Hump Day Hill Repeats

Yesterday was rough. I crashed out at 7:30. After sleeping for 10+ hours, I still feel like I could sleep more. There wasn’t anything spectacularly bad, just sheer tiredness. The kind where you want to go to bed and not get out until the next decade. Or at least the next presidential election cycle, right? Sigh.

After dropping off pretty princess at preschool yesterday, I headed to campus and worked most of the day on all the various sundry and unglamorous aspects of professor life. STARTED thinking about some of my writing projects, but only managed to look at my notes and print a few things to get ready. That might need to happen tomorrow as today is filled with a million meetings and a cram session for a faculty book discussion I’m supposed to help lead.

Since I’ve been struggling so much with the speed, I decide to at least do something else different with training to get stronger. I took advantage of being out by Waterfall Glen and decided to go with hill repeats. Sadly, those hills felt/looked much bigger in real life than they do on the elevation map of my Garmin.

I was going to do all of Big Bertha, but for the sake of time and efficiency, I just decided to do a big hill. Or what I thought was a big hill. Dubious now…Big Bertha is somewhere between miles 4 and 5. It’s about a half mile stretch, I think I got the bottom quarter of it. I didn’t want to spend half a mile doing the downhills because a) it bothered my left Achilles/ankle (I really gotta figure out what’s going on with that) and b) it seemed like too much rest/recovery time doing the downhills.

One of the nice things about the hill was a little overlook at the top so there was some reward for the work.

 

Today’s a rest day. Ideally I would squeeze in a yoga workout, but I think I’m going to have to settle for bringing some of my recovery tools to work (travel stick and foot massage ball) and doing it in between meetings. If I get home before 10, I might do a 10-15 minute yoga stretch routine. Otherwise, it’s too much.

That brings up something I’ve been curious about with ultra running. I stretch myself time-wise to fit in marathon training, and while the 50k seems somewhat more manageable time-wise, everything beyond seems really difficult. I’ve noticed that the bulk of folks who are most active on my trail/ultra running Facebook group are single and/or childless. I’m curious how working moms juggle training for ultras and still parent, work, and not go crazy. I might put it out there. That is definitely one thing that’s prohibitive about training. The other is the amount of traveling that seems involved with getting to races, especially in the Midwest. We only have so much open trail and ultra road races are fairly unpopular it seems. I’m new to all this, so feel free to pipe in with experiences, thoughts, etc. In the meanwhile, I might post on the Flatlanders group for a roll call about working mom ultra runners and how they manage.

Spending time on self care

Women can be bad at self care (yes, I know it’s an overgeneralization). Moms are even worse. Running moms the worst. One way I know this is even the targeted health advertisements I see for women to get mammograms or other screenings, and the advertisement is spun as a “You take care of everyone else, but you also need to take care of yourself in order to do that.” As a mom, you put your own needs and sometimes health behind others (ask any mom what happens when they are “sick”). As runners, we’re even more prone to ignore aches and pains until it’s too late. I get the extra awesomeness of being Korean and having grown up with self-employed parents–read: having minimal insurance/access to doctors–so I don’t go to the doctor when I’m sick or for much in general. Just to give you an idea, my dad slipped/fractured a disk in his neck and ended up having major surgery, wearing a halo brace, and being out of work for a year. And he didn’t go to the hospital, in fact SLEPT on the injury, until the next day.

So yeah, learning to ignore pain and what my body wants or needs runs pretty deep. Recently, Craig (my myofascial guy) gave me a long lecture about how I really needed to work on self care to keep myself injury-free. I couldn’t just ignore stretching, etc. And he may have muttered a thing or two about aging…

And the fact of the matter is that I’m not 25 and gutting out my first marathon through excruciating pain and thinking it’ll all go back the way it’s supposed to in the morning…or in 3-4 months since I refused to run for awhile after that first marathon.

Whereas before, I used to not understand what people meant by this “warming up” before running they would do, and I had no idea what a foam roller was until my second marathon. Oh, and I started training for my first marathon in cotton. A lot has changed. I still don’t warm up, but I do sometimes stick my legs (meaning I use “the stick” or “tiger tail” to massage my legs a bit) and do some dynamic pre-emptive stretching before a run. I wear compression religiously to ward off “something” much like garlic for vampires. I spend more intimate time with my foam roller than I do with my husband. And I’ve always been good at stretching afterwards, but it was only for at most 5 minutes. Craig was talking about spending some serious time getting into the tightness, maybe backing off the mileage, and doing more yoga and other activities.

The brat in me wants to stomp my foot and go, “REALLY?! You want me to do MORE STUFF to be able to keep doing the stuff I’ve always been doing?” Um, yes. As much as I hate to admit it, my body has changed. And my threshold for discomfort has lowered. Don’t get me wrong, I can take pain like no one’s business (hello, two natural child births), but I’ve begun to realize more and more that I don’t HAVE to. And maybe I SHOULDN’T (yes, this post is all about caps). Maybe that’s wisdom. Or just being an adult.  

14 miles in 2 degrees. i can take pain.

I see this in other areas of my life. The other night, I crashed hard at 7:30. After a brutally cold 14 miles starting at 6:15 am, my body was done for the day early. I demanded a lot from it, and it wanted a lot in return. I actually debated forcing myself to stay up. Watch bad shows. Read. Putz on the interwebs. As if some “cool patrol” was watching me and assessing my dork factor for going to bed on a Saturday night so early. But no one was watching. I was the only one who had to face the consequences of my actions. So I went to bed. I slept a solid 11 hours.

I have begun to realize more and more that if I don’t take care of myself, I will be one miserable runner, mom, wife, and educator. And I will make the lives of those around me miserable. And that doesn’t have to happen.

So I go to bed early. I call people when I’m struggling with my depression. I go to yoga. And… I drop down running plans. Boom.

Yup, I decided to move from the 5 day/week running plan to the 4 day/week. My body isn’t happy with what I’m doing or have been doing. Something needs to change. And for some insane reason, it freaks me out to admit it to myself and change the plan, and admit it to others. Even though no one is judging me for it, and most of my running friends would encourage me to be healthy and do what my body needs. But there’s a sick little devil on my shoulder that tells me that I’m not a REAL runner if I’m not cranking out 50+ miles a week. If I’m not running 5-6 days a week. If I’m not running a sub 8:00/mile on the daily. If I don’t make the top X percent. So you push and “dig deep” until your well is empty and you are spiritually or physically broken.

No thanks.

I’ve been there and done that. And I don’t need to go back.

But that’s taken me a long long time to learn. And it’s definitely progress, not perfection. It’s the long view. Boston was once a bucket list for me. And now that it’s on the horizon, I want to make sure that I can actually run it. I don’t know if I’ll run it more than once, so I want to make sure all my crazy work the last two years actually means something. I take it back, it DOES mean something whether I get to run Boston or not (as of right now, btw, there’s nothing to stop me but myself). That I can work hard, attain my goals, and bust my guts doing it. And regardless of what happens at Boston, I’ll know I did good and I’ll be with friends. *cue soaring, inspirational music* But that only happens if I’m healthy and strong enough to get to the starting line. And that only happens if I listen to my body and take care of myself.

Even the elite runners do this. Deanna Kastor pulled out of the Olympic Trials pretty last minute, and Kara Goucher said she “left it all out there,” but it wasn’t enough to make the Olympic Team (although since she was 4th, she’ll be the official alternate). Even Desi Linden, who pulled an amazing second half of the marathon, said she had to trust her plan and not punch it in the first half to keep up with Amy Cragg and Shalane Flanagan (and that plan is what got her to pass Shalane just within the last mile or so and nab second). Amazing. So even the elites have to listen to what their bodies and spirits need.

Sorry if this post was all over the place, but I’ve been thinking a lot about trying to figure out what I need and how to keep myself healthy on lots of fronts. I didn’t have a great foundation for those things growing up, so it’s new terrain. Anyhow, hope you all had a great run this weekend, whatever your plan was.

 

Another exciting Friday night in the kingdom of nerd

This is me staring at some research I’m supposed to be presenting on Sunday. The third of four presentations I’m involved with for a major conference that’s in town. It’s been a grueling week, and my coffee intake has assumed epic proportions. I calculate that I’m consuming 60+ oz of coffee a day most days this week. The withdrawal will probably be ugly.

I actually had a presentation on campus the other day as well, and i was so jacked up on coffee that I was rambling to two cornered freshmen afterwards. I literally couldn’t stop talking, and it was a ridiculous strung-out, semi-crazed conversation I was basically having with myself. I’m sorry, kids.

For the life of me, I can’t get this graphic to show right, so here’s a link to the original source. Anyhow, it’s the taper. It’s actually been the taper for over a week. Normally I’m going crazy with the taper. I want to run more. But, this week has been so awful that I actually cut a mile off the speed workout Tuesday, and ditched the 4 miles today. To ask me to run less is hard enough, but for me to voluntarily cut back even more is insanity. I’ve not had enough sleep, energy, or time to do the full workouts though. So any irritability, craziness, fitful sleep has been more a product of things this week rather than taper madness.

My kids have been super tuned-in to my stress level as there have been constant demands for “cuddling” 24/7. Kids coming in the early morning hours, late at night, all while I’m serenaded by shrieks of “cuddle!!!” It’s awesome. Really. Demands for cuddles while whining in one’s highest, nerve-grating voice, makes me want to melt into a pile of warm gooeyness. The work-life juggle has been hard, though. I missed out on some networking opportunities and face-time with other nerds–i mean colleagues/academics–to attend my kids’ preschool art/music show. Still, they were pretty cute. They clean up ok. 🙂

Ok, so we are 7 days out from the marathon. 7. days. That is within throwing distance of an accurate weather report. And I just made the mistake of checking the 10 day forecast.

I can and will run in rain. But almost 4 hours of running in rain while shooting for an ambitious time goal makes me want to cry, vomit, or scream. Either way, that forecast had better clear up. To be honest, even the 3 day forecasts lately have been spotty, so maybe I can just pray to the running gods.

Jen has, however, been freaking out. She’s only run one marathon so maybe that’s it, whereas I am so much more experienced and advanced as a runner (haha) that I’m not worried. But maybe it’s also because I’m busy that I haven’t allowed myself to think that far ahead. I DO need to start getting my head in the race, though. I have a plan. To tie myself to Jen and have her pull me along.

No, actually, I do have a real plan. I’m (we) using www.findmymarathon.com and using it to print pace bands for a conservative start and even effort. I’ve read some reviews online, so I know that people are a bit surprised by the few hills that pop up. I think it’s that when you’re used to seeing so much complete flatness, any hill is an unwelcome surprise and feels very difficult. One friend (thanks Mary!) also suggested using Google Maps’ satellite imagery to do a fly through of the marathon route. I feel like I have a decent handle of what to expect scenery-wise (having gone to school there), but I know U of IL has changed alot since I’ve graduated so it probably wouldn’t hurt. While the idea of using mantras in the mirror makes me want to roll my eyes, I’m wondering about at least getting a couple in practice under my belt for use during the race.

I also need to start working on my sleep (not until after Sunday) and hydration this week. I’ve seen some stuff about also eating mostly simple carbs the week before, but that seems extreme to me. However, I’ve also been struggling with a more sensitive stomach lately so maybe it’s not the worst idea in the world. Anyhow, work and my bed still await, so have a great long run Saturday (just 8 for me, assuming I can squeeze it in)!