Texas weather is difficult. It gets really hot, but whether it gets cold is up in the air. Last year, we had the mildest winter I can remember. This year, I got to experience running in 18º and strong winds. While I’m not particularly experienced with cold weather, the refrain I’ve always heard is that there’s no bad weather, only unsuitable clothing. I took this to heart and prepared well for the cold weather I had no idea was coming. This brings me to the Tracksmith Twilight review.
What makes Twilight different?
Where the Van Cortlandt singlet is a mesh fabric, the Twilight fabric is much more closely knit and weighs much less. It’s pretty soft, too.
Tracksmith calls this fabric their Bravio Blend. It’s Italian, and they say it’s designed for when the temperatures get warm. I’ll get to that in a second, but I will say that the Italians seem to know their stuff when it comes to this. Continue Reading
For the last seven weeks or so, my Strava has been blank. I’ve still been running, but all the activities are set to private. I’m trying to run truly easy, and to subvert my ego, I’m making sure that nobody can see it.
This isn’t a race recap, because no one wants to read about four miles of chatting with my only real life running buddy in the race and then nine miles of “woo buddy I’m in trouble.” I did run the DRC Half on Sunday, though, and while I won’t say it went well, it did get done, and other than the usual post-race soreness, I’m alright.
I ran by the packet pickup on Saturday morning to at least get the shirt, even if I wasn’t going to run the race. I hadn’t noticed it when I got my pre-race email, but I was apparently bib number 2. (No bib seeding here – I was just the second one to sign up for the race this year.) For some reason, that made me want to run the race. I’m probably never going to be fast enough to get an elite bib number, so might as well get some pictures of me running with a low number bib while I can! I admit, it was a stupid reason to spur me to decide to run. But it did. Continue Reading
Does anyone ever look at their training logs and go “aw yeah, I’m really training pretty stupidly right now, I’m gonna keep destroying my fitness until I get a stress fracture!” I really don’t think so. If we knew we were making training mistakes, I’d think most of us would immediately stop and reformulate. But the fact is that we all come down with injuries at some point or another, and most of them can be traced back to a root cause. It’s usually some combination of over-training or under-resting, with a little bit of not doing preventative exercises thrown in for flavor.
The Question
As a relatively new runner, I still struggle to know when I’m pushing too hard. Of course intervals are going to hurt a little – that’s the point, right? And the training plan called for 12 x 400, so at rep 10, I’d expect to have to be going to the well just a little bit to get these done on pace. It’s not like my legs are falling off, they’re just a little dead. Later that day at work, climbing the stairs feels worse than the last 100m of a 5K, but that’s to be expected. Stairs are obviously awful after a workout. I’m a little tired throughout the day, but there’s a reason the pros get like 10 hours of sleep a night plus a nap.
Those things all sound pretty normal when you think about it. So how is anyone supposed to know when they’re pushing too hard and no longer building fitness? This applies even more to runners, who are stereotypically type-A overachievers. How are people who have learned their whole lives that working harder produces better results supposed to sit back and…rest? Continue Reading
I was a little late to watching the joint Nike/National Geographic Breaking2 documentary. It had been out for a couple of days by the time I had managed to watch it, but waiting made me even more excited to watch it. So many of my running friends had said how inspirational it was, so I was really hyped. Nike’s marketing department did a fantastic job and it was a really good visual representation of what we’d all been reading from Alex Hutchinson in the leadup to the race.
Photo credit: Mark McCambridge/Nike/Harmonica.co
What was most impressive about the film was not the unbelievable physical and mental performances that day, but Kipchoge’s personality and outlook on life. I find myself getting frustrated and complaining about traffic and work all the time. “I have never complained, and I will never complain,” Kipchoge said, after recounting the difficulties of his childhood brought on by not having a father in his life.
I have always turned up my nose when people started talking about the power of positive thinking. It seemed silly and frankly quite ridiculous that you could improve your situation just by trying to reframe it in a more positive manner. That was for glass-half-full people and serial optimists. I was neither of those things. Continue Reading
Bad races happen. You set your goal too high, or you’re just not as fit as you thought you were, or there were things that were out of your control that caused you to do badly.
I’ve been lucky. I’ve had nothing but successful races, due in large part to only having started running in 2014. Beginner gains are fantastic. But they will run out. As you get faster, the PRs start getting smaller and harder to come by. Up until now, I’d had races where I didn’t PR, but I always had I reason. I was injured or I was pacing someone else, or I had signed up for the race but decided to use it as a training run instead.
That was not the case Saturday morning.
Mellew Productions is a terrible race company.
I’m not going to pull punches on this one. I’m mad about the way the race was put on and that I didn’t get the 5km race that was advertised. I signed up for the Hypnotic Donut Dash back in October when I was tapering for the DRC Half. I was scared I was going to have a horrible half marathon and wanted a couple of 5ks to look forward to if that happened. Those races were the fantastic Speedway Candy Cane Classic from Cowtown and Mellew’s Hypnotic Donut Dash.
The Speedway Classic was challenging and the weather was horrible, but it was still a great race. I will sign up for that race again this year with no hesitation. Everything about it was well done. I had specific parking and stadium entrance instructions the day before, the charity aspect was better implemented (and probably received more money from the race), and more importantly, the course was actually 5km.
The 2017 Hypnotic Donut Dash 5K was somewhere between 2.96 and 3.0 miles, according to the Strava Flybys and the other finishers I talked to at the finish line. For $30, I expect a for-profit company make the race the actual distance advertised. The DRC gets all of their courses USATF certified, and they’re a non-profit that’s entirely volunteer-run. Cowtown did the same, at least for the Candy Cane Classic. But a for-profit company whose only purpose is to put on races can’t even get the distance right?
On top of the course being short, it had entirely too many sharp turns. I managed to wing a better course that was actually 5km on my cool down than the organizers of the race did. Mellew Productions also managed to not send race day information to a huge number of participants, as evidenced by the number of cars in the caravan I was part of as we were trying to figure out which entrance we were actually allowed to use to get into Fair Park.
When I asked the race directors to send me the race information on the morning of the race, they said they couldn’t and directed me to the website, which contained no parking or entrance information. I told them that, and they told me that I wouldn’t be able to miss the signs and to follow the cars. Funny, I didn’t see any signs, and I followed the cars to different gates for fifteen minutes before we got to the right one.
Aside from a bad race experience, I raced badly.
On top of Mellew’s terrible race production, I raced badly myself. I went out too fast, knew I was toast after a mile and a half. My 21:26 for 2.98 miles still doesn’t work out to a sub-22, despite cool temperatures, clear skies and relatively okay wind.
I would probably be less upset about the course if I had been on track to break 22 based on this finishing time. I may or may not be fit enough to do it right now, but it wasn’t going to happen that day. That compounded how mad I was about the course being short.
So I fumed during my cool down. And I fumed while I was putting my shirt and Bislett pants on by bag check. I paused the fuming while the little girls were getting their age group trophies because they were absolutely adorable. I resumed my fuming on the way home, where I wrote up a race report for the Advanced Running subreddit.
As people started commenting, I stopped fuming. We started looking to how my performance improve between today and the DRC 5K next weekend. I got ideas. As I got to *identifying the problem*, I started running out of fumes. I started thinking about how I can use the next week to maximize the chance of me breaking 22 minutes on Saturday. I stopped being mad about this crappy race was and started getting excited about this week’s chances.
So that’s the key for me. I get to fume and mope for a little bit, but after that, what makes me get over a bad race is attacking the race and finding out what happened. And it really helps to talk to people about it and get their ideas on my race. I’m so glad I can always get feedback from such a great, knowledgeable group of people.
Looking ahead
So this week, I’m going start using visualization during my training runs. I’m going to make sure to throw a few strides in near the end of the week. My fellow meese led me to realize I needed to work on my mental game and really focus on pacing. My last few 5Ks have been solidly positive splits, and that’s got to change. I’m also thinking about not using my heart rate monitor. As much as I love the data, I have to admit that it does impede my breathing just slightly, and that’s not worth the data.
My legs were pretty wrecked after that race weekend – in addition to racing, I tacked on some near-LT pace miles at the end of my 10 mile long run. It’s Thursday morning and I’m just now shaking the legular fatigue. I’m going to throw some strides in this afternoon’s run and do a quick shakeout tomorrow and then it’s race day again.
I was reading over my Peak Performance newsletter this morning. If I’m being honest, I wasn’t expecting on getting much out of it. I don’t really do New Years Resolutions. I just set goals. I’m not concerned with suddenly stopping training because I got too busy. But I’m really glad I decided to read it, because the first tip was to do a pre-mortem on your resolution or change or goal.
What’s a pre-mortem?
You start by assuming you failed. I know. It’s not a good feeling. But by thinking three, six, twelve months in the future and imagining that you missed your goal, you can work backward and identify the obstacles you might encounter along the way that would cause you to fail.
This can work for regular life goals like getting a promotion or for running goals, like a mileage goal or a hopeful PR.
Putting it into practice
Personally, I wanted to try to use this technique to see what I might be up against in my coming training cycle. My loose goal at the moment for my half marathon goal race is to PR. I’ll narrow in further on a performance goal when I get closer to the race. But say I don’t get a PR that day. Why wouldn’t I have done that?
The most likely explanation would be didn’t train right. This isn’t likely, since I’m following a good plan that’s already worked for me. But say this was what happened. I would have had to miss a lot of training runs. I’d probably be injured again and couldn’t train at the right level to make significant improvement. So let’s explore that further.
Further dismantling the (imaginary) roadblock
I’m trying to get over an ITBS injury right now. I feel like I’m on the other side of the problem at this point. That said, I’ve definitely slacked on the ITBS routine in favor of yoga…and sleeping in a little. That’s something I need to get back to immediately, lest I stop healing.
That said, I also have to prioritize sleep to make sure I recover enough during the week. I’m okay sleeping in on the weekends, but I need to make better use of my time at home after work on weekdays. It’ll help ensure I’m in bed at a reasonable hour. That means getting meals prepped on Sundays so that I don’t need to spend weekdays cooking too.
Prioritizing sleep also requires setting a weekly schedule so the boring parts of life like doing laundry and cleaning the floors are already accounted for. Writing down what I want to complete during the next day before I go to bed will also set realistic daily schedules and keep me on top of tasks. I work best with schedules, and I know that already, so I can play to that strength too.
Life could also get in the way and cause me to miss training, but I believe the chances of this are really low. I’ve run through a lot of life getting in the way already. Granted, that was in the summer, and it’s a lot harder in the winter when it’s cold and dark outside all the time. Having the right gear helps, and I have the right gear for sure. (I got a lot of Tracksmith items over the last couple of months. Clothes designed for New England winters are definitely capable of grappling with Texas winters.)
If I plan a route beforehand, it’ll make it as easy to get out of the house on groggy morning autopilot and get the runs done before work. Later in the cycle, days will be getting longer and I’ll be able to run after work too.
Post-pre-mortem
I probably didn’t think of every difficulty I’ll encounter over this training cycle. But thinking through these and planning for them will help keep problems from piling up and crushing my training. I’m glad I got that email this morning. This is a great mental exercise to help prepare for the next training cycle to approach your goal most prepared to reach it.
I recommend signing up for Steve Magness and Brad Stulberg’s monthly email digest too. I’m planning on reading their first book, The Science of Running, when the Advanced Running Book Club picks it, and when it comes out, I’ll read Peak Performance too.
I ran three times last week for a total of 17 miles. I’m losing my mind with this injury.
There is nothing that can prepare a runner for being forced to take time off for injury. When you’re training hard for a goal, you become a master at doing whatever it takes to get a run in. I was getting up at 4:30 to get the medium-long midweek run in before work just six weeks ago. Since peak week, my average weekly mileage has plummeted, and honestly, I’m lost.
I’ve been diligent about rehab and rolling, and I’m doing more yoga now than I have in ages. Part of running is believing in your training and having faith that you’ll get out what you put into it. I suppose the same holds true for rehab and returning from injury, but I find it a lot harder to keep the faith when I’m trying to get back to running than when I’m training hard for a race.
How can I not panic?!
When I got my stress fracture in 2015, I panicked. I panicked that I’d put on weight and that I’d lose the little fitness I’d gained in the year or so I’d been running. In the year I’ve been back since the stress fracture, I’ve gotten so much more fit, and have so much more to lose, but I’m not completely panicked. I know I can keep my aerobic fitness up by cycling, and I can probably run enough that my musculoskeletal system won’t lose its training adaptation.
There’s not a lot of panic this time around. I have the normal injury thoughts floating around – “What if I never get better?” and “What if I can never run without pain again?”. But rationally, I know that ITBS should be a relatively quick recovery, especially given how diligent I’m being about rehab. Reminding myself that being smart about running and rehab now gets me back on the road sooner doesn’t hurt either.
Mostly, I’m just antsy. I’m ready to get back out there and run. It’s cold outside! There are leaves on the ground and I barely had a chance to use my tights before the ITBS really set in! I genuinely miss running, not just the benefits I get from it.
How can I stay fit?
Let me tell you, I’ve been using my FitStar yoga app nearly daily. I’ve been doing the Strength Running ITBS rehab protocol with the same frequency. I’m so desperate that I did 20 miles on the indoor recumbent bike on Saturday morning. I am not worried about fitness. Anything I lose should be relatively easy to gain back, and I’m in running for the long term progress, not just through the next race.
I have to admit that I’m surprised at how much the rehab routine gets my heart rate up. My HR is routinely in the 130s and 140s while I’m doing the exercises. While that’s mostly recovery heart rate zones for me, it’s still better than nothing. When I was biking, my goal was to stay between 150 and 155 bpm, which is a solid general aerobic effort for me.
As time passes, I’m finding that I’m more able to increase the frequency of my runs than my distance per run, so adding in another day or two of three or four miles is preferable to adding an extra mile or two on to my existing runs. I’m able to get my mileage up higher, and three miles in a day is better than no miles.
Is there a bright side to injury?
I’m up to 13 miles already this week. I have every expectation of being able to hit 20 miles this week, and hopefully more than that. No doctor can give you a definite timeline on coming back, so you just have to feel your way back. I had an appointment with a chiropractor yesterday, and he had the same ideas about the root of my injury that I did. We’re working on strengthening and loosening and leveling so I can be a stronger runner on the other side.
It’s hard to try to reframe these sorts of setbacks as blessings in disguise. If it takes a relatively benign injury to force me to confront something that might have sidelined me for months later on, perhaps that’s what this is. Until I’m back to 100%, I’m just going to log the miles I can and crosstrain like a mofo.
All of the advice about injury is to stop running when you begin to feel pain. And almost always, runners struggle with doing that, despite the fact that we know it’s the smartest thing to do.
I ignored the pain this time. And now I’m sidelined for a week or more by IT band syndrome.
I know it started during the DRC Half a few weeks ago. When I kicked during the last mile or so, I could feel my IT band tightening up. It became hard to bend my knee, but it felt better after I crossed the finish line and stopped running. I followed the recovery plan that was in the 12/47 half marathon plan, which was essentially a reverse taper, for the two weeks after the race. It wasn’t a really huge rebuild in mileage, and my right quad was actually the most painful thing after the race. By the end of the first week after the race, my quad was fine, but there was a little pain on the outside of my left knee.
I knew what it was. I knew I should have rested. But I just tried to do recovery runs, hoping that it was just tightness that would dissipate if I were diligent about rolling and yoga and Myrtl. None of that was helping, though.
In the second week after my race, I was feeling tightness in all of my runs. At first, it took eight miles to start hurting. Then six, then four, then two and a half. So I took an unscheduled day off. I biked to work instead of running, and I did more of the stretching and yoga and rolling with the R8 to try to make the pain stop.
It felt good enough to run the next day, which was Thanksgiving, so I did eight miles. The pain came back during the run, but it was worst after the run. As soon as I hit my apartment complex gate, I couldn’t walk. I stopped and had to do the awkward leg swing if I wanted to get to the door. A little stretching got me loose enough to walk, and everything felt progressively better throughout the day. The next day, I worked on my legs hard, and there was no pain at all throughout the day, so I went for a run that night. It came back partway through the run, but I discovered that turning my foot out at a slight angle made running painless, and so that’s what I did.
Armed with that information, I decided to do a VO2max workout to help prepare for the 5K I’m doing on December 17th. So I ran to the track with no issues, but I started tightening up in the second 800m rep. I stopped and stretched after every rep and made it through the whole workout. I was doing a little extra stretching before I ran back home. Then I heard a pop and felt pain in my knee and I knew that I wasn’t running home.
So here I am on the couch today. I did a lot of hip work last night and today. I’m feeling a lot better today after ice and stretching and ITBS recovery routines. No pain in the knee or IT band from bearing weight, no pain doing most of the recovery exercises, and maybe a 2/10 when trying to bend the knee or walk normally. I don’t know how long it’ll take to recover, though I hope it’s just a couple of weeks.
I hope I can get those extra 90 miles in for the year to hit 1500 miles and that I can run the 5k next month. I’d love to be able to do The Michigan on New Years Eve with the rest of the ARTC folks. I’d really like to get all of those done, but it won’t be the end of the world if I don’t. I probably wouldn’t be here if I had taken more time off after the race. I knew getting hurt was possible if I tried to run through the pain, and I did it anyway. Of course, I probably would have had less time off had I taken it earlier, too. Now all of the rest of my year’s goals are in jeopardy and the hindsight is really killing me here. So yeah, don’t run through pain.
After April’s HM, I decided to take the Pfitzinger plunge for the 2016 Dallas Running Club Half Marathon. Uncle Pete, as he’s fondly known to his disciples, has such a good reputation with my usual running folks, and I figured I could probably handle it. So I spent all of April dawdling around and making bad training decisions (like trying to run six miles a day every day for a month) and injuring myself. I got shin splints and my calves got so tight that my Achilles started hurting. When I finally recovered from that (after a painful month on the treadmill) I started base building from 23 miles up to 42.
After a successful buildup, I started in on the 12/47 plan. I ended up running a couple of extra miles every week and peaked at 50 miles. I hit all of my workouts and didn’t skip a run until the last night before the race when I stayed too late at a friend’s house playing with the HTC Vive and ran out of time to do a shakeout.
Pre-race
I got up at 4:30 for my 7:30 race to let my lungs wake up. I ran for about 15 minutes at a painfully easy pace, then came in and ate a Picky Bar and showered. For the first time ever, Ben was able to make it to a goal race for me, and we left the house at 6:30. I was a little short on time when we got to the race and only did a mile to warm up, but threw a couple of strides in there at least. I got out of my warmups and checked my bag and used a secret hidden portapotty that didn’t have a line and then lined up at about 7:20 with the 1:45 pacers. I asked if they were planning on doing even splits and they said they were. The anthem played, the eagles cried, and the gun went off.
Race strategy
A short word about strategy: I had planned on leaving with the 1:45 guys no matter what. If I was feeling spectacular at 8 miles (no niggles, HR still low), I’d head off on my own and shoot for 1:40. If I felt good at 10 miles, I would head out on my own then and shoot for 1:43. If I felt crappy, I’d go out at 11 and die trying to finish as fast as possible.
Miles [1] to [8] (7:42, 7:41, 7:47, 8:02, 7:55, 7:50, 8:05, 8:01)
So when the pacer said he was planning on running even splits, he lied. Even splits for a 1:45 finish are 8:00 on the nose, and 7:55 to take tangents into account, maybe. Their plan was really to bank time in the flat sections and ease off a little in the hills, of which there were way more than I remembered. None were really awful, but I was glad I had to run up a big hill every morning to get home from my runs or else I’d really have been screwed. After the first hill, my HR shot into the low-to-mid 170s and stayed there for most of the race. It was slightly alarming at first, but I ended up settling in somewhere in the second mile and getting used to the exertion level.
One of our two pacers was really chatty and funny. He’d sing songs and banter with the spectators or the people running by that weren’t racing. He told us when the hills were coming and generally distracted us from the race. If there’s one thing you can say about the DRC, it’s that their pace groups are awesome. They’re everything you want a pacer to be, and nothing more. They’ll usually get you in right underneath the goal time and help people that are struggling.
After three miles, we got out of the houses and got some breeze, which cooled us down. I think there was a water stop every mile and a half. I skipped the first one, got water at the second one and choked, got a stitch that resolved by the third one where I dumped the cup on my head. I got water again at the fourth one and Gatorade that was way too strong at the fifth one.
There was a great crowd at a turn near the sixth mile. I remember that same crowd from the first time I ran this race in 2014 and just like that race, I nearly teared up thinking that these people got up early on a Sunday just to be loud and excited for the people that were causing roads to be shut down by their houses. The crowd support at this race is pretty low on the whole, but the people that do show up are truly awesome.
Miles [9] to [11.5] (9 – 8:07, 10 – 7:50)
So we had a solid hill at mile 8 that sort of stuck with me for the rest of the race. My quads were a little busted and my legs felt a little dead. I definitely wasn’t leaving the pacers yet. Mile 9 was the slowest in the whole race. I think everyone was slowing and trying to find their second wind while battling the real wind coming off of the lake. It was in the low-ish 60s and overcast the whole race. Not as cool as I’d hoped, but not as warm as it had been all week. During this part of the race, we were on the lake battling other people who weren’t racing (or paying much attention to their surroundings) so that didn’t help either. There were a couple of water stations. One of them had Rick Astley playing, complete with lyrics and signs at the end of the area that said “U Just Got Rick Rolled!”
At the second water stop, the pacers slowed down to get drinks and I just kind of kept going. We had met up with a woman that the pacer knew and that had started right in front of us, but was just running it for fun. They had been talking for about a mile, and when I started leaving them behind, she yelled to the pacers, “Hey, she’s leaving you in the dust!” The talkative pacer said “yeah, she ought to be, she’s been hanging with us for 12 miles!”
Miles [11.5] to [13.1] (11 – 7:50, 12 – 7:50, 13 – 6:59, 13.1 – 1:42/6:43)
Well that woman ran up to me and asked what my goal was and I said “1:43, but I think that ship has sailed.” She immediately picked up the pace and told me she’d get me there. So we picked up to just barely under a 7:00 pace and she started just coaching me through the last little bit. She emphasized breathing deeply and just kept picking targets for us to reel in. With about a half mile to go, my left hamstring started getting tight, in addition to my legs feeling leaden already. If I had been on my own, I probably would have eased off, but my new pacer told me to just keep focusing on my breathing and on continuing to pass people. With 100 ft to go, I saw my mom and Ben, which was pretty great. We crossed the line in 1:43:08, hands firmly in the moose position, and my head promptly exploded.
Post-race
I met up with my mom and my husband, and tried to catch my breath. I thanked my impromptu pacer and my official pacers. For some reason, my right ear had gotten like they do in airplanes and I couldn’t get it to pop for the life of me. We did pictures and I got a Sonic breakfast burrito and donut holes and red velvet cupcake but as soon as I smelled the sweetness, I felt sick, so Ben got the sweet stuff. One of my friends running the race came in in 1:51, and informed us that they had computers where you could check your results, so we went over there to see my official time and learned that all of the fast 25-29 year old women in Dallas had decided to run NYC or were saving their legs for the Dallas Marathon next month, because I had won my age group. My mom and Ben had to leave before the awards ceremony (which, as usual, started half an hour late) but my friend stayed and took a picture for me.
What’s next/Random Thoughts
IDK, man. I never really expected to go under 1:40, but I did think 1:43 was achievable, and that’s still a 14 minute PR over April. It’s a 31 minute PR over 2014 when I ran this race the first time. My half PR was 2:14 coming into 2016, and I was just coming back from a stress fracture. It’s November, and I’ve run 1300 miles this year, cut all of my PRs down by a significant margin, and more than anything was able to train consistently because I avoided major injury by not being stupid.
I have a couple of fun 5ks coming up in December and January. I’ll probably go for PRs and AG wins (maybe overall female win for the January one, based off of last year’s results…) I’d like to do a short cycle of 5k work to hone in on some speed gains to complement my endurance gains from the HM plan before starting another half plan for the spring. No goal race decided for that. I’m up for suggestions for whether I should either run the 12/47 again, add some mileage and run it again, or try to step up to the next plan for the spring.
Finally, as much as I complain about people, I felt really good about humans on the whole after the race. Those people didn’t need to come out and cheer for us, but they did. The pacers are volunteers, and yet, instead of PRing, they decided to get up and pace us to a finish. And the woman that paced me at the end was a straight up angel. She had done a 30 mile bike ride the day before (triathletes, am I right?) and instead of just letting me go off on my own and perhaps blow up, she pushed the pace when she probably didn’t particularly feel like it and helped me achieve my goal. Seriously.
Pictures
Before the raceAfter the race, and a big thank you to my mother’s phone for making me look like an alien. Getting my age group award after the race!
