Fartlek, heh heh

I don't know what happened, but a little over a month ago I ran the best 3 plus miles I've done in a very long time. I felt fantastic. But since then, when I moved to running outside on the pavement, I have been trudging along slower than a hybrid car filled with fat people and towing a trailer.

Last night, after a workout of biking for a few miles, I picked up the latest issue of Runner's World. It had an article about preparing for a 5K race, which is exactly what I'm doing. And it talked about the importance of interval training. I haven't done any interval training in a long, long time. It mentioned other options, all intended to increase strength and speed. A series of consecutive 400 meter runs with a small rest between each is apparently considered an excellent way to prepare for a 5K race. And, of course, the ever popular fartlek. 

OK, to be fair, I do fartleks, or used to, a lot. I actually like fartleking. It's a great way to break up a monotonous run.

I also love saying 'fartlek' because it just sounds like 'fart' only it has a legitimate purpose and usage. I can go into an athletic store, such as Fleet Feet, and say fartlek over and over again for an hour straight and no one will think I'm being a total smart ass. But on the inside I'll be giggling like a 12-year-old boy.

I just fartleked

Anyway, back to the topic of Swedish farting and today's workout, I decided last night after reading about the importance of speed work and intervals and fartlek workouts prior to a race that I should make that my workout for today. 

I do not feel like doing this first thing in the morning

When I woke up and headed outside I began having doubts about whether I was making the right decision. I certainly did not feel like doing any sprinting first thing in the morning. I barely felt like running at all. I walked a full mile before I reluctantly broke into a run. I say 'run' but it was more like a trot, a very slow and pathetic trot. I slow pathetic trotted for a half mile before my brain zoned out and I was able to slip into a regular, albeit slow, pace. I jogged for another mile until I came to a straight, flat stretch of road that stays flat and straight for about a quarter mile and then I began my fartleking. heh heh

My attempts at sprinting weren't very impressive. At first I felt like I was going to pull a muscle in my outer thigh and I wasn't even really going that fast. I was just picking my knees up high and springing hard off my toes, but somehow my body seemed to think it was under attack from this and complained. Gradually it seemed like my muscles began to remember what sprinting was all about. They stopped complaining so much and I was able to go faster. 

Repeat

To finish off the workout I fartleked to the bottom of the steepest hill on my course and ran sprints up it repeatedly. I ran about 6 of them. Then I walked home.

Running makes me age backwards, like Benjamin Button

It's funny how I feel so awful when I begin the workout. I feel old and decrepit and tired. The first mile I run I just feel like I'm going to die. But after that, my body steadily remembers that once upon a time I was a real runner and have done this before without dying. By the end of today's workout, after I had run several miles, plus striding out some mild sprints, I actually felt great sprinting up the hill over and over. I wanted to keep doing it, but my calves were threatening to revolt and pull a muscle, so I had to finally stop. I was exhausted when I finished. But I felt a hell of a lot better after all of that running and sprinting than I did when I first headed out from the house to begin. 

I'm thinking of getting a personalized license plate for my car that reads FARTLEK. heh heh

Wordless Wednesday

This is Getting Monotonous

This is jogging?

Monday I went for another run. With my left knee giving me a really bad time my runs have turned into more of a 'run' with the sarcastic single quotes around the word the way the media does when a conservative is being mentioned. I end up walking for a very long way until my knee finally says "OK, I guess I could try running now."

I can't even remember what a good run feels like

But on Monday I was impatient and not in the mood to walk forever, so after about a half mile I broke into a run anyway. It was sort of a "ready or not, let's get it on" sort of thing. I ran slooooow. I mean, it was what people mean when they say 'jogging' instead of "I went running." Does that make sense? My mind was a million miles away and I wasn't paying any attention to my pace. So my pace was slow. On the plus side, because I wasn't paying much attention, I ran much further than I have in at least a month by just zoning out and trotting along. There are a lot of hills out here and I hit them all. Well, up to a point. I could have run farther and hit many more, but I had a set course in mind. I've taken to walking down the steepest hill just as a precaution for my cranky knee.

Gravity running - it still counts

I jogged about 2 1/2 miles before I reached the top of the steepest hill, gasping from the pollen-clogged air which I had been sucking deep into my lungs as I tried to maintain good running form while climbing the hill. I sort of let gravity take me to the bottom on the other side and then trotted a little further. Then stopped and walked the rest of the way home. Somewhere I have a map where I wrote down the distances to various points along my route. I think I was about a half mile from the house when I started to walk.

My foot hurts

Later that night I noticed that my heel was bruised on my left foot. I have no idea how this happened. My running shoes are padded like little foot-shaped pillows under each heel. I've run with far, far less padding in a sole before. I can't imagine how my heel got bruised.

So, with a bruised heel, running on Tuesday seemed like a bad idea. Walking didn't seem much better, either. So out came the bike. I pumped up my tires, which clearly needed air the last time I rode as I could feel the rims of the wheels transferring bumps and ridges up through the bike frame into my butt. And then off I pedaled, into the wild green and asphalt yonder.

My bike is kind of old

It was a decent ride, not fast, but with endless hills I couldn't avoid. By the time I arrived back home again my legs and lower back definitely felt satisfied that they had endured a workout.

Today I woke up and decided to try running again. My heel seemed better and my race is coming up fast. So I went outside, walked even less than I did on Monday, and started jogging. I felt agonizingly slow, which I was, but my goal was to keep going the entire way and cut out more of the walking, so that I started running maybe a quarter mile from home and then planned to stop running the same distance from the house. That would still leave me plenty of distance for a proper cool down.

My knee doesn't feel right

Somewhere around 2 miles my left knee suddenly started complaining. And I do mean suddenly. Everything was fine and then suddenly it wasn't. Ouch! I briefly considered trying to continue on, running through the pain in the hopes that it would go away by itself. But it's less than a month until the race and I remember what happened last year when I tried to run through the pain in my calf. It wrecked my calf and I wasted a race just limping along the entire course afraid to accelerate for fear that I'd reinjure my calf. By the time the main race for the year came along I was still unsure of my calf, although it did ultimately hold up.  So, lesson learned, I stopped and walked.

It even hurt to walk on it. So I walked more carefully. I came to the bottom of the steepest hill and began trying to jog up it. I thought "I'll just stride up this, working on my form, and then stop running again. My knee won't mind that." But it did and I stopped and went back to walking pretty quickly.

My new best friend

I made it home just fine. My knee isn't screaming or swollen or anything. I think I'm going to become addicted to Chrondroitin or however you spell it. I should have taken some before I ran instead of just after, but I didn't. Next time I won't forget.

Back to biking

Anyway, looks like tomorrow its back to the bike. And Friday I have an appointment so I don't know if I'll get to run or bike before breakfast or have to do it after, with food in my stomach. Part of my goal with these terrible runs is to run first thing when I wake up so that my body has no fuel. The theory is that this forces your body to use fat for fuel, which doesn't feel very good, but it helps you lighten up before a race. Of course, if my thyroid is still sabotaging me then all I'm burning is muscle. I need to make an appointment to be retested so the doctor can see if the very weak thyroid medicine they gave me is accomplishing anything.

If you'll throw this ball for me I'll stop chasing you

So, that's my exciting update of my adventures in jogging. No snakes this time, but a big yellow Lab did run out of the yard as if he was going to eat me, only to get right in front of me and wag his tail at me until I reached down and scratched his ears and chest for a bit.  Oh, and a friend sent me a link to a Sprint Triathlon coming up this month. After yesterday's bike ride I don't think I'm up to it. The bike ride in this triathlon is only listed as being 8 miles, but all I'm biking is maybe 3 or 4 and that seems to do a number on me. Apparently I'm still too pathetic to swim, bike 8 miles, and then run 3.1 miles. I still have a lot more work to do just for a tiny little Sprint Tri, which is the shortest triathlon there is.

Pathetic.

Wordless Wednesday

That Was a Workout??

Skinny

 So I went for a pre-breakfast walk, run, walk, dry-heave workout outside on Thursday prior to some nasty storms coming in. It was terrible. Or rather, I was terrible. Supposedly everyone who wants to cut weight before a race runs first thing in the morning on an empty stomach in order to maximize the fat-burning effects of the workout. They claim that first thing in the morning your body has no fuel to burn, so it has no choice except to burn fat. That is, unless your body is messed up like mine and then it may burn muscle instead.


No fat, no muscle

 So I got up and went out to give this a try. Keep in mind that I am not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination and I hate, hate, HATE running early in the morning, especially on a totally empty stomach. Now add to that the fact that I am having to walk a great deal prior to breaking into a run in order to get my knee warmed up enough to let me run at all and you have half a workout wasted just for the knee warm-up part.


Electric blue and speed walking

 I went out in my awesome electric blue running shoes. They're obnoxious and they'll blind you if you look directly at them for too long. I walked as fast as possible until, to be honest, I couldn't stand to walk anymore. My knee didn't technically indicate being ready to run. But I started running anyway. Oh, and my allergies were attacking me like mad. This was the first outdoor run I've done in a long time. Right off the bat I had to run up a steep hill. My knee complained the entire time, so I walked down the other side, which was steeper. Then I went back to running. I quickly became aware of the fact that my run pace wasn't much faster than my walk pace and I probably looked like an idiot.

Then I passed a snake.



You sure run slow. Why aren't you faster? Maybe I'll chase you.

 It was a tiny snake, curled up on the side of the road right at my feet as I sloooooowly ran by barely making any progress at all. At first I thought it was a piece of rope. Then I saw the head. Then it flicked its tongue and I said "oh, snake, how awesome." And I ran on, glancing behind me just in case the evil snake decided to chase me because, you know, they do that.

It didn't.

Here comes the sun

My run was terrible. I felt terrible. I had no energy at all and no speed. Also, I was badly sunburned last weekend and this was the first day I had gone out into the sunlight since then. I could feel the sun hitting my burned skin and it hurt.

Why so serious?

I ran to the bottom of more hills and trotted up the first hill. I thought about running on up the rest, but decided that I needed to make this an easy run, just to assure that I felt well enough to run again tomorrow. So I stopped and turned around, heading back the way I came.

Snake! Again.

Back to the first hill I climbed, and this is the steeper side. I stopped and walked the rest of the way home from there. And my God, I felt like death!

This is so much fun. I feel awesome.

 So, this running on an empty stomach thing, if it takes any weight off me and makes me lighter for race day, is hard. And if it doesn't take any weight off me, because lets face it, a personal trainer tried everything he could think of for a year and a half and it had NO EFFECT, then it's just a major pain in my ass. I hate it. I feel like death running with absolutely no fuel whatesoever inside of me.

And then for the rest of the day I felt like death. And I STILL hurt the next day, mostly from the sun on my burns, so much that I didn't run. Blah!

Next day, no run

Wordless Wednesday

Right Now

So, enough is enough. The company I have been working for is a body shop, a place infamous for bringing in tons of bodies, working them like slaves until they are exhausted, and then, when they slow down from fatigue or make a mistake (just a single one is enough), they throw them out again. It's a company with a well-deserved bad reputation and I will be moving on as fast as possible. I'm burned to a crisp. My mind and my body have had it. All around me I have listened to stressed out coworkers whispering about being called into their bosses offices to be screamed at for a mistake or not going fast enough or something, always something. This is a toxic environment. Having said that, I have worked with some great people. I think the problem in this place is high up, somewhere near the top, if not at the very top.

In anticipation of leaving I cancelled my brand new gym membership. I only joined because it is close to the office where I work. But if I don't plan to be working there anymore then I don't need a membership to a gym that probably won't be anywhere near my new job. Nashville keeps calling and calling. The city I'm currently in, oddly enough, does not. They don't seem to have anything going on. Its like a morgue here.

As for my workouts, I still have a race to prepare for. My last workout I needed to run, but I was going crazy from lack of weight lifting. So I did some chest and tricep exercises just to stop the atrophy that was causing me pain. Then I got on the treadmill and walked until my knee seemed ready to run. Then I ran like a mofo, faster and faster, dropping below the race-pace I plan to run for the Cotton Row Run and trying to hold it as long as I could. I didn't go the full distance because I had already done chest and triceps and have a limit on my time during lunch hour that I can exercise, shower and still get back to work. So I ran 2.1 miles as fast as I could. It wasn't fast by anyone else's standards, I'm sure, but it was faster than I have run my last few races and I felt good as I did it, which surprised me.

One thing I should mention, since I seem to tell EVERYTHING here, is that when I went to the doctor for blood tests, all I was asking about was my thyroid. But he tested other things and decided that my testosterone was too low. This would explain why my workouts seemed to have poor results, my race times keep getting slower and slower, and I keep getting injured. So my doctor put me on testosterone. Its nasty and it stinks and it makes me smell funky. But I sure am running faster all of a sudden. I'm not running at the pace I used to run, by any means, but I'm slowly moving back in the right direction, towards where I was before everything just seemed to fall apart. It makes me wonder if my testosterone levels just dropped off a cliff and this is why I am always injured and slowing down race after race. It might also explain why my naked body looks like a sack of potatoes with arms and legs instead of looking like me.

So, on top of giving me the teeniest dose of Synthroid for my thyroid problem, the doctor gave me the big T. Actually, he didn't give me the Synthroid. It was the nurse practitioner that I saw when I went back to talk about my test results at my own request. He put me on T, she put me on S.

Yes, yes, I know its annoying for me to shorten Testosterone to T and Synthroid to S, but all the stupid TV commercials are doing it and people aren't rioting in the streets about it, even though it drives most of us crazy. I figure I can do it for these two things since if you've read this far you surely know what I'm talking about. And also, I'm basically done talking about it now.

So Spring is officially here. I know this because my car is green today. Officially the car is blue. It says so on the title. But looking at it today there is no denying that it is currently green. Even the windows are green. It's so covered with pollen that you can only barely see the car beneath. And my sinuses are completely clogged with pollen. If I had a Nettie Pot I'd be trying to wash out my sinuses right this second to see if I could get some of this pollen out of there. Honestly, my nose is running like Niagara Falls and I have a trash can filled with used Kleenex sitting on front of me. I've gotten pretty good at balling it up and shooting it across the room into the trash can. It's my personal little allergy basketball game. I'm winning, by the way.

So, I'm leaving my job and potentially moving to Nashville, I'm taking testosterone and Synthroid, and my face is pouring snot out my nostrils. What other extremely personal and private information can I divulge on my very public blog against all wisdom? How about my steady plans to one day visit Australia? If I ever get to visit Australia, as I intend to do, I would like to meet up with the handful of Aussie bloggers who don't dislike me. You guys have been my friends for a long time, longer than this blog has existed, and I appreciate that. I want to see your fabulous country, get drunk in a pub, and throw pickles onto the ceiling in McDonald's, are "Maccas," like a proper Aussie.

So anyway, that's really all that's been going on. Lots of work, work, work, exercise, drugs, mucous, and emails. Pretty much catches you all up to this point. So what have you been up to lately?