Treadmill Tempo Run Fail

I woke up dreading my run today.  Mainly it was because I was up late last night blogging all sorts of blogariffic things on all my blogs, and the late was made later by the fact that I teach a grad class on Wednesday nights.

I need to learn to make better blogging choices.

Anyway, I woke up very tired and very cold.  The wind was howling, the temperature was in the teens, and there was no way I could run a tempo run in sub-zero wind chills.  Or, at least that's what the hubbs mumbled to me when my alarm went off at 4 AM.  It's very cold here in Illinois right now, in case you didn't know:

Even my puppies are feeling the cold, and they're built for it (partly genetics, partly too much blubber):

This morning I had to gather up all my courage--even the stray bits under the bed and in the back corner of the linen closet--to go downstairs and do a 4 mile tempo on the treadmill.

You probably already know I can barely handle running 1000m repeats on the thing, so you can imagine the state I was in when I started running 4 miles at my tempo speed.  Outside, I can run a 4-mile tempo without much thought. The treadmill, however, is a much different and completely sad, pathetic story:

First 800m: "This isn't so bad.  At least I have some good TV on the trusty old ID channel."
Next 800m: "This is starting to suck."
Next 800m: "Maybe I should kick the speed down a notch.  If I were a total wimp."
Next 800m: "ZOMG I'LL NEVER MAKE IT I SUCK I WILL TOTALLY FAIL AT THIS MARATHON."

In case you were counting, I barely made it to the half-way point of this tempo.  After that, I had to break it up into 800 m repeats just to get through the workout.  What's extremely sad is that the last part is no exaggeration; I was mentally cracking by the second mile.  I really need to mentally toughen the you-know-what-bad-word-to-which-I-am-referring up.  So, to punish myself, I shall be doing more tempos on the treadmill until my inner whiny baby learns to put a cork in it.  It's kind of like self-flagellation, only with a treadmill.  I think.

Meh. And you can quote me on that.

Had a 6 mile easy run on the ol' marathon schedule thisa morning, but because I didn't get my butt downstairs in enough time (I really don't know where my morning time goes), I only had time for 4.5 miles.  I knew this going into it, and then changed my goal from distance to time when I realized I only had about an hour to work out.

Because I keep forgetting to turn the damn GPS off on my Garmin when I run on the treadmill, this is what the map looks like from this morning's run:

Not really much else to say about that run (except I didn't really move around that much.  I am not talented enough to do plyometrics AND run at the same time whilst on a moving treadmill), except that it was really slow--which was the point.  My legs are feeling pretty good; methinks they have finally recovered from that 18-miler.  That's a good thing, since I have a 20 miler scheduled for this Saturday.

Not much else to say about anything else really.  Had one of those days that involved a lot of snarling, finger-pointing, and me declaring, "And you can quote me on that!"  That pretty much drained all of the witty repartee right out of me; we'll see if a good night's sleep can restore my jovial banter for tomorrow's post.

Total Running Moron Tuesday

I had every intention of running outside this morning.  I really, really did.  I had 4 mile repeats to do, and the weather was in the 50s at 5 A.M. on January 29th.  In Illinois.  Which, in case you didn't know, is in the Northern Hemisphere, so we are supposed to be in the depths of winter, but we're not--the Snow Miser is on vacay and his brother Heat Miser is here to stay.  At least for today, anyway.

But, as you probably suspect by now, I didn't get to do my repeats this morning.  I did do these things:

a) Go outside.
b) Run

But it was just too freaking windy (20 mph winds) to do any sensible speed work.  I only managed a mile warm-up before I turned around and came back, being blown all over the place in the meantime. I know you hard core types would have been pumping out the miles and cursing Mother Nature into the wind the entire time, but I actually like to get up to the proper speed in my speed work.  And maintain it.  Winds that are too high don't let me do that, you see.  I toyed with the idea of doing them on my treadmill, but the thought of the mental anguish I would suffer doing that when I can barely manage 1000m repeats on the thing caused me even more mental anguish.

So I just came back in and got ready for work--but I packed a bag of running clothes for later.

After my last period class, I changed into said running clothes:

The gruesome aftermath of my run.  But my compression sleeves are freaking awesome.

I snapped on my new Garmin footpod, slapped on my 910XT, and then began to run in endless circles around the upper floor of our school, over the terrazzo floors and through the halls.  I did this in front of a lot of students and staff that knew me, which resulted in a lot of battle cries, jeers, and snide comments thrown my way.

Lessons learned on this run:

• It is much nicer to run mile repeats in endless circles than on my treadmill.  While technically my displacement for both would be zero, I have actually traveled a distance by running in those circles.
• There is no wind or rain when running inside the school.
• High school students sure do come up with witty things to say about teachers who are running in the hallways.  Witty, funny, and highly inappropriate.
• I maintained pace nicely, unlike what would have happened this morning.
• It was actually nice to talk to people in the halls that I knew while I was circling; it helped pass the time.
• I shocked a lot of students who didn't expect to see me running all-out at them in the hallway in shorts and a t-shirt.  I was not in my regular teachery uniform, you see.  I half expected some of them to start throwing homework at me just to get me to stop barrelling towards them.
• My cadence sucks.  Going to have to work on that.
• My new purple compression socks are working out quite nicely.  They would look great in a race photo or two.

I didn't care that I looked like a total running moron.  I had a run that needed to get done (without getting injured!), and I plan on crossing that finish line of my first marathon somewhere close to my time goal.  I hope to do it upright, however, and not by crawling and/or throwing myself one body part at a time towards the line.

Monday Ramblings

I began my morning by ever-so-gracefully slipping in my driveway on the sheet of ice that had formed overnight and landing right on my ass.  Good thing I have worked long and hard at putting extra padding back there; I don't even have a bruise.  Yet.  That'll teach me to wear fashionable boots with an almost nonexistent coefficient of friction instead of practical ones.  Since ice tends to melt when it hits warm ass molecules (I know this because I am a science teacher), that meant that any ice clinging to my ass thereby underwent a change of state and transformed itself into liquid H2O which wet my pants and backside thoroughly.  I got to drive to work with a wet ass.

Good thing this happened after I did Cathe's Supercuts workout (DEEElicious!), or I would really have been in trouble.  This is the third time I've done it, and I must say I am in pretty heavy serious like with it. Compound moves that make my heart rate skyrocket and that crazy core at the end....mmmm mmmm.  Now if I can only convince her that I really am committed (she keeps asking me, dammit, every time I do the workout), it would be a perfect workout.

Now, it's probably obvious I love me some cross training, mainly because it mixes up my workout week and staves off boredom.  But I also like it because I really believe it helps you train injury-free (if you're doing it right, that is.  I've done it wrong before and only got more injured.  Let's just say you shouldn't do high-impact workouts on your cross-training days-just because it's not running doesn't mean you should do it).  And my marathon training plan (which I am bitter about purchasing but glad that I have) provides two cross-training days after my long runs on Saturday.  This isn't something I ever had in a training plan before, and I dig it.  I'm thinking this has been allowing my legs to heal before smacking them around with more running abuse each week.

Why do I think this?  Because I have been the proud owner of an Achilles injury since September.  And, even after running 18 miles on Saturday, all is quiet on the Achilles front.  In fact, it feels 95% normal--and I am hitting a weekly mileage I have never ever seen before.  I guess I just got all jacked up in my old training schedules that never gave me two days off from running in a row; being a novice runner, I just assumed that wasn't what was done.  I got all mentally trapped in the boxes of those schedules I never realized I should have just given myself two days off if my body needed it, breaking free from the schedule shackles I had imposed upon myself.

Whoa.  It got all serious for a second.  Let's lighten it up:

That's better.

Anyhoo, after a pretty craptastic day today (at least I had no meetings), this came in the mail for me:

Calf sleeves.  And they're purple, people--my lucky racing color. Plus they are from Pro Compression, a neat little company whose products would make excellent Christmas gifts for the runner(s) in your life.  Just sayin'. Can't wait to try them out tomorrow morning when I'm running mile repeats in the dark.

Cathe's Burn Sets Round 2: I can't smell my own fire

In order to recover from my 18-mile run I did yesterday (my quads still aren't speaking to me), I decided to fill this cross-training day with the wonderful world of weight work.  Specifically, I did Cathe's Burn Sets again from her new XTrain series.

This is a solid workout, and I actually heavied up all my weights this time.  In fact, at some points I was using heavier weights than Cathe.  But not as heavy as I should have to feel the burn.  I know I should have looked like this during some point in the workout:

photo credit: pasukaru76 via photopin cc

But instead I felt more like this:

photo credit: slworking2 via photopin cc

In this workout you do three exercises per muscle group (chest, shoulders, back, biceps, triceps), and then you do what Cathe calls a burn set, which is an exercise designed to really make those muscle fibers burn baby burn.  They usually involved resistance tubing and a firewalker band, which required me to go get even more equipment (I hate workouts that involve a lot of equipment).

Again, I wasn't feeling it.  I mean I was feeling it.  But I wasn't FEELING it.  There was no spontaneous combustion of my muscles going on.  At all.  Maybe a sputtering of a flame.  Like a sparkler on the 4th of July.

Hmmmm.

I did heavy up on all my weights, but the heaviest weight I own is a set of 20 pound dumbbells.  I could have picked up my 40 pound dogs, but I am not interested in getting bitten.  I mean, I was using those 20s on exercises I never have before (biceps and shoulders, mainly), and was whomping out tricep extensions with my 12s when I normally use 8s, but those burn sets didn't burn.

Maybe my muscles are made of flame retardant materials.  Or I just need heavier weights.

18 Miles of Hunters, Animal Poop, & More Bad Running Fashion

Yesterday I topped off my third week of marathon training with an 18-mile run, my first-ever run at that distance:

The weather couldn't have been better for a winter run--temps were in the 20s, there was no wind (for once!), and the sun was out the entire time.  I got to run to places I've never been before around my house, which included finding out that there is a hunting club about 9 miles out.  Nothing like coming down the road and seeing rows of men in orange with guns coming toward you, peering into the cattails ahead of them with murderous intensity.  My inner mantra during the 8th and 9th miles was, "please don't shoot me please don't shoot me run run run."    Now you know why that 9th mile split time is juuuuust a tad bit faster than the rest.

I'm still working on my eating strategy for this type of mileage.  I want to experiment with eating something solid, but for now I usually just eat gels (PowerBar ones being my favorite) and wash those down with some water every 30 minutes or so.  I hate carrying a bottle of water in my hands, so on this run I wore my water-bottle belt.  It made me look like a total running dork but it was worth it just to not have to carry that bottle around:

Boy do I know how to put together a running outfit as if I was color blind.

Problem was, that little bottle just wasn't enough water.  I was thirsty by the end of the run--really thirsty.  In the last 2 miles, I seriously considered eating snow just to quench my thirst, but opted against it after realizing how much anonymous animal poop was located along the side of the road.  Note for next time: bring an extra water bottle and drop it off at about the halfway point.  It's not like anyone will take it out in the middle of the country where I run (unless the anonymous pooping animals scamper off with it).  

But it was also one of those runs where little itty-bitty things start irritating the crap out of you (literally!), and you have to deal with that stuff along with the fact that you are tired by mile 14 or so and are also trying to mentally urge yourself forward, valiantly resisting the urge to sit down in the middle of the road and call your husband to come get you.  Things like finding a place to use nature's facilities where no one will see you and call the cops, adjusting your clothing 3 bazillion times because it's all askew after using nature's facilities, realizing your gloves aren't cutting it and having to stop and bust out some hand warmers, trying for 5 miles to get said hand warmers in the right position in your mitten-gloves so you don't lose fingers, realizing your nose is raw from all the wiping after snot-rocketing, dealing with the fact that you are thirsty enough to eat snow....all of those things just grate on my nerves after a while.  

But I have to learn to suck it up and keep on running, which is what I did.  I have to admit that, even though I was irritated by all the little things, I was excited when I hit the 17th mile.  I was happy that I had kept on going despite all the annoyances and despite the fact that my legs were so numb from fatigue that they no longer felt like they were attached to my body.  I was rather jazzed that I was now running into mileage territory heretofore unknown to me.  We runners are weirdos like that.

But I was most happy about my decision against eating the snow along the side of the road.

Workouts, Unicorns, & Rhinos.

I have been crazy busy again, whomping up presentations for other school districts, occasionally teaching a class or two at my high school, and stopping students from putting plastics on my hot plates:

So, since last we met, here's the working out rundown:

• Treadmill Tuesday was full of high running fashion
• Wednesday was an easy 5 mile run, which I did on the treadmill because I had no interest in losing body parts as a result of frostbite.  And when I say easy, I mean easy:

One of my training resolutions this time around is to make the easy days easy so I can run my quality days with quality.  Just trying not to get injured.  Again.

• Thursday was an 8-mile tempo run, 6 of which were run at a comfortably hard pace.  Lesson from this run?  "Comfortably hard" does not mean "running all out."  I have to convince my legs that tempo runs are NOT races; they are supposed to be kinder, gentler speed work, not runs that have me wondering if I'm going to freaking finish.  Plus, I learned that running after work sucks, mainly because I'm tired because I walk and/or stand around all day watching younger humans learn.  
• Today's workout was upper-body weights, doing my fave Pyramid Upper Body workout.  I think the bicep track, which usually has me emitting noises that are from another planet by the end, is getting easier.  Not much, but a little.  I also think I have an unnatural love of the dumbbell pullover that might require therapy at some point.

On a more serious note, I shared this picture on facebook this morning:

I expressed the sentiment that I often felt like the rhino in the picture.  I know people think I'm totally nuts (about a lot of things), but once you have been overweight (see the "About" page for a good hard look at the old me)  it's hard to get out of the rhino mentality--your image of yourself gets distorted much like what you see in a funhouse mirror.   And my mirror has especially been all sorts of funhouse crazy since I found out  that I have gained about 14 pounds since I quit smoking over 2.5 years ago, which I have rationalized in all sorts of crazy ways.  But, bottom line, I'm scared to death about looking like I once was.

What I think I have to realize about this whole weight/body image thing is that:

• I am healthier
• I am more active
• I have done things I never thought I would ever do (running a half-marathon or a Ragnar wasn't exactly on my to-do list when I was 80+ pounds heavier)
• I no longer get irritated by sweat pouring out of any back-fat rolls during the summer
• I own no clothing with sizes that begin with a "2" anymore
• I like bulleted lists

I also have to realize that, like one astute Facebook friend stated, I am already the unicorn.  But maybe just a species that is genetically predisposed to store fat in case of dramatic climate change.  Genetic variation is the spice of natural selection, you know.