TURN AND FACE THE STRAIN I've been making some changes this summer. New goals. New priorities. New approaches to my own fitness. I've changed because of all the goals I achieved in the past year. And I've made a couple of changes in response to circumstances.
Ouch!
I started the summer wanting to get faster. A six and a half hour marathon is an achievement to be sure, but it sure is a long time to run. I tried adding some speed drills into my program, and started seeing some results, but somewhere along the way, I strained some muscles in my groin and they are taking a long time to mend. It was frustrating at first, not being able to run or swim without pain, but I took the injury as a challenge. Instead of holding on to my frustration, I decided to discover what I could do.
WALK BEFORE YOU RUN
Every Wednesday at the Y, a group of seniors gathers to walk on the Legacy trail. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed these less intense sessions, and decided to try walking instead of running. Last Saturday, while the rest of John's Striders were running the Iron Horse Half Marathon course, I joined a group of walkers who planned to cover the first half. The pace was vigorous, the conversation stimulating, and the sweat was real. By the time we finished the 6 miles, I was convinced that power walking is going to be part of my program from now on.
GET ON YOUR BIKE AND RIDE
A slightly newer model than mine, but you get the idea.
My $25 yard sale mountain bike has been standing in the garage for several years now. It's a steel framed beauty, a 1995 Trek 800 Sport. I knew it was a waste for it to just lie there unused, and I remembered how much I enjoyed riding it to work a couple of lifetimes ago. I wondered if the less demanding requirements of cycling would be easier on my sore muscles. After pulling the old girl out of the carport, applying a little soap, a little grease, and some new tires, I discovered that I could ride quite comfortably. I now commute to work on my bike, and the extra hour of cardio every day has helped me to break through a weight plateau where I've been stuck for quite a while. I love riding and working on this machine. Mrs P blanches at all the trips to the bike shop for tools and parts, but when she sees how much I'm saving on gas, it softens the blow a little.
FINDING YODA
MUCH tougher than she looks!
Just before the marathon, I asked Coach Carrie if she would be my personal trainer and she agreed. Before we started, she asked me what my goals were.
To run a 1 hour 10K
To build strength in my core and upper body
To get my Body Fat down to 20% and my weight to 240
To pick her brain about the art of Personal Training
Coach designs each workout with these goals in mind. Since my injury, we've been focusing more on rehab than speed, giving special attention to strengthening the muscles around the hurt ones, and gently stretching to keep my legs from knotting up, (particularly my wood-like hamstrings.) Along the way she is teaching me to use a variety of apparatus like the Swiss ball, the medicine ball, weighted bars, resistance tubes, kettlebells, TRX, and the medicine ball. From time to time, when she is giving me a correction, she'll say, "When you're training someone, you have to look out for this." She is teaching me how to organize workouts and how to help a trainee progress toward their goals. I decided to make myself her apprentice. It was an excellent choice.
TELL THE STORY
I haven't been blogging much, and I don't really know why. This week, my friend Kim came back to Lexington for a visit, and thanked me for inspiring her to get fit. She's stronger, faster, and lighter than she's been in a long time. Kim told me that when she has trouble getting going, she remembers that I'm out there on the road, and it motivates her. Could any writer have a higher honor?
I resolved to be more faithful to FMR. Not to promote myself or to brag. Lord knows, my achievements aren't exactly record-breaking. But reminding people that they have the strength to keep going, to reach their goals, to exceed their hopes - that's my mission in life. I believe that's why God saved me. That's why I need to keep writing: because every now and then, someone is going to find hope in my story, and the courage to believe in themselves. What greater gift could you give to the world?
Peace,
Pennsy
My friend Charlie is running the Chicago Rock'n'Roll Half Marathon as I'm typing this. Here's wishing him good speed, light legs, and pretty young things to hand him Gatorade along the way. Rockit, brother!
Living Strong at the Y I launched a fundraiser yesterday, to coincide with my preparations for the Pittsburgh Marathon in May. I hope to raise $11,000 for LIVESTRONG at the YMCA. It's a program that helps cancer patients, survivors, and fighters like me to take control of our lives and wellness through exercise, nutrition, and education. This program has meant so much to me over the past year, and I want to help make sure it is available for many more cancer fighters after me. I'll be bombarding everybody who will listen with pleas for money over the next two months, so keep an open mind... and an open check book!
Training Week It's been a pretty good training week, now that the great Groin Fest is over. I took a couple days off,. and the rest did me good. Not many miles, but I felt very strong and faster than I have been in a while. Looking for some Long Slow Miles this weekend when I hit the Run the Bluegrass course with the Striders. My cross-training included a great Zumba class on Sunday before work, and some quality laps in the pool. My stroke is getting stronger, but my endurance still leaves a lot to be desired. I'm doing my workouts 50m at a time, which is fine until the 9 year-olds come in and start swimming 500's.
In Praise of Walk Breaks I have two friends at the YMCA who are training for upcoming races, one is a 3K, and one a half-marathon. At one time or another they have both expressed anxiety and frustration to me because they still can't "run the whole way." They really don't want to have to stop running and walk. And I have to ask myself, "Why?" Here's my tale of two Fat Men Running.
Before I bought into the Jeff Galloway Run/Walk/Run schtick, I logged fewer miles, I ran them more slowly, and they hurt more. The idea of completing a 10K was beyond my imagination. I didn't have many serious injuries, but I was sore a lot. I still took walk breaks... I just waited until I was too tired to run before I would take them. I didn't walk to recover, I walked to surrender.
Today, before I start a run, I set my watch to beep out the intervals I want to run/walk. If I feel like superman, I might take a break every 10 minutes. Once, when I felt especially bad, I set it to go off every 30 seconds. And I have to tell you, both felt like really good runs. When I know I'm going to be running for 3 or 4 hours, that first break after 4 minutes can seem a little goofy, but I know I'm saving gas for the end of the workout when the minutes are longer and the hills steeper. I'm not afraid to press my pace a little, because I know there's a walk break coming in just a few seconds. I can maintain good form after several miles, so I don't get as sore and tired in my upper body as I used to.
The bottom line for me is, I can run as often as I want to run, and I can enjoy every single step. I'm not going to be an elite runner. I will probably never win my age group, no matter how old I get. But I will be able to keep running and feeling great about it. I don't mind taking walk breaks at 51, if it means I can still be running when I'm 91, and that's my plan.
The secret to exercise success is finding something you love to do. Until you do that, you won't feel drawn to a workout, you'll have to push yourself toward it. But once you find that thing that makes you want to pack the bag, pull on the fins, or lace up the shoes and go, then by all means find a way to do it that doesn't turn your love into an obligation. I would never run if it were a chore. No sane person would do something that hurt every time they did it.
Take it from someone who lives at the back of the pack. The scenery is still beautiful, the cheers at the finish line are still sweet, and that medal still feels great around your neck, even if you don't have to crawl to the stand to receive it.
Pulling your groin... it's always sounded a little obscene to me. I guess I was never really sure where my "groin" was. I thought of it as the general area of the crotch, as in "he got kicked in the groin. Actually, the groin muscles are part of your hip adductors. They help you close your legs. I learned this when the surgeon implanted an IVC filter through a vein in my groin. Long time readers will remember the day I had my bikini line shaved for the first time. To be honest, I haven't given my groin much thought, since then, other than the standard cleaning and maintenance that any responsible owner give to his equipment.
But on Wednesday night, I pulled my groin while swimming. I'm trying to think of a wussier sounding sentence. Swimming is the exercise we recommend to people who are old and stiff. People with arthritis can swim. People who are already injured can get into the pool, for Pete's sake. But there I was, doing the Breast Stroke, which is basically a resting stroke, when I snapped my legs together and felt a sharp, burning pain from my hip to my inner thigh. My first thought was, "Oh, so that's what a groin pull feels like." My next thought was, "This had better not screw with my running." And finally, the killer: "You wuss. You just pulled your groin SWIMMING!"
I leave it to you, Dear Reader, to contemplate the experience of treating your injured groin with ice packs.
When I was in high school, my friends Bobby and Dwight were always convincing me to "go out" for one team or another, with fairly consistent results. There was the basketball tryout where the coach pulled me off to the side and suggested I go out for wrestling. The night on in the throwing pit when I discovered I could not safely predict the direction I would be hurling the discus. There was the week of wrestling where I discovered the humiliation of trying to throw a young man who appeared to be fastened to the floor with lag bolts through his feet. Then there was the night I went out for swimming. I don't know how many miles Coach Troy made us swim that night: 12 or 15, I think. I remember being passed a lot by guys who had propellers for feet. I remember feeling like my legs were made of burning jello, and missing school the next day because I could not move any of my limbs. But mostly, I remember handing Coach my excuse for being absent. In perfect cursive, Mum had written, "Sore from swimming." He read it silently. Looked up at me. Read it aloud, softly, so as not to embarrass me, for at heart, he was a kind man. Then his eyes filled with a kind of tender pity, as if I had missed school so I could travel to San Francisco to try on prom dresses. Swimming was never really the same for me after that.
Still, when I joined the Y, the pool beckoned. I used to be a decent swimmer, and I wanted to keep my cross-training options open for the days when I wasn't running. Mrs P found me some trunks at the Goodwill, I picked up a pair of those weird goggles at Meijer, and off I went to the water. It soon became apparent that I had forgotten a great deal about swimming.
Where are those tree-huggers when you need them?
My endurance is pretty good for a fat old man. I can run for a couple of hours and require no medical attention at all. My first 25 meter length of the pool at the Y left me wondering if they would have to drag me up onto the deck to administer CPR, or if they could just do it while I lay on the bottom. My heart pounded so hard I could hear my pulse. I gasped for breath with my elbows hooked on the edge of the deck, hoping the people from Green Peace would find me in time. I could not believe I could get so tired so fast.
I've been practicing since then. Asking for advice. Watching YouTube. Studying the dolphin-like 10-year-olds who come to swim practice after school. I'm getting better. But today I have this little twinge in my groin and I don't want to aggravate it, so I'm giving it a rest. I've missed a training run, and I'm in a grump.
Which prompted me to think of other injuries I have sustained in my long and storied athletic career. Other than the sore knees I experienced when I first started running, I have had only one injury on the road. I strained both my Achilles tendons during my first 5K, which is its own funny story. I once strained a shoulder doing a bizarre exercise where you hold a medicine ball up over your head, then throw it down to the floor as hard as you can, catch it, and repeat. I've never had more than a blistered ring finger from lifting weights. And the only injury I sustained during my LIVESTRONGat the YMCA training was from doing a stretch where you lie on the floor and cross your leg over your body, twisting your hips into a sort of screw shape of which my sacroiliac joint did not approve. Then of course, there was the bout of Pickleball Shoulder I experienced recently. The less said about that, the better.
The upshot here is that discounting poor conditioning or male stupidity, I have never been seriously hurt while running. I give credit for that to the techniques and philosophy of Jeff Galloway. Using walk breaks early and often has enabled me to keep going without pain or injury. An important part of this approach to training is respect for recovery days. So I want to cross-train. I want to do something besides run that will keep my metabolism cooking. It's just that all these exercise things are so dangerous. Cycling, for example, wears me out almost as fast as swimming, and involves Pennsyltucky drivers, a notoriously aggressive breed.
I'd try shuffle board... but I hear it's really hard on your knees.
It’s been a while since I have taken the time to post. That usually means I’ve been goofing off, but not this week. I made it to the gym six out of the last seven days, which has been my plan all along. I’ve actually been spending a lot of time researching runner’s knee.
Sports medicine turns out to be a lot like nutrition -anybody with a keyboard and an internet account can be an expert. I have read every possible variation on how to treat this injury, from ice to heat, from compression bandages to surgery. The one that finally made the most sense to me was Dr. Lewis G. Maharam on Runner's World. (It is me, or does The Running Doc look like he could be Christopher Hitchens' sober younger brother?) Basically he says, “Look, your knee hurts because the muscles around it aren’t strong enough yet. Until you fix that, you will just keep hurting your knees. Here are some exercises that will help you make them stronger.”
I know -- just another expert. But this one made even more sense than the last one who seemed to make sense so I gave his treatment a try. I also started stretching for a good long time before and after my workout, and slathered the old Ben-gay® on quite liberally.
The aroma does not make me particularly popular on the gym floor, but the cure is working. I have decreased my range of motion on both the leg presses and extensions to focus on the quads without grinding my knee cap any further. I’m also spending a lot of time stretching the hamstrings and the groin. Stretching the quads will have to wait until the knee is better, unless someone can suggest a way to stretch your quads without bending your knee.
I’ve also put the ice pack back in the freezer. It may be that it’s done all it was going to do, or it may be that it was just making the joint stiff, I don’t know. What I do know is that knee feels better when I get home, and feels almost fine when I wake up in the morning.
I may keep the little knee strap for a while. (Pennsy's knees are - well - meatier.) It’s kind of a mental crutch and Mrs P thinks it makes me look sexy.
And that, as they say in the Visa Commercials, is priceless.
The last two days, I’ve tried splitting my workouts, upper body one day and lower body the next, with half an hour of cardio after. I don’t exactly have a program yet, but at least I have a plan.
I have snuck a peek or two at the scale this week, and it looks like the lighter workouts are going to show up at my weigh-in tomorrow. I would rather not slow down the weight loss, but I thought it made sense to slow down and get the knee back in shape. I really want to be up and running soon, but I want to be ready.
Peace, Pennsy
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. –George Bernard Shaw
( Is it me, or does GBS look like he could be SC's older drunken brother?)
