Mile 3

I know why I over-indulge when I drink alone.  I have no base of reference for my intoxication level when I am alone.  I’m not talking or trying to follow a conversation that I might be expected to contribute to.  I’m not moving around much.  I’m not really engaged in anything that requires specific skills.  I’m sitting and reading or writing.  Sometimes also knitting.  Sometimes also picking out chords on my guitar.  But that’s about it.  I won’t realize how intoxicated I am until I stand up to go to the kitchen or the bathroom and realize that I’m swaying.

I know that right now, with things as intense as they are, I shouldn’t drink alone.  I’m so pent-up all the time – so anxious and so stressed that even the vilest of liquor goes down like water and as soon as I start to feel even a little relaxed I want to feel a lot relaxed.  My self-control goes out the window.

Until 6 am that is.

And that is over sleeping.  That means I don’t get to workout in the morning.  That means I’m going to struggle getting to work on time.

So that was today.  Last night I got done with work and the gym and hit the books and at 9 pm I realized I was clenching my teeth and my shoulders were up around my ears and I was cranky so I had a vodka.  Then another.  Then, because I was feeling alright, a third.  This morning, when the alarm went off at 4:45, which is when I’m supposed to get up if I want to make it to the gym, I turned it off.  When the second alarm (I have to have a backup system.  There are three total) went off at 5:50, I thought it was still 4:45 and turned it off too.  When the third went off at 6, I knew things were bad.  Bad bad bad.

I went to work, and it hurt.  I got stuff done, but it was not pretty or efficient.

Then I went to my noon weightlifting class (Because student loan regulations require that I remain a half time student to keep my deferral and that meant taking another class.  Only I wanted one that had no writing required and minimal reading.) and it hurt too.  Actually my wrist is hurting again, and the weights really accentuate it.  I’m not sure if it is that it is still weak from the surgery last year or if it is the fact that the growth on the tendon is back.  Hard to know.  I mostly ignore it, but sometimes it gets a little persistent.  No matter, no health insurance, no fixing it.

After weightlifting class I put on my headphones and went for a run.  This was the first time I have run without Dog is so long that I can’t actually remember.  I knew that she slowed me down.  I knew that she stressed me out on our runs because I am constantly aware of the other runners and bicyclists and squirrels around me and I have to make sure that she and they are all safe.  And she has this habit of getting distracted and looking one way while she’s running the other and running into me and tripping me up so that we end up in a literal “dog pile”.  This is not to say that I don’t like running with her, but I do not get an endorphin high when we run together.  And I’m often frustrated and irritable after our runs – partly from the extra attention I have to pay and  partly because she must Pee on Everything and the constant stopping makes me nuts.

Today, though, was different.  It was sunny and calm and about 65 degrees.  The trail in the middle of the day was almost empty.  And even though every step hurt and I could feel the alcohol leaching from my system, I kept going.  Then I hit mile 3.  I felt the last of the alcohol leave my pores.  I instantly had my first endorphin hit in a couple of weeks, and for the remaining 2 miles I didn’t think about work or about my thesis or about my sore shoulder or about the fact that I’m 3000 miles overdue for an oil change, or that I need to clean the dog poop out of the yard, or that the leaves have blocked my gutter and there are mosquitoes breeding up there, or any of it.  It was just me and the trail and the sunshine filtered through the baby leaves of the still winter bare trees and the green grass and the river and a good soundtrack.  Who knew you could run to Snoop Dogg?

I didn’t get as much work done the rest of the day as I’d hoped.  But I finished what I’d planned to finish.  Mostly though, I remembered that there is a reason that I’m not supposed to drink alone, and it is because the real relaxation is not in the bottle.  If I want it, I have to make time for it – and not at 6 in the morning or 7:30 at night or whenever I’m trying to jam in my workouts in the dark.  And most of all, I have to quit this thing were I feel guilty if I decide to run without Dog.  She is doing ok.  Skipping a 5 mile run here or there isn’t going to ruin her life.

Mile 3.  It’s the magic mile.  I’d forgotten.  I’m glad I remembered.

Twitchy Bridge

SacTowerBridge08, originally uploaded by projectdistraction.

My left eye has been twitching for two days. Of course I had to look this up on the internet to find out what sort of death dealing infectocide I might be dealing with.

Stress.

Good to know. There isn’t a whole hell of a lot I can do about it though. Still no running for me – it will be at least two more weeks before the ankle will be ready to start rebuilding. And as that is my primary stress relief, I’m left with a twitching eye.

It gets worse when I yawn.

SO, Photos! I went out and tried my hand at HDR photography last week. It was for a work project, and while the photos got rave reviews, they ended up not working for the project. I’m still glad I took them though. I have some crazy ideas for my next set.

Think Batman. 🙂

Acceptance…

Acceptance is realizing that I will not be running on October 3rd.  I could agonize over it, I suppose.  But today, when I stepped off the curb while leaving my office and almost tripped from the sudden pain, I accepted.

I do not like it though.  I’m not as angry, and I no longer want to take a hammer to my ankle.  Well, maybe a small hammer – like a ball peen or a tack hammer.  But mostly, I’m resigned.

Honestly, it feels like I’ve lost a fight and now I’m crawling away with my tail between my legs plotting on what I need to do to win next time.  “You haven’t seen the last of meeeee!”  Which would honestly be pretty difficult because I’m both the winner and the loser in this fight – will vs. body.  Body may have won this round, but will has the better average (except when there is chocolate or whiskey because will is weak when it comes to chocolate and whiskey).  Body is going to win eventually – on a long enough time line the survival rate for everything drops to zero.  Yeah. I just quoted Fight Club.  Again.

Still, I resent this kind of interruption.  I especially resent it in that I don’t feel like I’ve been pushing myself all that hard – certainly not as hard as I did last summer or even last winter.  How dare this wad of flesh fail me when I’ve been so easy on it?

The worst of it is that I wish I was doing this pushing for vanity – because then it would be easy.  Do whatever gets me into the next smaller size.  Lather – rinse – repeat.  I’m not though.  I want performance.  I want to be able to run and climb and hike and lift weights and fight and ski and snowshoe and bicycle and dance and learn new martial arts and I want to do it all dammit – on the same day even.  I do not want to be on the injured list.  Not even for a moment.  I don’t have enough time to do all the cool stuff there is to do without wasting weeks with my foot elevated as it is.

Mostly, though, I don’t want to be too injured to run because it makes me sad.  Not “boo hoo” sad.  Give up  sad.  I’m an endorphin addict and I go through withdrawals when I’m injured.  Severe withdrawals.

Like Mr. Lewis said, “I need a new drug.”

Or at least an additional one.

So I’m not running.  In fact, I’m not going to do be doing much working out at all for the next two weeks.  Then I’m going to start over from scratch.  I’m going to begin rebuilding my body, looking for the weak spots that lead to these kinds of injuries, fixing the problem areas that I’ve been ignoring, and, if my physical therapist has anything to say about it, making sure that I address problems as soon as they manifest, and not let them go weeks and months without relief.

And in March?  I’ll run a race again.  And in June?  For my next birthday?  I’m signing up for Juijitsu.

Shhhh.  Don’t tell my therapist.

Second-Hand Goals

This morning I ran for the first time in three weeks.  It was only 3 miles.  Considering I have a 13 mile race in two weeks, three miles is distressingly little.  This time last year I was running 10 and 12 miles – comfortably.  Easily even.  Not today.  Not this year.

I’m pretty sure I have anterior Achilles bursitis.  Net result is that my right ankle was in so much pain that I couldn’t run.  I couldn’t walk without limping – and as recently as Thursday I was gimping the Dog around at the park.  But I got a new ankle brace, I’ve been trying to do some strengthening exercises, and I haven’t been running.  Which, in my world, means it should heal.

It hasn’t healed.  It has improved.  I was running pain free for the first two miles – the third started aching, but it was generally tolerable.  Or tolerable for me.  I am still learning that a high pain tolerance is not always a good thing.  Just because I can doesn’t mean I should.

Today was a test.  Do I run the race in two weeks?  Or do I accept that I’ve wasted the entry money?  I already know that all my previous goals are shit.  I won’t be running for time.  I’ll be running to see if I can finish.  And I’ve already run that race.  I already know I can run 13 consecutive miles.  I’ve run 13  consecutive miles on several occasions – both officially and in training.  There is nothing to prove there – nothing to gain.

And there may be something to lose – a more severe injury could mean a much longer recovery time – could mean months of not running, not just weeks.  Could mean even a doctor’s visit for a cortisone shot or worse.

Yet I hate the idea of not following through with my goals.  I hate it so much that I’m seriously considering running the race anyway – loading up on anti-inflamatories and vicodin, getting an even more severe ankle brace, and running the race.

I know what this is.  I know why I feel so strongly about it.  I have a story in my head about the kind of person I am.  When I was younger I had a habit of starting projects and never finishing them.  It still happens more than I like, but I’ve worked very hard the last 10 years to rewrite that part of the story – to become the kind of person who sticks with it and pushes through the boring parts and the painful parts and the time consuming parts and finishes what she starts.  That’s the kind of person I want to be – it’s the image I have of myself in my head – and it’s the reason that not running this race is so unsavory.  It would violate my story – invalidate that bit of myself that I’ve worked so hard to create – the bit that finishes what she starts.

So I’m at a conundrum.  I’m going to hurt either way.  Do I take the physical pain and maintain my inner story?  Or do I accept that the story is flawed and let the ankle continue to heal?  The second probably seems the most reasonable – to an outsider, but what would you do if it was your story that was at risk?

I guess I still have two weeks.  Sort of.  In the mean time, I have a collection of  ice packs in the freezer, and a bottle of pain killers in the cabinet.  Either way I’m prepared.

Adrenaline and the Dog Walk

One of the biggest struggles I’ve had since Ryder came to live with me is making sure she gets enough exercise.  She spends a lot of time alone.  And while she seems to mainly sleep during that time, it means that when I get home she wants to play.

She loves the walks at the park, especially when I’m tired.  This is because when I’m tired, I tend to stroll and let her have a loose leash and stop when she wants to smell something and pretty much let her determine our pace.  She is less impressed with the brisk walks where I make her mind her manners.  And she downright pouts when I make her run.  It’s almost impossible to pee on everything that smells peeable when we’re running.

For the last two weeks my ankle has been bothering me.  Mostly it is fine, but then it will suddenly have this sharp shooting pain that will make it very painful to even walk.  Sometimes I can limp through it and it will quit.  And sometimes it doesn’t happen at all.  It is very sporadic, but getting worse, and it is because I need new running shoes.  And also probably a break.  But mostly new shoes.

Today the pain in my ankle was so bad that I was limping by the time I got home.  I put ice on it for a while, but when it came time to take Ryder to the park, I left the ice at home, took a couple of advil and decided to see how it would go.  It hurt at first, and then got better for a while and then started to hurt again when we were at the baseball diamond at the far end of the park.  I decided to sit for a bit to rest it, and she was tugging at the leash to smell the trees and kept getting tangled in the table and in the garbage can and in my legs.

So I let her off the leash.

I’ve done this twice before and both times she came back when I called.  Both times she never got more than about 30 feet from me.  Both times everything was fine.  So I assumed this time would be fine too.  It was late, there were no other dogs around.  Traffic had died down, there were no people about, I thought it would be fine.

It was not fine.

She wouldn’t come back when I called.  She’d stop and look at me, and then turn and keep trotting away.  When she got to the edge of the diamond I realized that she was just about out of my range of control and got up to follow her, calling her all the while.  She just kept trotting away, looking over her shoulder to see if I was still coming, and then continuing on.  I started jogging after her because she was getting close to the edge of the park and would soon have to cross the street.  When she saw that I was jogging, she started to really move.

This is when I realized that she wasn’t going to stop or listen or come back to me by command.  This is when I realized that she would probably run all the way back to where we usually park the car – which meant crossing two streets and a parking lot – and then who knows what would happen when she remembered that wasn’t where we parked the car this time.  This is when I realized that I would have to catch her by then or else…

This is when I started running for reals.

Now, running is a thing I do.  But I seldom go all out for more than what it takes to cross the finish line.  It has been a long time since I tried to see how long I can run at top speed.  Apparently it is a lot longer than I used to.

I had almost caught up with her when she crossed the first road.  Thank god there was no traffic and I thought just maybe she’d get distracted by the duck pond and everything would be ok.  We passed a cyclist who said something in Chinese as he passed me.  And then we passed the pond – she didn’t even slow.  By this time she was loping along, glancing to make sure I was following and having a grand old time.

If I hadn’t been afraid of the cars and the potential that she might hurt someone or that someone might hurt her, I would have handled this differently.  If, if, if.  As it was, I’d run one of the fastest half miles of my life when she cruised on past another runner going the other way.  Apparently she liked him because she stopped for a moment.  This is where I made my mistake.

I started to sprint.

I didn’t know I could run faster than I was, but then there I was almost flying.  I was having visions of her pulling some sort of snarling biting thing – though she has never bitten anyone.  Killed ducks and chickens and goats, yes, but never bitten a person.

There was a couple of seconds where she looked like she was going to approach this person.  He crouched down and called to her and she seemed taken by this.  And then she saw me coming fast and she took off again.  The guy stood up and saw me coming and asked if she bit.

I told him no, but that she didn’t know about cars.  He took off after her too, running as fast as he could.  He had about 60 feet on me so he was closer, and Ryder, well, she thought this was the bestest game ever.

I was right about where she was headed – straight for the usual parking spot.  I also lucked out.  He got there right after she did and when she stopped to wonder where the car was, he called to her and she went right up to him.  When I came gallumping up a couple of seconds later, he had her by the collar and was scratching her ears and she looked all sorts of pleased and a little confused.

I haven’t been that afraid since I don’t remember when.  It was my fault, my stupidity, my assumptions and it could have been a disaster.  When I finally had her leash back on her, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to hug her or kick her.  I was so relieved and so angry.

I profusely thanked the man who caught her.  I felt like such an idiot – taking the leash off of an Akita in a public space was an incredibly stupid thing to do.  All because I was feeling tired and sore.  And there I had just run a mile at full speed and I hadn’t even noticed my ankle, or the fact that I was running in sandals, or that I was so tired.

I can tell you I’m noticing it now.

He was generous and told me it was ok.  No harm done, he’d got a good run out of it.  And when he stood up to leave, I had the very strong urge to introduce myself – which is not something that ever happens, especially when I’ve been caught being criminally stupid.  I found that even in that short of a time, I had a positive impression about him – apparently my dog has good taste – that initial impression is never wrong.  Sometimes I ignore it, but it is never wrong.

I have learned my lesson.  This dog will never get to be an off leash dog.  Next time she gets all wistful watching some other dog playing fetch in the park, I’ll remind her of this little adventure and why she cannot be allowed to play fetch in the park.  Or sniff things unattended.  Or participate in any of those other off leash adventures that more responsible dogs get to do.

God, I sound like a parent.

Things I have learned:

Leashes are forever.

I need to do more all out running intervals – I was thinking today that I wasn’t going to make my time goal for my next race – if anything was going to change that some serious speed intervals would be the trick.

And I need to take a couple of days and let my ankle heal.  Maybe while I wait for my new running shoes.

Oh, and one more.  I think I might start running at night.  🙂

When Drunk…

It is amazing the things I will do when drunk that I won’t even try when sober.  Like food prep.  I’ve been on a humus kick for about a month now.  I crave it.  Whenever I go shopping I inevitably end up with a container of humus and a bag of pita chips in my basket – even when I can’t rationally afford humus and pita chips – there they are.  In my basket.

Tonight I ran out of humus.

I’d been looking forward to humus and pita chips all day.  I didn’t eat enough for lunch, at least not enough to go run 9 miles right after work.  Which I did – longest run since my half-marathon.  So when I got home I could feel the crash coming.  Actually, I felt the crash at mile 6.  Crashing when you are exercising is an interesting experience.  It is like your limbs suddenly go heavy.  Suddenly is the correct word because it happens so fast that it invariably takes me by surprise.   One moment I’m going along all active like and the next I am light headed and dizzy and wondering what the hell is happening.  I run out of fuel.  Literally.  It is a fascinating experience – except not so much when three miles from your car and 15 from your refrigerator and 25 min from anything edible.

So I ran out of humus.  I tried eating rice, but rice and whiskey does not go all that well.  Actually, most food doesn’t really complement whiskey.  It is unfortunate, really, as I go directly to the whiskey bottle at my first opportunity.

So I decided to watch a movie instead.  Once Upon A Time in Mexico – which I’ve seen a handful of times.  The film isn’t great.  But it has moments – enough of them to link together to make a reasonably entertaining couple of hours.  Especially if you have humus for your pita chips.  Which I didn’t.  Until…

I paused the movie half way through and abused the google until it coughed up a handful of humus recipes.  I then took what was common between the recipes, reconciled it with what I had in my kitchen, and threw it all in my blender.  The end result (after a lot of manipulation because blenders are nothing like food processors and the damn garbonzo beans just did not want to blend and I am/was sufficiently drunk that it was all a bit touch and go anyway) was amazingly delicious.  I put three sleeves?  bundles?  whatever the pieces of garlic that you peel away from a clove are, in the blender with a can of garbonzo beans, almost half a cup of lemon juice, a couple of teaspoons of sesame oil and who knows how much cummin.  Actually the measurements of all of it are suspect.  The only thing I actually specified was the can of garbonzo beans.  Everything else I just guessed on.

The result?  Wonderful!  Somehow I ended up with a humus that puts most of the stuff I’ve been buying in the supermarket to shame.  If I knew it was this easy…

I don’t think I’ll be buying pre-made humus again.  I also don’t think I’ll be using that much garlic again.  Good grief.  For a vegetarian I have a very hard time digesting garlic.  Even though I love the flavor.  It’s a Catch 22 (the last book that made me actually cry).  The humus is insufficient without the garlic, but makes my tummy unhappy with it.  No win.

I was going to go out tonight.  I’ve been planning on going out tonight for over two weeks.  Obviously I did not go out tonight.  I wanted to.  I just didn’t want to go by myself.  Usually it doesn’t bother me.  Tonight, as I was playing my guitar and slowly getting drunk, it bothered me.  And as this is the only night I really get to go out, I feel like I’ve wasted it.  Again.  On the up side, I did get a lot of my homework done.

I know this is my life, and I’m acutely aware that it is passing me by more quickly than I can reconcile.  I also acknowledge that I’ll likely be spending it alone, and that my window for partners is rapidly narrowing.  There are more women than men out there.  1.9 percent in most cases.  It looks like I’m in that bracket – the percentage that must be solo so as to preserve the gender balance among the reproducers.

I can deal.  Especially  now that I know how easy it is to make my own humus.  Now I just need to figure out how to make pita chips and I’ll be set.  You’ll never see me out and about again.  Except for my runs.  Because next weekend will be a 12 miler.  And while I met my 20 miles per a week running goal (does not include the 12 miles on the elliptical machine, nor the 6 miles on the stair master) it was not enough to keep me from detesting myself.  Detesting.  As in Hating.  As in Disgusted.  As in I don’t know what.  My expectations are so unrealistic, and my self-image is so completely fantastical that I spend a good amount of time wondering why I don’t look like a fitness model.

Genetics.

And I’m not even that upset by them.  For all the pouches of body fat that I’ve inherited, I also have a high alcohol tolerance, the ability to decipher complex data, even when drunk, and a complete lack of fear for my wellbeing.  Ok, maybe the last is more a product of my experience than my genetics.  But that doesn’t change anything.  I’ll take y’all on right now.  C’mon!  What are you waiting for!  Bring it already!

Or not.  That’s ok too.

I’m going to go take one of each of the sleep medications I have in my cabinet.  Hopefully it will drown out the barking of my neighbor’s dogs – who have driven me to the point that I’m fantasizing about anti-freeze and animal tranquilizers.  Wonderful fantasies.  Sleep full fantasies.

At any rate, we’ll see what tomorrow brings.  My expectations are low – except for the part where I’ll be hosting band practice.  I bug bombed my studio in anticipation of band practice.  If I’m lucky it will restore my cosmic balance.

If I’m lucky…

Clarity

I went for my first run since the half marathon today.  The extended break wasn’t intentional – quite the opposite.  As someone who relies on exercise to regulate my mental and emotional balance, extended breaks tend to wreak havoc on my internal operating system.  It starts off with just a general sense of negativity and if I don’t catch it in time I’m in full on Fuck It mode before I even know what happened.  Fuck It mode is the precursor to “I wonder how long I’ll sleep if I take this whole bottle of pills” and “hmm, I wonder what would happen if I drove off this bridge”.

When I say I have a self destructive streak I’m not talking about hanging out with the wrong people or making poor choices.  I mean self destruction.  As in the end of self.

Honestly, it’s been this way since I was a teenager.  In some ways it was worse then because I didn’t know what was happening or why or how to make it stop.  My parents didn’t believe that depression was a real condition – they thought it was something people made up to get out of working hard or taking responsibility for themselves.  It wasn’t until my mother had a bout of depression herself that she finally understood what it was about – and that was around seven years ago.  By that time I’d run the gauntlet of antidepressants and borderline alcoholism, over-eating and sleeping for days at a time.  I was well into my exercise addiction and had already made many of the connections about what I needed to do to keep stable.  Her understanding, while appreciated, was a little on the late side.

So going two weeks with only three trips to the gym is, for me, playing with fire.  I knew it Friday when I proceeded to drink myself stupid.  And I knew it yesterday when I came home from work and promptly fell asleep for four hours.  I knew it this morning when I woke up and wondered why the hell I was still breathing.

As a note, people who are impressed with the fact that I can run 12 or 13 miles at a time have no idea that that is nothing.  The hard part, the truly hard part is putting on your running shoes and your sports bra and pulling up your hair and going to the track and making yourself move when all you really want to do, the only thing that sounds right, the only thing that makes any sense, would be to curl up in a ball in bed under the blankets, and stay there until you simply stopped being.  Fighting that urge is a hundred times harder than pushing through the pain of the last 3 miles of a half marathon.  A thousand times.

It took me a couple of hours this morning to make myself go running.  I’d planned on going in the morning when it was cool and fresh out, before the blooms opened on the trees, before the trails crowded with people out getting some fresh air.  Things don’t always go as planned.  By the time I made it to the trail the air was heavy and the pollen thick.  I started running, and immediately I knew it was going to be a difficult run.  I couldn’t breathe.  Almost instantly I was light headed and no matter how I tried to regulate my breathing, I just couldn’t get enough air.  Plus, my body felt alien to me – like I was in someone else’s skin, trying to move their legs and arms and lungs – legs and arms and lungs that were not necessarily accustomed to my level of activity.

It hurt, is what I’m saying.  I ran five miles, and it was the hardest five miles in a very long time.  I have no idea how I ran 13 two weeks ago.  I wish I could blame it on the 35 degree temperature difference.  But I’ve run 12 miles in triple digits.  That wasn’t it.

The same thing has happened to my climbing.  Only this was much longer than 2 weeks in development.  I’m trying to work back into my climbing and weight lifting schedule, but it is not easy.  I see things that I could do before, and I try to do them now and I can’t.  Mentally I can, but physically I am unable.  I guess this is what happens to the guys who were football or track stars in high school and college and who don’t believe they’ve gained that much weight or lost that much muscle.  I am in awe.  I knew I was losing muscle mass the last few months – I had to really cut back on my activities, first because of my wrist and then because of my school schedule – but I had no idea it was this bad.

I followed up the run of patheticness with a couple of hours of pathetic climbing and another hour of pathetic weight lifting.  I’m so far below my usual standards that I feel like the punchline of a very unfunny joke.  BUT, the negativity is gone.  The urge to climb into my bed and disappear is fading.  The need for a drink is non-existant.  I’m ok.

And if I needed proof that the sleeping pills/alcohol/caffeine cycle was a bad idea, here it is.  I hear it loud and clear.  Now I just need to figure out how to keep my balance when school goes back in session.

I think I’ll worry about that bridge when I come to it.  One thing at a time.

Race Report – Shamrock’n Half Marathon 3/14/10

The race went well.  Here are the highlights.

It was COLD at 7:00am (really 6:00).  Especially cold since I was only wearing a light jacket over my race shirt and running capris.  If it had been one of my normal morning runs I would have been layered to the nines – so that I could shed a layer at a time as I passed my car on the mile loop track near my house.  But I knew there would be nowhere to ditch clothes on this course and that I would have to carry whatever I was wearing.  I actually didn’t even want to have to carry the jacket, but I was so cold that I was shaking violently by the time they started the race, so the jacket was necessary.  It took three very slow and very painful miles for me to get warm enough that I could take the jacket off.  But then it was on.

I ran pretty aggressively once I got warmed up.  At first I was just trying to find somebody to pace with.  Pacing yourself with someone else in the race is a good way to make sure that you don’t burn out too fast.  My problem was that as soon as I’d picked someone to pace to, I’d catch up with them, and then realize they weren’t going the right speed after all, and I’d pass them to pace with someone else up ahead.  I did find a guy to pace with for about three miles, but then I accidently passed him (there was congestion and I had to really run to get around it and when I looked for my pace buddy I realized he was way behind me.  You were a good pace buddy though, handsome man in the brown Team Lucca  shirt!  Let me know if you ever need a running partner!) at about mile 7.  That’s about when I stopped looking for pace buddies and started just picking people ahead of me to catch up to and pass.  And that’s how I ran the rest of the race. 

My chip time (measured by a sensor you attach to your shoe as it passes over a reader in the track) was 1:50:53 for the 13.1 miles.  That averages to 8:23 per mile, which is about 7.2 mph.  Reality though is that my first three miles were closer to 6 mph, and the next four were between 6.5 and 6.8.  Which means I ran the last six miles of the race.  Really ran.  I can’t help wondering what my time would have been if I hadn’t started so cold.  For the record, this was 3:54 faster than my Cowtown time. 

Miles 11 and 12 were the hurt miles this time.  The last race, the Cowtown back in October, it was everything after 10 that just killed me.  I’d done a lot of longer distances this training cycle, and I was prepared for the length, but even so, miles 11 and 12 were the most challenging on the course, and I noticed.  That did not stop me from passing folks though.  Like the last time, I did a lot of my passing on the hills.  I’m so glad I found a trail with natural hills to train on.  The hills on the race course were very short, and with two exceptions, really not that steep at all.  Yet on every one I passed people complaining on how they hadn’t trained for hills and Oh God the hills and who picks a course with hills?  I just smiled, tucked my head as I leaned forward, and thought how they should try the last hill of my 12 mile training loop – 3/4 of a mile of gradually increasing incline followed by 300 feet of stair-steep climbing – all at the very end.

The biggest challenge of this race, aside from the cold start, was the people.  There were considerable stretches of this race where the course was not very wide.  Yet there were groups of runners who insisted on running side by side until they pretty much blocked the course for anyone else.  Lots of times they were wearing matching shirts, and were obviously friends.  I have no issue with people running in groups, as long as they recognize that they need to leave some space for others.  Single file people.  Single file.  Or even double.  But no triples.  This was a race, not a cavalry charge.  I frequently found that to get around a group I had to swing super wide on corners or hop curbs or go off the paved path or weave between other runners, and all of that meant bursts of speed.  Try finding a burst of speed at 11 miles while on a roughly paved incline.  Yeah. 

I did have enough left to sprint the last quarter mile.  Go interval training!  And within three or four minutes of crossing the finish line my breathing and heart rate was almost normal.  Nor did I have the same muscle cramping that I had back in October’s race.  I stretched a bit, walked a bit, and waited for my training buddy.  She did fantastic – took 27 minutes off her last race time for a 2:00:33 finish.  Next race I think we’ll run at least part of it together.  I haven’t told her my goal time yet.  (1:46  : )  But I am confident (more confident than she is sometimes) in her abilities.

The race was great.  But pretty much everything after the finish was anti-climactic.  I watched all these people celebrating, either with their running buddies or their friends and family who came out to support them, and it reminded me that I was going to get in my car by myself and go to my empty house and get cleaned up and then study on my own for the rest of the day.  I didn’t calculate that it would take almost 40 minutes to get out of the parking lot first.  By the time I got home I had a blossoming migraine that actually put me out of commission for the rest of the day and half of the next.  The whole thing contributed to a bit of melancholy that is still lingering.  I’m going to hit the gym today and see if I can make a dent in it before class tonight. 

And next weekend, if the weather is pleasant,  I’ll go for a nice long run.  With hills.

Sidestep

If I’m going to get back on schedule, and I do fully intend to get back on schedule, I’m going to have to be very regimented for the next few weeks.  And once that is done, there will be steam.  And it will probably need to be let go.

There may be booze involved, is all I’m saying.

I’m on a no drinking week while I prepare for the half marathon this Sunday.  I keep vacillating between feeling really good about the race and feeling like I’m not quite ready.  I know I’ll complete it.  I am even pretty sure that I’ll complete it in under 2 hours – provided nothing goes wrong.  But I keep thinking back to where I was last time, and it seems like I was in better overall shape.  I’ve lost so much strength from my upper body since the surgery on my wrist.  And it will be a while before I have the time to start building it back up.  At the same time, though, I don’t really get sore after long runs anymore.  I’ll be a little stiff, and I’m not quite at my best on the stairmaster the day after a 13 or 14 mile run, but it isn’t like before, where it took a week for the soreness to go away – where I groaned every time I stood up and walked to the fax machine – where sitting down was a delicious three second adventure of agony.

I’ll be honest right here.  I like feeling sore.  There’ve been a few times when I went too far, when I couldn’t get out of bed the next day, when I had to crawl to the bathroom because it hurt too much to stand.  But for the most part, if it hurts, I’m happy.  Sore abs and legs and shoulders make me the happiest – big muscle groups.  When just one little muscle on the side of my calf is sore, I get curious and start trying to remember what on earth I did that could make just one little muscle so unhappy.  For the most part, though, I’m almost always a little sore.  It has been this way for almost 8 years now, and I feel wrong when I’m not hurting at least a little bit – hell, I notice the absence of soreness more than the presence.

This is why I need to get back to the martial arts.  Nothing every made me hurt quite like that.  Especially the falling and rolling and falling.  I have photos that I took after a day long jiu-jitsu seminar way back when.  I had no experience with jiu-jitsu at the time, and had gone because the seminar was aimed at helping kenpo practitioners fill in some of the blanks that resulted from the commercialization of the art.  I’d spent the whole day either throwing guys much bigger and heavier than me, or getting thrown by guys much bigger and heavier than me.  My arms and legs were heavily spotted with bruises.  I had bruises on my shoulders and my back and my neck.  That was one of those times where the next morning I had to crawl to the bathroom.  It hurt so much to move that even breathing was painful.  I think at the time I wondered if I’d taken total leave of my senses for doing that to myself.  Now I want a second chance.  I think I’d handle it better.

In the meantime I run.  Last Sunday was my last long pre-race run.  13.25 miles.  I accidently laced my running shoes up too tight – not too tight for the first half of the run, but increasingly too tight for the rest of it.  One’s feet swell when one is running for 2 hours outside without sufficient access to water – my bad on that last bit.  I don’t usually carry water, and it isn’t usually a problem, but there were some extenuating circumstances, and I should have suspected that I’d be more easily dehydrated than usual.  At any rate I bruised my feet – deep tissue bruises.  I ran the treadmill at the gym today, and I could feel it with every step.  It doesn’t hurt so bad that I can’t turn it off while I’m running.  But as soon as I stop, I’m clawing at my feet to get the shoes off.

Sadly, this is not the first time I’ve done this.  Apparently I need repetition for emphasis.  I’m still training pretty solidly this week.  One more interval training run on Thursday, then something light for Friday – maybe some weights or climbing.  Saturday will be a carb fest (pizza and cake!) and then Sunday morning, at the literal butt crack of dawn I will be on the track.

Huge down side about this race/training period – last time I did a lot of my training runs in the morning.  It was just too hot in the day, and it got light early enough to make it possible.  This time I have only done a handful of early morning runs.  It is dark and cold and I end up staying up too late at night.  This race, however, is at 7:30.  I should be at the course by 6:30.  Which means getting up no later than 6 – 5:30 if I really want to have my shit together.  BUT the kicker is that Sunday is the first day of the time change.  So 7:30 will feel like 6:30 and 5:30 will feel like somebody kicked me in the head with steel toe shoes.  It is impossible for me to fall asleep before 11.  I try frequently.  I use drugs.  I meditate.  I read math books.  None of it helps.  Falling asleep at 11 is a huge success in going to be early for me.  So this is going to be a challenge.

Fortunately, I like challenges.  Sometimes.  Ok, occasionally, when I get to pick them, and when the reward is worth the risk of failure or the pain and suffering or the overall cost.

And there are always naps later.

Focus.  I’ll be keeping a pretty regimented schedule for the next few weeks.  It will be good for me.  I will not dwell on things that I have no control over.  I will not have fantasies of tripping on the treadmill and breaking my legs.  I will not think about all the things that can go wrong.  It’s a lot of things.  I will think about how good that race is going to feel.  I will think about the rewards I have planned for myself – the ones that are already paid for and therefore guilt free.  I will think about what I want to do next, how I want to do it, and how best to organize myself for success.

And I’ll try to remember not to tie my shoes too tight.  That’s the big one.

Ephemeral Control

That last post is about as close to pathos as I want this experience to go.  I did not create this to be a chronicle of “poor me”s.  All things considered, and that is a lot of things, I’m doing pretty good.  Except for the hives.  And even those will go away eventually.

I took the day off of work yesterday.  I turned off my phone.  I checked my email once in the morning.  And the rest of the day I spent getting my life in order.  It was a very productive day.

Memory Log!

Yesterday morning I had a peanut butter and honey sandwich for breakfast.  Took some energy drugs, and did that cleaning thing where your hands are never empty – you know the thing, where you are always carrying something to put away in another room, even when it isn’t pertinent to the exact task at hand – cleaning the bedroom meant carrying laundry to the laundry room and then taking the long way back so I could move the snow boots from the dining room to the hall closet.  It is good cleaning – indirectly efficient cleaning.

I finally tackled the office.  I’d been dumping paperwork in a box for the last five months.  Before that it was a paper bag which had ripped and spilled all over the office floor.  And the top of my desk had become so cluttered that there was barely enough flat space for a coffee mug – let alone books and papers.

Tangent: It is amazing how much impact the environment has on me.  While the basic tools of my office have not changed – I still have the computer with the internet and access to the online libraries and I still have a chair and my music and a little heater for my feet and I still have my coffee mug and printer and stapler – before, when it was too cluttered to even move around in, I couldn’t concentrate.  I would come in here, sit down to work, and immediately feel zapped of any motivation or desire.  I’d end up farting around on the internet the whole time.  Sometimes without even pretending to access my school-work files.  This morning though, I woke up early, and for the first time in weeks I’m looking forward to working on my assignments.  Which is about time – I’m behind and if the malaise of the last few weeks had continued much longer, I’d be in big trouble.

Cleaning the office included emptying my file cabinet and storing all of the old documents and then filing the new stuff in its place.  It was very challenging and I now understand fully my reluctance to attack that particular task.  It was the equivalent of reviewing the last few years.

Tangent 2:  Before I had my car accident I was pretty good about keeping on top of my paperwork – bills and what not got paid on time, stuff that needed to be filed got filed, stuff that needed a response got a response.  After the accident, I quickly deteriorated in my ability to manage my paperwork.  Part of this is because it increased in volume.  But more than that, I found that I simply couldn’t manage.  Bills went unpaid – sometimes because I didn’t have the money – usually because I didn’t have the money – sometimes because the insurance was supposed to pay them but hadn’t.  The barrage of insurance documents and collections documents and hospital documents took me to a point where I simply couldn’t manage the rest of my paperwork – the utilities and the phone and my car insurance and the credit cards.  I’d pay what I could when I could and dump the paperwork into the file drawer loose.  Eventually the file drawer became full, and I started using bags and boxes.  Seldom sorting, often leaving letters and bills unopened (particularly if I was paying them online), just stuffing it all away.  Last year when I finally decided to get my tax situation resolved (or at least the federal portion of it) I dumped a lot of this paperwork on the floor so I could shuffle through it to find the documents I needed.

And I never picked it back up again.

Yesterday, as I was sorting through the file cabinet, putting the old stuff that I need to save into storage, roughly sorting the two and a half years of paperwork that had accumulated, and filing away everything from this year, I realized that I was looking at the physical evidence of my breakdown.  It was so vividly apparent, written in the dates of the bills and letters and demands, in the logos and language of the corporate medical machine, the impersonal insurance denials, and the varied collection of rejection letters from my last attempt to find a job.

I have a vast collection of letters stating that while my application is impressive, they’ve decided to go with someone else.  Thanks for my time.  Good luck.  Suck it.

Getting all of that sorted out was incredibly relieving.  It is also a testament to how far I’ve come that I would even consider taking on such a task.  And I have a good foundation to build on for this year.  A whole new organization, and a file just for the next crop of rejection letters.  Except this time they’re going to be from a much higher caliber of employers for a much higher caliber of jobs.   End Tangent.

I did take a little time to go to the gym and get a workout in.  I was very lax this last week about working out – I ran on Monday, hit the gym on Thursday, and then hit the gym again on Saturday.  That is a lot of down days for me, and I can feel it.  The workout was good, but it exhausted me more than I thought it would.  And afterwards, I came home, had a snack, finished cleaning the office, zoned in front of the computer for a while, practiced guitar for a bit, and went to bed early – or at least early for me.

I slept ok last night, quite a bit of tossing and turning, and when I did wake up the couple of times that I remembered looking at the clock, it was quite a while before I fell back asleep.  But it was more than I’ve been getting.  And there was no rooster crowing at the butt crack of dawn to wake me up and make me actually get up and go outside.  That was a huge bonus.

Friday afternoon my youngest brother stopped by on his way home and caught Urban Chicken and put him in a box and took him away.  My relief was so palpable and I was so exhausted from the whole thing that I just went inside, turned my brain off, and sat for several hours.

End Log.

The last two weeks have been very difficult.  Yard Chicken was part of that.  The lack of decent sleep also played a role.  But I think that eliminating the office clutter and the rooster is a good start to regaining some of that illusory control that we all find so necessary to function.  Or at least I do.

Today I’m going to do the last long pre-race run.  I’ll be glad when the race is over, though I don’t think I’ll be really cutting back on my exercise regimen all that much.  I need it to keep an even keel – and my emotional instability and increased stress level this last week has only underlined how important it is that I get enough endorphins.  But not having the race looming will be a good break.  It’s really interesting how when I first sign up for these races I dread them – and have to keep reminding myself that I have plenty of time, then as the training continues, I really enjoy it – enjoy having an excuse to take two hours on a weekend day to go outside and run the trails, and then as the race nears, I start to dread it again – thinking about all the stuff that could go wrong and wishing it was over already and wondering if I did enough training and my mantra becomes “why the hell do you do this to yourself?”.  But if this race is anything like the last, it will all be worth it.  And I’ll probably sign up for the October race again.  Because that middle part and that part where it is over are worth the stress and self-doubt inherent in the process.

Ok, time to work now.  A band that I like very much will be playing this Monday night – during the last half of my class.  I’ve promised myself that if I get on top of – and a little ahead in – my classwork that I can leave to go see them play.  A little reward for pulling my shit together.  Even if it did take a day off work to make it happen.