying to shroud him in some veil of secrecy like he is a dangerous, foreign “unknown” is so ludicrous that it’s laughable.

Whoops … this is supposed to be a running blog. Well, this is what I was watching and thinking about while running this morning, and I’d guess people on treadmills all over America this morning were watching and thinking about the same thing, so I guess it’s fair game.

This was my first run inside on a treadmill in a while, and here are the pros: you can run on a treadmill when it’s dark outside, you can see and set exactly how fast you’re going and how far you’ve run, and you can watch TV. Other than that, I’d pick outside on the road every time.

I decided not to run today to give myself a rest after my “long” run of week one (4 miles). Instead, I decided to enlist the assistance of Jillian in my workout. I didn’t want to go on a cardio rampage and blow the concept of “resting” so I decided to just do the strength and abs sections of the workout.

If anyone is unfamiliar with Jillian Michaels’ 30-Day Shred, it’s a workout DVD with three different levels. Each level features three circuits of strength, cardio, and abs. Before tonight, I’d only ever done level one. I decided to move up to level two but fast forward through the cardio sections because they tend to be pretty rough on the legs in terms of impact (lots of jumping jacks, jump roping, and so forth). The abs sections weren’t that much tougher than level one, but boy howdy, were my shoulders screaming. I am a big fan of this DVD and hope to keep incorporating it into my routine. And I only use 3-pound hand weights. That’s right, 3 pounds. And it’s still really hard. 

This is not very riveting information, but I want to keep track of this as I go along. The big news of the day half-marathon-wise is that I went ahead and registered for the race. Money is a big motivator in this day and age, and I’m hoping it will help me get out of bed tomorrow morning in the pitch blackness and head to the gym for my first run of week two. Now I am going to lie down, clutch my shoulders, and moan.

If there were ever a day perfectly created for outdoor activity, it was today. It was sunny and warm and cool at the same time and bright and clear. My first four-mile run in a very long time felt much longer than a three-miler, but it was okay. I kept reminding myself to enjoy the feel of the sun on my skin and the sight of the egrets and the ducks and the turtles sunning on their rocks. The highlight of the run was seeing B. approach from the other direction while on his ten-miler and slapping hands with him as we passed each other. It put a smile in my step.

And now for my running pet peeve of the day! I am guilty of being a person who formerly ran on the left side of the road. I liked to be able to see what was coming. I realize now how idiotic this is. Now that I’ve seen the error of my ways and run on the right side, I encounter people coming towards me (walking or running on their left side, so directly in my path), and more times than not, it’s as if they expect me to go around them. In other words, I am to turn around and see if a car is coming behind me (which is not exactly easy while propelling in a forward direction) before I dart into traffic to go around them — whereas it makes more sense for them to go around me because they don’t have turn around to see what’s coming since they are facing the oncoming traffic and they’re the ones on the wrong side of the road. I’ve begun to stick strongly to my guns and not budge from the edge of the road, sort of forcing them to be the ones to step into the road since they can see what’s coming and they’re the ones not following the rules of the road. It seems only right. Am I wrong about this? 

I’m happy I got all four runs in this week, this first week of training. Week two is a repeat of this week, and I find that comforting. I don’t feel ready to ramp it up quite yet. I still can’t really believe that I have committed to doing this, but here I am, 1/16th of the way done. Now I am going to reward myself by watching some Wonderfalls.

I run a pretty slow pace, despite what I thought over the summer during my training for the Nike 10K. I thought I’d worked myself down to a 10:30 pace but alas. The caliburation of my Nike+ gadget was off and I was really running something more like 11:15, 11:30 miles. Which is fine, but I’ve grown a little uncomfortable with that. I can do better.

So I’m approaching my shorter, mid-week runs as speed runs. Not drills, but honest-to-God speed runs.

I managed to run the two miles on my schedule at 11:12-pace miles. I rationalized that it was only two lousy miles. Surely I could crank them out.

I was a little sore, but no worse for the wear. I keep wondering if drills wouldn’t also be effective.

On Sunday, I took an hour-long walk. It was a beautiful day, but I didn’t have it in me to run. I was coming off of a week in Hawaii, where I’d done what I consider to be a fairly respectable amount of exercising for someone on vacation (a run here, a walk there, a hike here, an exercise class there), but I was feeling jet-lagged and a little hungover from getting drunk on beaches, mountains, Thai food, and Java Chip ice cream. Walking this route felt so different from running around it, and while taking it all in at a slower pace (let’s face it, not that much slower), I couldn’t help but remember all the time I spent on training runs out there when training for the half-marathon. I thought about what it felt like to start that training two years ago in a fall that felt a lot like this one and wondered what it would feel like to train for something like that again. The next day, I sat down and pulled up my old training chart from the fall of 2006, changing the race date to indicate 2009’s date and working backwards to see when I would have needed to start training if I should decide to entertain such a possibility, fully expecting to see that I’d missed the beginning of the training period and that it was too late to think about doing it.  And I went backwards, week after week, until I ended up at day one, which was that day. That very day! I decided it was a sign.

Two years ago, some friends and I discussed training for and running the race together, but none was ultimately able to for various reasons. I put out feelers to see who might be interested this time, and Erin said, “I’m in.” That was all it took for me to move my commitment from shaky to solid, and I went on my first three-mile run of the sixteen-week training period that evening. I felt heavy and slow daunted by the 62 training runs ahead of me before the race, but I told myself that’s okay, that I’ve never been fast and probably never will be, and I am fine with that, and I know I have to take it run by run.

After falling off the fitness wagon pretty much immediately after the last half-marathon for a good 15 months and HATING myself for it, I started exercising again in June of this year, and I’m really glad I’ve been doing 3 miles pretty regularly, since that’s the mileage at which this training program starts. I feel like it’s another little sign that there’s no reason I shouldn’t do this. Is 3 miles necessarily an easy distance? Hell no, but it’s doable. Is it sort of a pain to build an entire week’s schedule around the four runs? Yes. But a worthwhile one, surely. Last time, I avoided any cross training because I was convinced I would pull a muscle or hurt myself and my entire goal would go down the toilet. I was pretty neurotic about it, even though I see now that some strength training and different kinds of cardio would have certainly helped me in the long run. This time, I hope to stick with Chalene and Jillian and work out my whole body in an effort to get stronger all around and not just be so focused on miles, miles, miles.

Last night’s 3-mile run, my second of the week, was very doom and gloom. Everything hurt. My knees, my ankles, my calves, my shins. Every step was a slog. I asked myself why I had committed myself to doing something I don’t enjoy four times a week for the next four months.

This morning I woke up with a renewed attitude and hit the road for my two-miler of the week. It was cool and cloudy, and my spirit was lifted by two songs in particular, “Waiting for the Light to Shine (Reprise)” and “Louder than Words,” and I was reminded about one thing I do actually enjoy about running … the opportunity to listen to music I love. These songs made my heart sing and my feet move a little faster. It was my best run of the week so far, for sure, and I remembered that this is just how it goes … some runs are downright miserable, some are fine, and some are even sort of good. It goes up and down, just like everything else in life. Running is clearly emotional exercise as well as physical exercise. Plus, on this morning’s run, I spotted two more Obama yard signs that had gone up on my street. I caught myself shouting “Yes!” and pumping my fist in the air in a moment of truly dorky, hopeful exuberance.

Mostly I just want to feel that pride in myself that I only feel when I decide to do something and actually stick with it, even if it’s really hard. That’s something I don’t do all that often. And I want to take care of myself, and running increasing miles every week for 16 weeks is a mighty fine way to do that. Looking back, it feels a little different this time because last time there was the ever-looming question of can I do this? Can I actually run 13.1 miles without stopping to walk? (In my mind, the slowest jog in the world, what I ultimately did, was acceptable. Walking = not acceptable. That is just the mindset I was in.) I never believed that I could do it until I did, and I was obsessed with that question and that distance even though it’s just an arbitrary number. Now that I know that I can, it’s less about achieving that seemingly impossible feat and more about just putting in the miles and hours and weeks of getting to that place. And the bonus is that I get to share it with a friend who understands why this process is important to me because it’s just as important to her.

I don’t love running. It hurts, it’s hard, and it’s mostly hella boring. But I love knowing that I’ll do it anyway. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it makes just enough sense to feel right.