Change of Pace

My company's website tried something new today by publishing a blog-esque diary entry from one of our young reporters in Iraq. I think they were hoping to give their readers an inside, personal look at what it's like to be a war correspondent, but the whole thing flopped in a decidedly embarrassing way. In the interest of keeping my own job, I will refrain from linking to the piece or mentioning the writer's name, but I will say that it seems like a really poor idea for a news organization to report on the "humorous" side of war.

The correspondent writes about how she was "delighted" to be "summering in Baghdad" since she "wasn't organized enough to rent a summer house on the beach." The whole thing just seemed so silly and flippant. It's just difficult to get to worked up about the tragic loss of someone's favorite pair of Levis in a lost luggage incident, when you're all too conscious of what really has been lost by the people who actually live in the city that she is so frivilously popping in on.

I don't want to sound petty and maybe I need to just lighten up, but I just can't imagine who would have thought that this was a good idea. It only serves to portray the young woman in question as a flighty airhead when I would assume that she wants very much to be respected as a serious journalist. I understand the importance of satire, but that wasn't what this was and even M.A.S.H. knew enough to make its social commentary on Vietnam by setting its action in the slightly removed locale of Korea. Is it inappropriate to joke about the lighter side of war while it's still going on? If we were talking about John Stewart and Comedy Central, I would say of course it isn't, but in the case of a serious news organization, it just rings a little off key.

Oh, damn the torpedos. I'm curious what other people think about this. Judge for yourself.

I hate making them up, really I do. I wasn't expecting a groundbreaking performace as I went into my 5K on Saturday, so I really am quite content with the 20:47 that I ended up running. It was hot; it was humid; I haven't been running much and I haven't been doing any speedwork; I wasn't used to running with a hat on; I'd stayed up late drinking with my Russian friends the night before... all of that was relevant I suppose. But the real reason that I fishished a half a minute or so slower than I'd expected had to do with a minor 'Fear Factor' bug eating incident just before the one mile mark.

I was actually running pretty well at that point. I started the race pretty far up in the crowd and was about to hit the mile mark in a suprisingly low-effort 6:20-something. I was feeling quite good and had every intention of cranking up the effort a little bit when a gnat flew into my mouth. I guess this is sort of gross, but it had tumbled so far back onto my tongue that it just seemed easier to gulp down the extra protein rather than awkwardly gum about, trying to work it to where I could easily spit it out. Unfortunately, it was about half a swallow later that I realized that my gnat was not a gnat, but some sort of little waspy creature that proceeded to sting me repeatedly on his or her way down to my gullet! My initial reaction was one of pain as I coughed and gulped and gasped at the little stabs inside my throat. It was only a moment before the nasty creature made his blessed departure from this existance, but the next worry to spring to mind was the disconcerting specter of anaphylactic shock. Don't people die from bee stings?

In hindsight, I agree with my mother that the sensible thing would have been to stop and find the nearest provider of first aid. Better safe than sorry and all that. Instead, I slowed my pace by about 15 seconds a mile and continued along, wheezing and heaving, still convinced that my throat was definitely starting to close up. When my airway hadn't ceased to function by the two mile mark, I relaxed a little and just concentrated on running an even, comfortable pace to the finish on the Mets home plate in Shea Stadium.

Thirteen little miles until I hit the big 1,000 mark. I've done it before, but never so early in the year and never when I've actually been aware that I was doing it. I'll have to pick up the pace for that particular mile to mark the occasion. Maybe I'll even slug down a shot of double caffeinated energy gel if I'm really feeling crazy.

Mentally, I'm settling comfortably back into the running routine, but physically, my right calf is still giving me some pain. It's completely managable at this point and I'm able to massage away some of the knots in the muscle during my run, but it doesn't seem to be going away. It's so hard to know when an injury is something you should pay attention to. I know what pain feels like...this barely even qualifies as that. I've dutifully sprung for deep-tissue massages and accupuncture and I backed off from running, doing only 22 miles over three weeks...shouldn't that be enough?

Alright, that's enough obsessing about the mile count. I overshot the mark on Sunday, now I can stop talking about it...unless of course, the situation arises where my tally is approaching two thousand miles for the year.

I did indeed get some lake swimming in on Saturday and I can definitely feel that in my shoulders now. It's been so long since I've done any sort of swimming at all, it felt a little like I had to learn the whole technique over again from scratch. It's not as if I don't know how to swim, but I'm really not very good at swimming efficiently. Or rather, I'm not very good at breathing efficiently. I think my basic freestyle form is respectable, but I tend to over-exert a bit and quickly find myself out of breath. It only took one poorly executed inhale to send a dose of lake water down my windpipe, leaving me sputtering and coughing while I tread water and recovered enough to give it another try. I haven't the faintest idea how many equivalent laps I swam. I'm certain that it wasn't very many.

I did get in a nice long run on Sunday morning, my first since the marathon in June. My boyfriend and I set out with a vague plan to run a section of the Appalachian Trail, but we missed the intersection of the trail it crossed and ended up running a big, mostly paved, loop instead. We did eventually pass two additional AT crossings, but neither one seemed to present suitable terrain for running, so we stuck to the roads. At 16 miles, we called it a workout, intending to then just walk up the steep road to my Aunt's lake house. The route proved to be quite a bit longer and steeper that we'd remembered from driving it (17% Grade!), but some lovely people with a pick-up truck were nice enough to rescue us before we'd even trudged halfway up. I had given a couple of plaintive backwards glances to the approaching vehicle in hopes of being offered a ride, but when they did stop, it was just to ask us if we could possible be the same runners they'd seen on 55 earlier, at least ten miles away. We laughed and told them we were and were halfway into the truck bed before they'd actually agreed to take us up the hill.

The ride home was a godsend, the ensuing dip in the lake was heavenly and today's sore muscles are a persistent reminder that I really should be training on more hills.

The New York Times has an article today that describes a population they call obligatory exercisers: individuals who feel "obligated or compelled to continue exercising despite the risk of adverse physiologic or psychological" consequences. Yo dude, those people are my friends!

The article provides a list of warning signs for this condition, indicators that provided by Molly Kimball, a dietitian at the Ochsner Clinic Foundation (Feel free to check off any that apply to you):

1 Continuing to train even when ill or injured. Injury is certainly a good reason to rest, but is it such a bad thing to substitute low or no impact activities? And how many of you would consider a stuffed up nose to be a good reason to not exercise? Congested lungs are one thing, but a five mile run can clear up a head cold as effectively as any pill.
1 Experiencing anxiety when a workout is missed. I'll buy this one. There are plenty of other things in my life far more worthy of anxiety.
1 Constantly talking about their sport, training schedule and diet. You mean like...bloggers?
1 Neglecting other important areas of life. There are other important areas of life?
1 Justifying excessive exercise as necessary to their sport. Um, last I checked, excessive exercise is absolutely necessary to the sport of marathoning.
1 Having friends and family notice a loss of perspective. My mother has actually accused me of this one.

Some of the other symptoms of this condition, according to the article, are the same as those in athletes who overtrain. They include "anxiety, apathy, chronic fatigue, decreased appetite, depression, hostility, mental exhaustion, mood changes, changes in values and beliefs, diminished self-image, impaired concentration, emotional isolation, sore muscles and disturbed sleep". My gracious! I may have become a little bit of an obligatory exerciser at the peak of my last marathon training cycle, honestly, "sore muscles" are the only thing that struck a chord from that doomsday list.

I didn't think that I'd really been keeping up that intense a training schedule lately. I took Monday off completely and then did fairly easy 7-mile progression runs the next three days. Feeling a little worn out, I did go to sleep early last night, about 9:30, but even so was barely able to drag myself out of bed to get to work on time.

Obviously, another day off from running was in order, but my physically undemanding desk job had its own sort of fatigue to impart today. The New York City Fire Department released an encyclopedic collection of 9-11 oral histories and radio transmissions that we've had to sift through and catalogue for the broadcast tonight. It's interesting how little it takes to drag your psyche right back to four years ago. As it is, I always cringe a little on the inside when social conversations drift to the topic of "where you were" and "who did you know in the towers". So reading page after page of the graphic accounts of people who were right there in the middle of everything has left me a little on edge.

And now this...

Tomorrow: Scattered clouds with the possibility of an isolated thunderstorm developing during the afternoon. Hot and humid. High 96F. Winds SW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 30%. Dew point 74°F, Humidity 82%.

How much sleep do runners really need? Me? I'm a 8-hours-a-day kinda girl under the best of circumstances. Once I start kicking up the volume and hitting 50, 60....70 miles a week, I like to sneak in a little more than that even. The fact is though, lately, I just haven't been getting it. There's a concert that I want to go to, my friends are meeting for dinner, I've got a new boyfriend that I want to hang with, I should be updating my resume, I need to edit those photos for my cousin, I need to do the laundry...there's always something to justify pushing my bedtime later and later. At the same time I've been getting up earlier to beat the heat and get my runs in before work in the morning. Add in a little bit of stress and anxiety about my career stagnation and job interview rejections and before you know it, there's a little insomnia in the mix as well. Last night was just six hours long for me, which is okay once in a while, but it's been happening more and more frequently of late.

There's an Australian study (Griffin, S.J. and Trinder, J. (1978). Physical fitness, exercise and human sleep), that compared 45 mile/week runners with serious weight lifters and sedentary people and of the three groups, the runners fell asleep more quickly and slept the longest and deepest. That's only one study, but it does seem to be commonly accepted that exercise helps you sleep. Of course, you actually have to lie down and shut your eyes at some point to get that benefit. It's obviously much less effective when you're still wide awake in a wine bar with your college buddies at 1 am. Ironically, one of the symptoms of overtraining is insomnia, so I guess the positive effects of exercise on the sleep cycle are not without their limits.

I've just been thinking about this a lot because I'm really not running that much mileage these days, about 40 miles/week now, and I've been feeling really fatigued. The marathon was two months ago now, so I really think it has to do more with the career anxiety and the hours I've been shaving off my sleep cycle.

I read about another study, this one in the Lancet, that went more into the why of it all. The researchers figured out that even just a few days of mild sleep deprivation interfered with glucose metabolism and raised cortisol levels. That's that nasty hormone that those Cortislim info-mercials insist will make us fat, but according to these scientists, it also messes with athletic recovery. It also turns out that it's in our deepest continuous sleep that the body produces the highest levels of human growth hormone, which is such good stuff and so important to athletic performance and recovery that it's considered illegal to supplement it in Olympic sports and in most professional sports. It also is a frequent subject of the spam in my e-mail in-box every morning. And all I have to do is sleep more to make this stuff? Get me my pillow already!

It's not the same as actually watching it happening, but even following the update splits online for the World Championship women's marathon was pretty exciting. Paula led the whole damn race and finished in a pedestrian (for her) 2:20:57, more than a minute ahead of the lovely Catherine Ndereba who herself was more than a minute ahead of her nearest competition at the end, a Romanian named Constantina Tomescu who I guess I should have heard of, but haven't. Most of the race looks like it was pretty hotly contested, as least from second place back, but the last few kilometers really separated the women from the girls. The American women in the race were never really in contention for much of anything, but it was still cool to see Jill Boaz's name up there, since she waited until she was 34 to quit her job and really get serious about her training. On a technical note, does anyone know what (SB) means next to a person's finishing time?

All of this seemed a million miles away from my life, as I sit here in a woozy state, still recovering from my 22 18 15 mile run in the ungodly heat and humidity up in Westchester yesterday. It didn't help any either that I went out with a friend for a couple of drinks last night, but a girl can't be all work and no play. I still love running up in the country and plenty of other people did manage to finish the whole course twice (Go Connie!), but for whatever reasons, it was just too much for me. I really felt like I was suffering for a good chunk of the first eleven miles and simply shuffled the last four when I was by myself and didn't have to put on a brave face for anyone. There was about a mile stretch somewhere about six miles into the run where Connie and I were runnning a faster pace, stride for stride, through a rolling, mostly downhill stretch through the woods and it was really cool to feel so in synch with another runner, listening to the perfectly sychronized beat of our footsteps on the graveled path. That was easily the most fun I had on the run yesterday. The rest of it was just brutal.

So did I get a cold because I wasn't sleeping enough, or was I exhausted because I was getting a cold? Guess I'll never know. At any rate, I'm sitting here at work, sipping my chicken barley soup, feeling alternately freezing cold or uncomfortably flushed, dreading the 5-mile Club Championship race that I'm meant to be toeing the line for at 8AM tomorrow. To make the experience even more relaxing and pleasant, I need to keep right on running after I cross the finish line in order to get home, showered and back out the door in order to make a 12:15 flight to Richmond for a baby shower. If it wasn't a team points race, I really think I wouldn't bother, but I do try and be a good team player, so I will be there. Besides, it's only a head cold and I'd feel like a wimp if I bagged it.

I suppose it could have been worse. Of course, it certainly could have been worse. I ended up with a time of 34:03 for the 5 miles on Saturday, almost a minute slower than last year, but really not too bad for being sick and tired. Alison still managed to snap this decent photo of me in action during the race. She was using the same camera that I have, but her mongo 80-200mm telephoto has given me a serious case of lens envy. Her photos from the race are up on fast-women.com. Jack Brennan from the Taconic Track Club took a bunch of nice photos at the women's race as well and those are here. Westchester Track Club's Joe Golden's photos(another D70 user!) have been uploaded at that link as well now.

The whole team points concept in New York is kind of a weird thing though. I guess in theory, it's supposed to be a chance for local runners to compete against just each other. Ironically, it's actually the non-team points races that tend to draw exclusively local runners. Whenever there's a big team points race, all sorts of new faces show up. It's fun to see world-class level talent in Central Park, but when it's not clear if those people even live in the New York area, it's kind of silly to make a big deal about it being a local competition. There's a lot of griping about this one the NYC running message boards and people really do get pretty bitter about it. Even my own team, which seems to take some measure of pride in the fact that they don't recruit high-level foreign runners in order to win, is happy to include team members who have moved away from New York who want to come "home" to run these races. Personally, I'm not all that concerned about it one way or another. I fail to understand why teams go to such lengths to come out on top for the year, since the prize money isn't even very substantial. Still, it does seem silly to call the competition local when not all of it is.

And last...congrats to D. (who usually posts his comments anonymously) for getting what I believe was a PR on Saturday. And with a cracked rib at that! Now, it's time for me to go about the business of getting healthy again by going back to bed.

I don't have my trusty Magic-8 Ball handy at the moment, but I'm pretty sure that's what it would say if I asked it about this little race that I'm registered in November. It was a little bit overambitious of me to plan two marathons this year with only about four and a half months between the two, but way back in May when I had to sign up for New York, I had no way of knowing if I'd even stay injury-free through Grandma's in June.

I seem to be recovering quite well from my little sinus infection/upper respiratory thing that struck me down before the Club Champs race, but I still don't feel anywhere near 100%. I'm not even really sure what to attribute my general running malaise to...lack of sleep, not eating enough, high humidity...but my gut tells me that I'm just not quite recovered yet from the marathon. So it seems a little silly to rush right into the next one with any expectations of getting under that three-hour mark. And if I'm not going to get under the three-hour mark, is it even worth the effort at this point?

Phrasing it that way actually makes my decision a much easier one. I know that I'm not interested in running a 3:01+ marathon. That's not enough for me anymore. So, eleven weeks out from New York, only running a little over 40 miles a week and not even one 20-miler under my belt yet...it's time to start looking a little further out.

What do people think about Disney? I can start up with a fairly aggressive 18-week training plan next month, by which time I'll have about six weeks of a 40-mile base.

Early winter in New York isn't too bad for training purposes weather-wise and the Disney course is a flat one. Those are the pros. The biggest cons would be the fact that not even counting travel expenses, the race costs $100 to enter and that it's a completely commercialized event that revolves around a scary giant mouse. I'm going to have to make up my mind soon though, because as of today, the Disney website warns that the race is already 85% full.

Last spring was a revelation for me as I learned the art of slowing down to speed up. I dutifully strapped on my heart rate monitor every morning and forced myself to keep to a slow-motion shuffle around and around the bridle path. I made new friends with good-natured, mid-pack runners who taught me to relax and take it easy on long, fun, sociable runs around the park. I started to really ramp up my mileage, bewildered, but certainly happy that all that running didn't seem to be taking nearly the wear and tear on my body that it had in the past. I snuck in some intervals and mile repeats here and there and even the occasional quarter mile workout, but mostly it was all about not pushing myself and astonishingly, at least to me, the discipline of it all actually made me faster. It felt as if I'd finally figured out some ancient training secret that had somehow eluded me for my entire two-decade running career up to that point.

And then I managed to completely forget all of it.

With all my griping about being so slow and sore yesterday, I totally forgot about the pace I was running at this point in my training cycle last time around. And how good it felt and well it worked for me! So this morning I hit the road running exactly the same pace as I did yesterday, but this time deliberately. I logged my seven miles for the day and barely broke a sweat, though I did have to repeatedly remind myself to slooow dooowwnn. The run took quite a few minutes more than the hour I had allotted in the schedule, but it felt good. The twinges of pain from my fragile feeling legs faded to the background and for once I felt refreshed rather than exhausted when it was over. I did end up being half an hour late for work, but disgruntled employee that I am, it seemed an acceptable trade-off.

Yuck, yuck, yuck. I ran the Manhattan Half on Sunday morning and finished it almost exactly one minute per mile slower than I did the half in Queens back in May. It is terribly demoralizing to hit the eleven mile mark and realize that gosh, during my last half marathon I was done by this point! Somewhere long before the one-mile mark I realized that this was not going to be a banner performance for me. I'd been looking forward to running with my sweetie for his first NYC road race, but I had to warn him that it just might not happen. I decided right then that I wasn't going to finish the entire course, but I'd just try to keep up a steady 7:30 pace for as long as was sane and just be happy with that. I decided to drop out for real just before mile 8 (you can see the strain there in my splits), but when my power gel shot kicked in a mile later and I was actually starting to feel okay, I thought I might as well stay the course.

7:20..7:12..6:59..7:15..7:37..7:27..7:45..7:54..7:38..7:37..7:34..7:11..7:20..:47

But enough with the whining. On the plus side, the cooler temperatures (low 70's) and light rain offset the thick humid air a bit and while my legs and body felt like lead, the race wasn't nearly as torturous as it has been in years past. Although it wasn't a team points race, the xxx women finished in third place and I was pretty psyched to see that I scored as the fifth runner for my team. My splits were damn even and I shouldn't be dismissive of the fact that, as awful as I felt, I ran the same exact time for both my first and last miles. At the time, it hurt like a fast race, but because it wasn't one, I actually feel relatively intact today. Only four miles this morning, and slow ones at that, but that's fine for now. It's all part of my master plan...muah ha haaa