Running Log

I keep a consistent training log. It's hand written and goes back to September of 2012 in the same book.  I am starting a new book up with the new year... though I cannot find a medium sized graph paper moleskin notebook anywhere in Ashland.... the search continues!

My log was about as exciting and enjoyable to write/read as my running had been through November. So, not very. I have thought about not logging anything for a few weeks or a month at a time just to relieve myself of the task, maybe of some residual stress associated with performing, documenting and seeing my running take shape in such a serious/set and written form. It sometimes feels like if I didn't write it down, it could be free to be different or better in some mysterious intangible way. But it comes back to wanting to eventually total things up and see what my year quantified up looks like in terms of mileage, time, or the always entertaining page flipping week to week for quick glances at workouts, long runs, and even pretty blank sections and reminisce about the good, bad, and indifferent times.

There had been a lot more indifferent times in 2014 than what is normal for a year in my running log. Now, this is only a running log for me so its not a diary or a journal. Its a written account of my training, primarily for training purposes and to make adjustments in the future. If it contained more personal information about my life maybe I'd find myself flipping back and seeing very clear reasons I felt so indifferent about training, or maybe not. Either way, I'm glad to say that in the last month+ things have begun to swing in the other direction. Things have become more enjoyable and more successful. I have a stronger, more defined motivation and now that I am a month or so into the training schedule for track season I can feel myself becoming much more balanced and strong physically as well which is something I lacked for much of the past year.

I am not often inspired or determined to stick to a new routine or set out specific resolutions when the new year hits. This year is no different in that way. I find that I do enough introspection on a normal basis to put efforts in place that will help change things for the better anytime I recognize something that could use a tune up. This happens on a small scale probably daily, but weekly sounds more believable so I'll go with that. This doesn't usually leave me with much that I feel needs hard outlining when Jan 1st comes around. One of the major things that I feel is different this year is a light. A light at the end of the tunnel. Its far but I can catch a glimpse of it. It is far off but it tastes like graduation. Its about an entire year away and I know it isn't always the great change everyone hopes it would of been once it happens but I'll see how that experience plays out when I get there.

In the mean time, I am motivated right now. I get restless doing the same things for too many sequential months. (Thats why my real full resume that would list all the jobs I have actually had would be 2-4 pages long depending on job task description lengths.) Having this light helps drive me. Knowing that having a dedicated coach and team and task at hand is one of few ways to get the best out of myself as a runner, I can commit and be motivated to achieve and push.

My running log is totaled for 2014. Its kind of awful. But I know it could be oh so much worse. I am excited to be starting 2015 how and where I am. I am (mostly) perfectly healthy and ready to set out and get things accomplished. When desire and action meet, peace can be achieved in my mind. Desire and action are nowhere near always aligned and thats for many reasons, but it feels balanced for now. So I will capitalize on progress and enjoy the process 'till the cows come home.

2014 totals:

First 6 months mileage: 803
Issues: Sick/Sick/Backpacking 2 months

Second 6 months mileage: 626
Issues: Hurt Foot/Crashed Bicycle/ Hurt Foot for a while

2014 mileage: 1429
Positives: Trained on a Bike a lot/Learned about life beyond running.

Ashland & Running Ratio

I arrived in Ashland late August and promptly put in a 10 mile running week! Buuut if you count my new elliptical routine and some biking I had logged almost 6 hours of quality cardio work. Having access to a gym has been great. As I've mentioned, I had a bike accident this summer and the danger factor of biking combined with the difficulty of getting in what feels like really good quality workouts is tough. So I was excited to be able to use an elliptical. Hard to believe? Well I'm serious, and its been fun. In the last few weeks I have logged 2-3 hours of great elliptical time per week in addition to running 30-ish miles. My foot hasn't hurt on the elliptical but I finally feel like I can get completely safe and great work in without any issues i.e: Bad weather, impact on foot, potential of crashing a bike, stopping at traffic lights etc. I have been alternating different "workouts" on the elliptical and its been enjoyable and reassuring for my catching up on fitness to get ready to race.

Fairly unrelated but this is a photo Carly took of some rock climb cross training  I got in with Mr. Wet Willy Hoffman at Emigrant Lake in Ashland recently. He taught me how to lead climb, it was great practice and a lot of fun.

I met with my athletic trainer upon getting to Ashland and after talking about my injury issues I got 3 options:

1. Stop running altogether
2. Just start running more on it
3. See a specialist

I wish I had seen a specialist over a month earlier but I think the way I was handling training was probably pretty close to what would have been prescribed to me. Ok lets be honest, I would have been given a much much more conservative approach and could just about guarantee a loss of this season of XC completely. My main worry was if running on it would elongate my recovery time or not. I had no way of knowing this. I was worried it was a stress fracture and I was balancing on a not broken foot / playing with the possibility of breaking it. But enough time had gone by with no or very little running that even if that was the case it could have healed enough to bring running in appropriately anyway. SO with all these thoughts and finally talking with my coach and following his advice, we went with running 5 days in the next week. About 30-40 minutes easy for each run, that was it. This was the decisive change that finally tipped my running ratio in the favor of actual running instead of mostly cross training.

The 5 days went well, still with some irritation but nothing worse or very bad. So the next week was 6 days and a longer run up to 50 minutes. That week went fine too, and I started feeling better about it all and running was feeling good, and fun. It was relieving to be able to really get runs in at all.

That brings us to this week. I'll be running 6 days again and ran a long run on Sunday of 65 minutes. I did one workout which was a sort of 15 minute tempo and I was (barely) approved to run our race today, Friday 9/18/14 in Portland. Obviously I am not going to blow the doors off in the race this evening but I feel good about it considering all things. Its a unique opportunity. There is no pressure other than what I place on myself (which I'm trying to manage as I type this). We still have 2 hours before lunch and we don't race until 5pm. I am wearing some fairly cushy trainers in the race to ensure I don't hurt my foot, and I am unsure about how turning sharply at high speeds will feel but I will figure all that out later today. I'm excited to be racing I just wish I was in better physical condition. But that is what I am working on daily.

I have space to add 1 more, hmmmmm...

A recent addition in my section of Carly and my "Goals" whiteboard is "do something extra everyday". What I mean by this is to do something daily that is beyond the normal stuff to help me reach my running goals. Some examples so far are, adding an ice bath when I normally wouldn't have. Icing my foot while watching a movie, and going through a thorough and long stretch routine. I went on a bike ride and explored parts of Ashland that I wasn't familiar with and I even went on a walk, just to loosen up from a long and tough day of Netflix-ing.

School still hasn't started yet and the job I've secured starts when school starts so I have had a lot of free time. I managed to get a part-time gig a few days a week though...... holding a sign on the corner for a mattress & appliance store. It hasn't been too bad, except the day I was out there 6 hours in the middle of the day. At least I had Carly's ipod, the only issue was it only had 40 minutes of music on it. It mostly consisted of her weird mix of really slow acoustic music and a few top 40 radio type songs. I just stood silently for an hour or more at one point.

See the post set on my foot? Apparently I could get a hefty fine for setting that on the ground, so foot it is!

Coaching in Mammoth Lakes & August Fitness

I haven't written here in about 2 months so heres the skinny:

I spent a mid August week in Mammoth Lakes coaching and hanging out with my old high school and our small but awesome crew of coaches plus some parents that came along. I unfortunately couldn't run too much due to the same foot issues I've had most of the summer but managed to get in some of the teams short double runs and I biked everything else with them. It turned out to be a low volume week of biking too though because I wasn't getting in all the commute biking that I was doing back home, but I didn't mind too much.
I had been wondering how volume increases on a bike may effect me weeks/a month or more later if I did an awful lot (for me). So having this lower week was kind of comforting. By the way, a big week of biking for me was/is 10 hours so take that however you wish but it seemed appropriately high for me given my inexperience with serious cross training for running.

Coach Todo, Clemons and Myself at the bottom of Mammoth Rock trail waiting for any stragglers.

Even though I only ran about 10 miles in the 5 days in ML, I was still very satisfied with the trip. I added up the weeks I've spent training in Mammoth and its now over 4 months, including a summer of 2 months and another of 1 month. Add in various 1 week trips and I have enjoyed and come to love this mountain town quite a bit. During this trip, I had a ton of fun and shared a cabin with Steve (a team parent) and a great group of guys. I tried to impart some wisdom with the little time I had left with these guys, as I knew I'd be heading north for Oregon at the end of the next week.
It's odd coaching only for the summer as I have for the last couple seasons. Its been a blast but I don't get to see all the work unfold through seeing them race and helping them deal with nerves and strategy and all the stuff coaches do. I'm really only there for 6 weeks in summer, whereas the summer training we do will help keep them improving from July all the way to the next June. I do keep up on some results from the season and get updates though. Honestly I am pretty busy training/competing and life-ing on my own anyway so its cool to see how things progress both for them and myself.

Some of the team at Mammoth Creek park. Either pre or post workout and ice bath. Weather was great, it was a beautiful week. Photo by Mama Clemons.

We went bowling! Around my waist is Lucan, a boy presumably raised by squirrels that we found running around the trails and streets of Mammoth(okay he belongs to the Clemons' and we brought him with us).  He beat me in the first game but I pulled through with a PR performance in game 2 for the W. Photo by Mama Clemons

Training and Fitness:
Through late August, I was incredibly unsure what to do in training. To run on the foot a little, not at all, or start to slowly bring running back in completely. I had a x-ray on my foot (and knee just to check from the bicycle incident) and the doc said there was nothing. After talking more, and with more people I realized that I should have continued to a specialist who could have diagnosed me better.... or at all. I was told by the doc that I had metatarsalgia which is just inflammation/irritation in the ball of the foot. So she just said to try and not run for 2 weeks then bring running back in slowly.
I told her I had done that twice already. To clarify... On two separate occasions I didn't run at all for 2 weeks then started bringing in running only to find the same foot irritations. So she just kind of got me out of the room and on my way and I kept biking with minimal running. Due to not running but still hoping to compete in the XC season, from early July onward I kept up with biking pretty seriously. For about 6 weeks I biked as little as 4 and as much as 11 hours per week. This was all what I called "quality" biking. If I biked to work and it took 45 minutes, I'd knock a few minutes off that for my training log if there was considerable coasting time because that isn't really "quality". This was how I was logging it anyway.

It was nearly impossible to prove but I felt fit. Despite not running more than 10 miles a week for about 2 months, I felt like if I HAD to, I could run a decent 5k considering all things. This was encouraging-which was great because if I didn't feel good about that, I wouldn't have much else to be happy about fitness-wise. It was hope. Hope that when the time came, I could begin transitioning my biking fitness into usable running fitness and put a season of XC together.

The coming weeks would entail making the move back to Ashland OR, meeting up with my team and coach and seeing where things went from there. Check back for the next update on being in Ashland and training...

Spoiler alert: I ran 30+ miles the week of 9/7/14!

Injured & Mt Baldy

I have been incredibly fortunate enough to very rarely have any form of injury keep me from consistent training. That is in part by design but in no way will I claim its solely due to smart training or "taking care" of my body by rolling out, etc. I believe its merely a matter of body composition, training habits, mental head-space (belief in my body's strength and durability), nutrition and lalala.

Well... I am injured and have missed a sizable chunk of training. I came back from essentially 2 months off of running due to a backpacking trip and admittingly was not training smart at all upon my return. Heres a breakdown of my initial mistakes:

5k race
+Running up & down a mountain (saddleback, 16 miles)
+Reintroducing barefoot running with very poor timing
(all within 3 days)
= Foot pain.

The foot pain was mild but it was there whenever I ran, so I replaced some running with bicycling.
It was working.

Then I crashed the bicycle into a chain that was locked across a trail I always hopped on to ride to work. It was totally stupid of me. I rode straight into a stationary object, but this was an un-gated and un-lockable passageway so I never had thought to be particularly careful when going through. But I had a routine and one day that routine's knee was hyper-extended and dangling painfully from a chain locked between two posts.

So my left knee took the brunt of the force and right when it happened, I really thought something was broken or my knee was literally bent backwards. Luckily that wasn't the case. But it definitely hurt.
Over the next few days I limped pretty badly but wasn't in much pain unless I straightened my leg too much so I went to work anyway. Working on my feet and walking around helped keep my muscles from becoming extremely tight and immobile. Over a few days I got a lot of mobility back which I thought was really encouraging because I was fairly clueless as to how long term this injury would be. Those few days became a week and I no longer was seeing further improvement. During the second week of no running or cross training and doing only some icing (and pull-ups), I could walk without pain and ran for 3 minutes after a 5 minute elliptical warm up at a gym that I kind of snuck into :)

Those 3 minutes turned to a 9 minute mile and a couple days later I was hiking up Mt Baldy.

View down a ski-slope section Andrew and Mark took on the way up. That's one way to do it!

 I had a small group planning to run Mt Baldy on this particular weekend and I knew I wouldn't be able to do it once the crash happened, but it turned out that I could walk with no pain at all and I could run up to 15 minutes without much discomfort so I figured I'd just walk most of it. I'm very glad I did it, it was awesome but certainly took a bit longer than the time in 2011 when I raced (pretty decently I might add) up it. I ended up hiking (and running parts) up most of the way with Cris and Carmille. Cris is getting ready for Angeles Crest 100 in a few weeks and I had a blast talking ultra with him and hearing his stories. Carmille and I go back a little farther so I spent most of the time just harassing her and cracking jokes-until will got to 9k or so and the conversation and pace slowed down!

It was a lot of fun and cool to get all this in and be home by about noon. I often forget how close-by awesome places are and I know I need to do a better job getting out to see them. The way down was super technical and consisted of some running but a lot of hiking too. My foot began to bother me so I slowed a bit and mostly walked the last 30 minutes or more. Hoka One One kept the foot pain away for a while but descending 3 or 4 thousand feet in a relatively short time and keeping nagging foot pain out may be too much to ask for even from the space shoes themselves.

The group: Cris, Mark, Myself, "Muscle" Mark, Andrew, Carmille at the top!

The Frustration:
The foot pain that was the beginning of all of this, isn't gone. I'd like to think after the 2 weeks of no impact the minor issue going on in the foot might magically disappear. NOPE. So now I am dealing with what seems like a very slow final healing process for my knee and the addition of a fairly constant and unknown ball-of-foot pain upon applying pressure (sometimes)......

I will say that I honestly am handling this pretty well (in terms of not getting the crazies and not giving the not-working-out Irritable Eye to whoever I may run into) but don't let my calm and collected countenance fool you--- this is really frustrating and a huge bummer.

I have absolutely learned several lessons from this already, so here are a couple quick ones if you haven't already gathered a list from reading all of the above.

-Don't run races (especially at race effort) when you're not in shape for it.
-Don't run races like the above in flats that are 7 years old that you found in a bin in the garage.
-Don't run up and down a mountain the day after running the above race in the above flats.
-Don't run a half hour barefoot on grass the day after running up and down a mountain the day after running the above race in the above flats.
-Don't crash your bike.
-Commute biking is great for the world and you, but don't try and get going fast enough to get some solid cardio in when you are in a place that may put a sneaky chain across a otherwise always-open passageway.
-Hiking can actually be fun.
-Turmeric is a natural anti-inflammatory, but tastes pretty bad when you put way way too much into anything.

Patience

Is patience ever a name? Like a kids first name.. like Constance, or Grace, or Hope---ok Hope is always the middle name. It seems like patience falls in line with all those other not-actual-name words and classy definitions enough that people would start naming their offspring after it. Maybe not? I don't know.

 Exercising my patience muscles for an hour while trying to hitchhike in Puerto Natales, Chile

I've always envisioned myself pretty patient, but then I started to get to know myself better and found that it really depends on the situation and the circumstances. I probably have a fairly typical patience threshold in general but I realized something about patience recently. You're always practicing having it. Well, those of us that believe we are trying to improve ourselves are always practicing it. Its never polite to have an outburst because you're done waiting around for some seemingly useless cause, but you try and try to be patient and nice because that is how you keep friends and not alienate people around you, right? I don't know.

I'm having trouble being patient with my running. I just want to be fit ("fit" is definitely a completely relative term)again. I am finding myself wishing the same thing everyone wishes for, whether secretly or out loud---to be fit without having to wait around through all the building phases of hard-work and sacrifices and time gone by.
I enjoy running, so even though I'm not as graceful as I'd like to be yet, it's okay. It's not like I am training to be a champion weight lifter, I don't think that would be fun, so it would be a huge bummer to be doing that all the time. I am happy to be healthy and running, and I try to exude gratitude for my health and ability to do what I love as much as I do. But this phase of practicing patience is HARD! It's not AS fun as training while you're already pretty fit. The difference is like fine tuning your guitar after a little strumming and before you go out on stage Versus hurriedly putting strings on your guitar while walking out on stage only to have to delay the show and face the shining lights while you try and get the strings to at least look correct, despite what they may sound like(the show must go on!).

I may be exaggerating. How can I complain about being perfectly healthy and training with no major necessity to be in really-good-shape for another 10 weeks? Not to mention my humongous wealth of help I have along the way from my family, friends, bosses, co-workers, teammates and competitors alike. My personal lesson about patience morphed into a miniature epiphany that is more about gratitude, thanks, and personal satisfaction.

I don't think I have anything cooler sounding to say than that last bit so please just pretend this sentence isn't here and reread the little section above before you exit out of the page. Thanks :)

The Process of Becoming Fit again

While traveling in Latin America some bad stuff happened early on that made me a bit nervous to explore new, exciting, and potentially lethal places. Combine that with then arriving in Central America where it was quite humid, sunny, and hot, I only ran a few times within a solid 2 months. We weren't by any means inactive. We hiked, lugged around big backpacks, walked, went volcano boarding and all sorts of stuff but not much running. Upon getting home to southern CA, I quantified my lack of fitness by promptly running a 5k at race effort. 18:00.

Burning some extra calories on our 4 night hike of the "W" circuit in Torres Del Paine. Patagonia, in the Chilean Andes 

Normally, it would have taken me over 2 minutes less to cover the distance. But thats not normal anymore. In the past 3 years (maybe more), I have not taken much time off. At least not all at the same time day after day, so I was never all too far off from "race shape". I now can understand better what its like for friends of mine who have seriously slowed down their running to all of a sudden try and run like they used to-FAST. To be fit is to be able to run fast and feel good (I mean, basically). Coming back to daily training and not being able to run what for years has been my "easy, whatever, daily run, nice" pace is a bummer. It's not that I don't understand my current fitness, I do. But my body hasn't gotten the idea yet. I take off for a run and my body wants to start cruising at a decent clip but it reminds me with these weird feelings that it can't do it so well right now, I call these feelings pain. In various places and types. Leg pain, head pain, chest pain, confidence pain, pride pain, and ego pain (this ones the worst).

I've been back less than 2 weeks and I have to remind myself on a daily basis to cool off and not try to do an easy 80 minute run at 7 minute pace. I am having to hold back and hold back so that I return to fitness properly and will be able to build off of it. But it sucks. I want to jump right to 40 miles per week then 55 then 60 then cruise around thinking I'm cool and hold more than that all summer but thats freaking stupid. I am happy that I know its stupid, but my plans for the end of summer and fall don't allow enough time to reeeaally properly get fit. So I think I'll compromise. Maybe I will do it right and run 40 minutes until its really easy then 60, then some 70s and finally start to mix it all up like a real collegiate runner, but I don't now yet.

Sometime before the snow came in Ashland OR, maybe November '13. Post warm up, pre interval workout of some kind. 

I've found that my quarter life crisis (My life at age 25[its not actually a crisis]) has brought many things into the forefront of my mind even more than usual. One great example of this was my decision to skip a track season/term of college to go backpacking for 2 months with my lovely girlfriend. I hope that I will train as smart as I know how to train, but I'm not worried. I know that if I make sacrifices such as running 80 minutes at 7 minute pace far too early because I'm having too much fun running with some friends or experiencing the trail, they will be worth it. It may sound naive, but it feels more like a priority change. One for the better. Bearing confidence in changes untested is such a reviving sensation. I think it comes with age, failures and successes. Experience is paramount, but it has to be translated into terms that will affect change in future decisions and situations.
Sometimes I feel like I don't write in english. If I lost you somewhere in there, just imagine I was mixing up Spanish, English, Creole, and 2 other indigenous caribbean Nicaraguan languages. I heard people speaking like that, it was nuts! Oh, and they had what sounded like a Jamaican accent on top of it all!

Old Goats 50 (K) Race Report

I recieved an email from the race director the day before the race. It said the forest service couldnt clear the main divide well enough to okay its use for the race. This meant the 50 mile race went to a backup course which included one 11 mile loop followed by two 20 mile loops. This presented the unique opportunity to run a perfect 50k distance and call it a day right there. I jumped at this chance and felt incredibly more relaxed going into the race with this new change. I had run a 29 mile training run 10 days earlier, up and down mount Ashland, and it went pretty well so my confidence in just finishing was very high. I let go of many more concrete performance goals once I beared the full weight of the toll the motorcycle ride took on me mentally and worse, physically.

I slept pretty poorly the night before the race, due to a combination of pre-race nerves and leftover soreness. I got up early {3:40am} to get to my beloved bluejay race morning. This would make close to a dozen races at bluejay. I parked and got my bib and took care of final gel and drop bag stuff between bathroom stops before the start. And we were off.
I knew that if I felt fine, I should be near the front of the group considering I was running a mere 50k compared to the people I was running near that had 50 miles to go. I was in the top 10 for a half hour, then I started dry heaving. I had run a lot of these trails before in Big Baz´s Winter Trail Run Series so I was comfortable with all the tight turns and bad footing, but my minor nausea was back. This was especially odd because I typically have an iron gut and don´t get bothered by much. This condition kept me from my practiced fueling of 1 gel every 40 minutes and 1 salt tab every hour. I couldn´t get my first gel down until the end of my 11 mile loop at about and hour and a half. This was very bad news for the rest of the race.

I knew what was happening the whole time, that this energy debt would be no fun at all, but I literally could do nothing about it. So I just kept running fairly conservatively on a heavy, empty, and twisted stomach. I made progress and hoped things would get better so I could hammer for 2 hours on lightly used legs to close out in a halfway decent time. This did not formulate. I finally got to the 18 mile aid station where my friend Jay was volunteering and got some more wáter and was happy to hear the cheers and see a familiar face. The next 4 miles were largely downhill but somehow the most difficult yet. This second wind hope I had was crumbling. I made it to the Candy store aid station and refilled and downed my 10 oz handheld a couple times, making me realize I hadn´t been drinking enough along with my not eating much. I saw some pinapple and shoved it down before I could think of it. It helped! I had been running near a fellow competitor Keshav for a while and we were helpìng to push eachother. He encouraged me to get out of the station and start moving, I chased him down somehow within a minute or two after the Candy store at approx. 22 miles. We went back and forth a couple times and I began having trouble just continuing to run from a serious bonk. I eventually decided I would not stop running until I got to my friend Jay at the next aid station which would mark about 25 miles. I did it. I ate some lil cutie slices as I still couldn´t handle gels for some reason. Some electrolite mix and wáter chugged down before I headed out, and these next 4 miles were about as slow as I have ever run in my life. I often questioned if I could see myself, if I would consider what I was doing running anymore. I made it to bluejay and somehow managed probably a sub 8 last mile, which I hadn´t done in the previous couple of hours.

5 hours and 29 minutes after I started, I finished and apparently won the 50k officially. To be eligible for awards, you had to claim which distance you were racing before the race started whether it was 50k or 50 mile. I was not the first person to finish 50k but I was the first person who had planned on only 50k, and finished. There were probably 10 people to actually cross through before me, but they either continued to run a full 50 miles, or decided to call it a day after their 50k, thus officially not being eligible for an award. Despite all that, I was just glad to be done.


I knew I was going into a 50 mile race without the time to prepare, but I went for it anyway. This takes a combination or courage and stupidity, I know. I am dissappointed in my performance mostly because had my health been fine, my body could have run this 50k a solid hour faster. But of course talk is cheap and its imposible to know.
The biggest benefit from taking over eager risks like these is the speed of the learning curve, verus doing it a smarter or more conservative way. I feel like what I learned overall packs quite a punch for the tie spent learning it. Its really intiguing to me knowing how much more is so out of your own control when lining up for a race that is a mínimum of 4ish hours. It is hardly comparable versus a 10k or 5k or 1500m. The attitude cannot be the same. Creativity becomes necessary, and adaptablility becomes crucial.

I don´t know what my future racing looks like right now, but I will be back training seriously in june and see where that takes me!


PS:  Again, I am typing all this in Valparaíso, Chile on a hostel computer. This means the computer and keyboard and online settings are in a limbo between spanish, english, and whatever languages travelers set them to. So please excuse misspelled words and weird punctuation, if any at all.