Dialing it Back

I was riding the subway home the other night, after a delightful dinner with friends, feeling elated and full. I decided to browse this month’s Runner’s World, which usually brings me so much joy, yet so much agony once I’ve read it from cover-to-cover knowing I have to wait another 4 weeks for a new issue.

An article that interviewed some of this summer’s Olympic athletes piqued my interest, especially the part on “injury prevention.” Shalane Flanagan, one of the women who competed in the Olympic Marathon, said how every runner will feel an ache here and there – but once it goes past 3-4 days, it’s considered an injury.

I got really hot, and cursed the non-pregnant young people who were taking up all the precious seats. After a minor hot flash/freakout, I came to terms with the fact that I am “injured.”

I thought I kicked my knee injury after my PT Session two weeks ago, but after running 4 miles Monday night and 6 miles Tuesday morning, it was definitely in a bit of pain. I noticed stiffness in my knee Tuesday at work, and tried icing and stretching, and didn’t think about it too much.

But after reading that article, I realized, I really do need to do something about it. My training plan has been somewhat conservative until now, and starting next week, it really begins to ramp up. I know that my knee is not going to fare well if I increase mileage, and I know that because I’ve been base training for about two months now, I will be fine if I take off or decrease the mileage on a few runs.

To give me some hope, I thought back to last year’s marathon training plan, when I followed the bare-bones beginner program. It got me through a full marathon, with only one minor injury along the way.

Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer - you have
a special place in my heart.

I opened up my copy, and I was shocked at how low the mileage was for the first half of the plan. A wave of RELIEF washed over me. I’ve been doing much higher mileages for weeks now, and if I need to lower mileage for a week or two to get back on track, it won’t wreck all the training I’ve already done.

So I got up on yesterday morning, listened to my body, and left my gym bag at home. I felt a bit antsy, but I knew it was what I needed. On the upside, I made oatmeal raisin cookies.

Not my cookies. I didn't take a picture of them.
I was too busy eating.

I went to the gym this morning, and though the treadmill was screaming my name, I gave my joints a break and did my cardio on just about every other machine (including that weird gazelle machine that simulates running. It was the next best thing and I still hated it).

I can already feel my body thanking me - I woke up with a ton of energy this morning, and basically leapfrogged out of bed. So while it’s hard for me to dial back my training plan, at the end of the day, I want to finish the Philly Marathon. I would rather run it and miss my goal time, than sit on the sidelines on race day.

How to: Build a Bookcase

Today’s Workout: 3 Miles on Treadmill at 1.0 incline, 10 minutes elliptical

Health Check: My quads are still a bit sore, and I noticed earlier in the week that my right knee bugged me if I was sitting for too long. My calves feel much better than they did on Monday, and I feel healthy overall!

Week 1! Marathon training! Yay! Not supposed to be the week of a new pain (feel free to skip the next few paragraphs if you want to avoid me talking about my knee, and want to get the incredibly interesting subject of this blog post).

As I just mentioned, my knee was bugging me a tiny bit earlier in the week. If I kept my legs in the same position at my desk for too long, it would hurt once I moved it (the pitfalls of an office job). I’ve never had a knee injury before this, so I found it disconcerting. I think it’s due to a combination of running three days in a row (which I hardly ever do), trying to change my running form, and building a bookcase (more on my carpentry skills in a minute).

I took Wednesday off from any exercise to make sure I gave my body a rest, and I was supposed to do a 5 mile run at MGP today. Instead, I did a 3 mile treadmill run at a very comfortable pace, and 10 minutes on the elliptical to make sure I didn’t hurt my knee any further. I’m planning on making up the other two miles hopefully tomorrow, and get some more cross-training in to strengthen my muscles.

I’m feeling unsettled about modifying my plan so early on in my training schedule, but instead of pushing myself today, I wanted to prevent injury. My incredible logic seems to be working since my knee feels loads better.

But I’m not going to focus on it anymore! I’m going to channel positive energy and get back on track to my training plan. End rant.

After going to Brimfield last weekend, I was inspired to spruce up my apartment a bit. My mom sent me this AWESOME link to “Flea Market Chic” inspirations, and I was thinking up all the ways to decorate my massive 400 sq ft apartment.

So I went back here:

CONTAINER STORE I LOVE YOU

Originally, I was planning on picking up two shelves so I could begin adding a bit more flair to one of my walls, and then I saw a really cool bookcase out of the corner of my eye. My book situation has been pretty dismal since I moved in (last OCTOBER, I might add) – they were all stuffed into old Steve Madden shoe boxes, wasting away. So as it usually happens in the Container Store, I decided that I just had to have it.

Do you see how they make you think you need this?

When I picked it up from the checkout, the cashier was a bit wary to send me on my way with it.

“How are you getting home?” Asked the friendly sales person.

“The subway.” I said matter-of-factly.

“Oh yeah?” She said, without concealing her doubt.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I probably should have just waited to pick this up with a car or taken a cab home:

It still remains a mystery how I carried this all the way from 16^th and 6^th to Greenpoint. It was about 40 pounds and in the most awkward box to carry.

But I was determined when I finally made it home, and got to work on building this behemoth.

As a gal living in her first studio apartment, I’ve never really had to assemble furniture before. Basically everything except my couch I inherited stole from my parents, and the only heavy lifting I did for my couch involved me picking up a pen to sign a receipt.

So if you also fall in the novice category for carpentry and heavy lifting, here are some helpful “how-to” reminders for building your first bookcase:

1.      Be in a calm mood

2.      Build it in a cool room (or at least not during a heat wave as I did)

3.      Have a good toolbox

4.      Keep cold beer in your fridge

I began building, and slowly started to realize what a big project it was going to be.

After several f* bombs and water breaks, I managed to almost put the whole thing together. Let me just say that those Lowe’s commercials of happy couples doing projects in their first homes are BIG FAT LIES. 

Show me a couple that can put together a bookcase and not yell at each other, and I will show you a couple on Xanax. It was not fun and I luckily did have cold beer in the fridge to decompress afterwards.

Yuengling can fix anything.

I came home last night determined to put the finishing touches on it, which included drilling a hole into my brick wall. I utilized eHow.com, which explained that all you needed was a drill and safety goggles. I did not have safety goggles, but I did have patience. I surprisingly  did have fun drilling into my first wall, and had a LOT more fun finally putting my dusty books and trinkets on my bookcase.

Look at all my pretty books!
I need more trinkets.

I feel quite accomplished for building this whole thing without my brawny boyfriend (though he offered to help! I think I saved us from a massive fight by doing it alone). I finished with one blister and a sense of independence.

Barefoot Running, and the Eye-Opening Watch Debacle

As I mentioned last week, I have made it my goal to lose the plantar fasciitis that has been bugging me for over a year. I got a new pair of minimalist shoes (which are all the rage in the running community) to help me alter my running form. I am a shameful heel striker, and I am on a mission to change that.

I tried out my new (PURPLE) sneakers, and they felt great. I also tried landing on my midfoot on a treadmill, and that felt OK too. But overall, it still felt pretty awkward. I didn’t know where to bend, what to bend, or where to land. As it turns out, changing your running form after years of wearing cushioned sneakers does not happen overnight.

So I decided to do some research. I Googled “Barefoot Running,” and came across a book written by a guy appropriately named “Barefoot Ken Bob.” The book, Barefoot Running Step by Step, chronicles how Ken, who is widely considered as the Guru of barefoot running, came to run 76 marathons (you guessed it) – barefoot. I didn’t actually buy the book, but Amazon's preview gives you quite a bit of pages to read without dipping into your electronic wallet.

Ken’s “Most Important Lesson” in the book to help you run barefoot – bend your knees. It seems so simple. But then I thought about it, and remembered this photo from the Brooklyn Half-Marathon:

My legs are almost completely straight. What happens when your legs are straight? You heel strike. What happens when your legs are bent? You land on the balls of your feet.

When I got home from work, I tried on a pair of Nike Frees that Keith lent me to try out, and went for a bent-knees run. And it worked!

Ken talks about how bending your knees fixes a lot of problems all at once – it makes you land on the balls of your feet (which absorbs the shock, and in turn decreases the chance of injury), and you are automatically set up to run in a forward motion. It was incredible to me how bending my knees naturally made me go faster, and it felt effortless. I was intending to go out for an easy jog since I did a five-mile run yesterday morning, but I ended up clocking in at an 8:33 pace (which is on the quicker side for me).

Barefoot Ken - notice the bent knees.

So what’s next? Well as most running rules go, do everything in moderation. My body isn’t used to this new form, so I’m going to try and ease into it. I want to try out running barefoot on the track by my apartment, and slowly incorporate this new technique into my daily runs. Also, marathon training starts next week (!!!), and I want to be as injury-free as possible. I have noticed, however, that my IT band that is normally a little sore, feels much better this week. A byproduct of the midfoot strike? Perhaps.

**(For more info on barefoot running, check out Ken’s book or his website, barefootrunning.com. I do not claim to be an expert on this stuff, or on anything really, so the above is just what I saw as the key takeaways).

After my first bent-knee run, I plugged my Garmin watch into my computer to upload both my morning and evening runs. While I do love my watch, it has a really hard time reading a charge or connecting to my computer. It takes me about five minutes to figure out how to connect it to anything, and it gives me serious rage that normally only comes from a crowded subway ride. During last night’s fit, my Garmin went completely blank. More rage. Keith and I tried fiddling with it, but nothing happened.

I became slightly dramatic, and was trying to plot out the time it would take for the manufacturer to fix it. JUST as I am about to embark on an 18-week long running voyage, my amazing GPS, pace-keeping watch decides to pucker out. My life is so hard.

At the end of my rant, Keith said very wisely, “You know, people were running before there was technology.” Bam. The birds began to sing, and the stars aligned. I began to think about his comment more, and I realized that I did my entire marathon training last year with my cheap, pink Timex watch. No GPS, no pace updates. Often times, I left it at home. During the actual marathon, I think I only looked at it three times.

In a dramatic statement that I will probably regret later, I have decided to run one day a week without a watch. I will need it for speed work, and I will probably want it on my long runs to see how many more times I need to run over the Williamsburg Bridge to make 18 miles, but I’m going to pick one easy run and forego my beloved technology.

I don’t want to become a slave to my paces or lose sight of why I started running – for fun. I truly loved training last year, and while it was a bit tiring at times, I never lost sight of why I signed up in the first place. I wanted to complete a marathon, and I wanted to enjoy it.

Starting next week, I will begin ramping up my mileage quite a bit, and to avoid becoming burned out, I’m going to check into the mindset that worked for me so well last year. I’m going to train for a marathon, and it’s going to be awesome.

(In case you were worried, I figured out how to turn my watch back on. Google solves everything)

Yet Another (failed) Attempt to Become Pain-Free

Runners love talking about their injuries – plain and simple. We spend so much time by ourselves running, that we notice every ache and pain and can describe these aforementioned injuries with great detail. It’s also possible that runners are a bit self-obsessed.

I try my best not to complain about my injuries too much because a) I am superstitious that  talking about an injury makes it worse b) It is really annoying. But give me this free pass so I can tell you a story. Pull up a chair, get comfortable.

I have been plagued by plantar fasciitis for over a year. Every morning when I wake up, I put my feet on the ground and wince in pain (worsened if I wore heels or really flat shoes the day before). Every evening, they hurt to some degree, sometimes so badly that I put them in an ice cold foot bath just to relieve some of the pain. For some strange reason, they don’t bother me while I run, which I do consider a sincere blessing.

I have gone to physical therapists and a podiatrist, but no one seems to be able to treat it. I ice and stretch my tight calves (which are usually the culprit for my non-fatal disease), but nothing really seems to help.

In the running world, being a heel-striker instead of a mid-foot striker (landing in the middle to ball of the foot as you would if you were running barefoot), is considered blasphemy. So as a pained heel-striker, my spirits were lifted when I read a recent article in Runner’s World. It was about a runner who also suffered from plantar fasciitis for a long time, but when he changed his stride to a mid-foot strike, he claimed that it fixed many of his injuries. Determined not to have my feet hurt forever, I decided to try and fix my stride.

On Tuesday, I bought a pair of Brooks PureFlow Sneakers, which are designed to help guide your feet to land on the midfoot. They felt great when I tried them on, and they are also purple.

PURPLE. Who's excited?

I was psyched to give them a go in celebration of our Nation’s birthday. I woke up earlier than I would have on a day off to beat the heat, laced up my new  kicks, and attempted this whole new stride-thing. Turns out, it’s really hard to change the way you run.

Though it doesn’t happen every time I take a spin around my neighborhood, I can usually reach a place of serenity on my runs. I take in the scenery, enjoy my iPod, and relish in the fact that I really do love to run. I had to be completely conscious of every step I was taking yesterday, and I had no clue whether I was doing it right and whether I looked like a complete fool (the answer to the latter is most likely a “hell yes”).

I was about four and a half miles into my run, and I was finally in somewhat of a groove. The balls of my feet were a little sore, but I thought I was getting the hang of it. I took a final loop of McCarren Park, which I have run many times, and noticed a slightly aggressive bum on the dirt path 50 feet in front of me. So I veered off back to the pavement, tripped, and completely wiped out. I mean a total and complete wipe out – Arms flailing, I skidded over the uneven pavement, scraped up my whole left leg, and got two big gashes on my hands.

I looked around, and was so confused as to what just happened. I was in a bit of pain, and I noticed that I had ripped the insulation sleeve on my brand new water bottle. Instead of being brave and shaking it off, I cried a little, limped back to the sidewalk, and had a pity party (if you're considering having a rumble or an intense game of flag football or something, you definitely want me on your team).

Since I was a half mile from home, covered in dirt from the pavement surrounding a bench that usually houses several homeless people, I mustered up some courage and ran home to wash up (and eventually stopped crying). I would show you a picture of my gashes, but even I don't want to look at them.

In an effort to relieve some pain from my feet, I got new injuries (in addition to my scrapes and bruises, I can barely move my left arm that supported my fall). The silver lining: this morning, the bottom of my feet did not hurt as much as they usually do. End rant on running injuries.

After I licked my wounds, I met up with Keith and Kyle, and we were ready for some 4^th of July festivities. On a whim, we took the subway to Mets Stadium, hoping to watch some baseball and eat hot dogs.

Sweating and waiting for the subway.

We were a bit stressed as we approached the stadium, unsure whether the game was sold out, or if we could even get seats together. I walked up to a security guard at the gates, and asked him which way the box office was.

He pulled out of his pocket, four shiny baseball tickets, free of charge.

WOOHOO!

We were over the moon – we had seats on the first baseline, in the shade, on the 4^th of July. AWESOME.

I also ran into Jillian (yay!) who got tickets with a bunch of her friends, and I was super jealous when I found out she had today and tomorrow off. After all the beer and fried food, I was less than excited to go to work this morning.

Mmm... Nathan's.

However tired, cranky, and hungover I felt this morning, it was totally worth it for the great time we had at the game. I was giddy the whole time, and after my epic fall, felt that my luck had changed its course.