Slogging through

This week has been rough to say the least.

I'm fighting some horrendous cough untouchable by over-the-counter meds. Thank god I have friends in high places (doctors) because I currently don't have a primary care doc. Some codeine-laced cough medicine and a Z-pack and I'm finally sleeping through the night.. Only problem is that I can't take narcotics during the day, so I'm doing my best not to cough constantly into my patients' faces. Guess my office is getting their money's worth out of the masks they buy for us.

I know there are articles out there that preach not to run if you're ill "below the neck" - aka chest cold. I went back and forth on whether to keep running this week, and eventually decided to because:

1. I missed an entire week of training for my knee pain and halved a second week while recovering, so I'm down a 12- and a 13-miler. My longest run so far has been 10, twice.
2. My cough is more dry than productive, except in the mornings
3. I cough way less/not at all while running. (It's only once I stop that I pretty much die.)

Monday - 3 miles easy

Winter in Pittsburgh has been abysmal. We get a few inches of snow every few days and NOBODY shovels their sidewalks. I don't have Yaktrax or any kind of traction device for my shoes so I'm at the mercy of a few streets' worth of reliably clear sidewalk. There's a pretty simple 1ish mile stretch mostly down Fifth Ave from Shady to about Morewood... tack on a few tenths of a mile from my house and you've got my go-to 3 mile round-tripper. It's definitely not flat, but not too brutal given Pittsburgh's hill situation.

Splits: 10:22, 10:19, 10:21 (Consistency!!)

My legs felt a little heavy and I couldn't quite find a rhythm on this run. I was keeping my effort super easy, but sometimes that makes me feel like something is just "off" with my stride and my legs just feel unnatural- I can't really describe it. The last quarter mile my mechanics felt so strange that I eventually gave up and started "tiptoe" running, which is how I naturally ran when I first started running but resulted in horrendous chronic shin splints, and I haven't run that way since. (After multiple months of PT, custom orthotics and completely readjusting my mechanics, I've been a heel-striker. I'm aware that's not ideal. Story for another day.) Seriously, forefoot running has never felt so good as it did at the end of this run. I felt like my body finally lined up and started coordinating itself and I was bounding across the earth like a gazelle and all was perfect. I only mention this because it inspired my treadmill strategy on Wednesday.

Wednesday - 7 treadmill miles

Between my cough and generally fatigued legs lately, I knew I needed a rest day Tuesday. Wednesday began a 2-day snow/rain/sleet storm that was supposed to last until Thursday night, so I knew I'd be stuck with a 7-mile treadmill run one of those two days. Lately I feel the need to get these longer midweek runs over with so they don't hang over my head, so I sucked it up and headed to the gym with Brian after work. My plan was basically to last as long as I possibly could, whether that meant walk/running or taking some breaks to lift between miles, since the treadmill really exacerbates that weird uncoordinated stride feeling (my theory is muscle imbalance related to my leg length discrepancy) and lately I've given up after a mile or two on the treadmill. 

I set the speed to 6.0 and the incline to random level 1 (0-1.5% varying every 30 seconds). To give you a better sense of normal for me, my half-marathon-training easy treadmill runs in the past were about a 9:30 pace at random lv4, which is 0-3.9%. It's been a little hard for me to embrace the fact that if I want more miles, my body can only handle that with less of everything else (speed, hills). Oh well.

Anyhow, within a few minutes I was already feeling the weirdness. I can only describe it as feeling like my legs are not quite in sync with each other, I'm a little off balance, and I'm kind of uncoordinated. I was inspired by the end of Monday's run and decided to test the waters forefoot-striking. Felt perfect. So I figured I'd run normally at any incline less than 0.8%, and run on my toes anything at or above that. I really never wound up having to go more than 1.5 or 2 minutes in any given mode, and it seriously kept things feeling more normal than I've felt on a treadmill in probably a year.

Splits: 10:00 for 7 miles, no stops.

By the time I was done, I had baby blisters underneath the balls of my feet, just enough to make things slightly uncomfortable. My fault for not wearing running socks, but I had never expected to last 7 entire miles on the treadmill. It's always nice when you surprise yourself! Cardio-wise this felt nice and easy, pleasant even. I think I'll still try to avoid the treadmill if at all possible, but when I can't, hopefully this new magic trick keeps working.

Spring Thaw 10 Miler: a "race" recap

On Saturday, I ran the Spring Thaw 10 Mile race that took place in North Park. I had signed up back in the throes of my "I'm gonna run a marathon" high a few months ago, since I had 10 miles on the schedule and it's always nicer to run when people hand you cups of water every few miles and plop a medal around your neck once you're done.
Sounds good in theory, until you wake up on the morning of and it's -3 degrees outside. "I could just crawl back into bed until the temperature reaches double digits..."

But the dog had to pee at 5:30am, and then I was up.
Anyone else feel an inordinate amount of stress having to get to an unfamiliar place at a very specific time? I spent the entire morning calculating how long it would take to get up, eat breakfast, take Sam to doggie day care, get to North Park, find where I was going, pick up my race packet, etc etc.

I got there way earlier than I meant to, had my race bib pinned on by about 8:45am and then had more than an hour to kill. I HATE unfamiliar places. I found the barn where registration was, but that's not where the bag drop was, so I braved the cold walk over to the drop-off place (the boathouse) only to find out there wasn't a place to hang out over there.
So back to the barn I went. It was nice to people-watch for a little while and scope out the Pittsburgh running scene, I guess, but going to a race alone in a new city is a little lonely..

The race started at 10am. There was a 10, 15 or 20-mile option, depending on how many 5-mile loops you felt like suffering through doing.

Starting line in the distance

By the time the race started, it was a balmy 5 degrees. The kind of cold where you feel the lining of your nose freezing every time you breathe. I seriously don't own any legitimate running clothes because I'm stubborn and kind of cheap, so I was dressed in regular old leggings (not any particular special warm kind), a tank top, a long-sleeve shirt, and the lining to my ski jacket - which I like to refer to as my space jacket, because it's lined with some kind of silver material that leads me to believe it retains warmth.

All bundled up.
In my fiance's fashionable ski neck warmer and the liner to my ski jacket.
Because I don't own actual running gear.

I was not racing this. Story for another day, but I have determined that my knees/lower limbs can really only handle mileage increases if I significantly decrease speed. So this was planned as a training run in the ~10:30 pace range, which is my "super easy this feels like walking" speed and pretty tolerable for my knees on my long runs.

Loop #1: Miles 1-5

• Mile 1: 10:17
• Mile 2: 10:11
• Mile 3: 10:30
• Mile 4: 10:14
• Mile 5: 10:26

First loop was kind of getting my bearings. I had never seen North Park before, but I had heard of those lake loops. And for some reason, I envisioned "lake loops" as some scenic flat gravel trail right next to a pretty (frozen) lake... similar to a reservoir near my old house in CT. I was not correct. 

It was paved, kind of hilly, and about 2% of that 5-mile loop was on a road that was not canted significantly to the left or right racetrack-style.

In the beginning, I stuck near the 10:30 pacer, which seemed like a good way for me to cool the competitive fire and not care that plenty of people were passing me... including people who appeared to be just walking quickly. There weren't a whole ton of people around and it was kind of boring/depressing.

In no-man's land...

Loop #2: Miles 6-10

• Mile 6: 10:17
• Mile 7: 10:08
• Mile 8: 10:14
• Mile 9: 9:57
• Mile 10: 9:45

The second loop was a bit more fun. I knew what I had coming up, and kept checking off little things as they went by... "water stop, first annoying hill, water stop, really winding road section, turn onto the main road, water stop, sidewalk..." I started "easy passing" people once I realized that I only had a few more miles to go, and my knees were feeling decent. "Easy passing" = attempting to pass people while still keeping the effort solidly easy. I haven't pushed the effort on a long run since my knees started causing trouble, and I didn't want to be sucked into that just because it was a timed race.

Showing off the goods

My official time was 1:42:35, a 10:16 pace - by my Garmin it was 10.08 miles, which just goes to show how winding those roads were. If it had been an actual race for me, I would've put more effort into the tangents. I seriously do not care what my pace is on my long runs nowadays, so 10:16 was fine by me.

Overall, it was a well-managed race. Boring, and not exactly scenic, but water stops every 1.5-ish miles was really nice, and they handed out some sort of energy gel at the 5 mile mark, which is great for people who enjoy/can stomach that. It would've been more fun if I had actually been racing and could stick with more of the "pack"... but I'll have to save that until after the marathon if I want to get to the starting line with knees intact.

"Spring Thaw"... psh.