Rescued by a Small Mountain

It is in moments of weakness that I learn how to be strong.

Off the back of an all round dreadful week I achieved my longest fell run, a nine and a half mile route up and around Tal y Fan. The day started after 5 hours sleep and continued with a gloomy sense of tiredness. I eventually managed to switch my brain off to the tiredness and drove to the base of the looming "smallest mountain" in Snowdonia. It's actually not too far from my house to the parking spot but running that extra distance would be a little too much for me.

After a while I managed to get into some sort of rhythm on the upward slog. I know that the ascents are my achilles heel at the moment and the lack of proficiency in this area has prevented me from signing up for an actual race. My problem is a combination of too little fitness and too much weight. I need to lose another stone (well, two if you count my gall stone) to reach a more efficient weight on the hills. I have too bigger build to get down to the sort of super skinny elite runner type but I would like to get below 11 stone. In combination with an increase in fitness the hills should get easier.

In the meantime I decided to experiment with my uphill technique. Varying stride length, cadence and lean angle on the different gradients was almost fun. Everything I've read on the subject says that leaning forward with a shorter stride length whilst maintaining stride cadence is the correct technique. Whilst I was aware of this, I wasn't aware of how pronounced these three variables needed to be. My level of fitness requires a very short stride length and my cadence needs to drop a little but working on the technique has helped.

In spite of these musings, I was reduced to walking on most of the more violent climbs. At the top I was surprised at the weather. The weather had been mild on lower ground but at the summit the wind whipped around the rocks and sucked the warmth from my muscles. I was extremely glad of the second top and gloves I had brought with me. This emphasises the need for caution regarding the weather on these longer mountain runs.

I struggled on the initial descent. I took a bad route through bogs and thigh deep heather. For about a quarter of a mile I was reduced to a walk in order to avoid breaking a leg on unseen rocks. Once I found the path again it was all plain sailing back down to the car.

This run has certainly taken a lot out of me. My legs feel like I've raced a half marathon. I might try a few shorter fell runs before trying this distance again. I'll try decreasing the mileage and increasing the ascents. That should take the sting out of my legs. However hard, this was a very enjoyable run and a highlight of my training so far this year.

Next Sunday is the Llandudno 10 mile race. This is my first race in a while and should be fun. The race is close to home and is a flat, fast course. It will be a good chance to see where my fitness is in terms of absolute pace. I am going to taper a bit this week but nothing too serious. I'll just take everyday as it comes; run how I feel.

A Difficult Week

It has not been a good week. It has been a struggle to get out of bed in the morning. It has been a struggle not to walk out of work, never to return. It has been even more of a struggle not to just sit down, crumpled to the floor, letting the world pass by behind closed eyes. The temptation of total resignation has been hard to ignore.

I say this only to emphasise the amount of emotional brute force required to cajole me into doing any running. The workouts that I managed were painful and unpleasant. It's weeks like this where I feel as unfit and unhealthy as when I first started running. The morale is at a particularly low point.

These are the conspiring factors in this bugger of a week. My gall stone ridden stomach is number one on the list. Most of the time it's like having an annoying stitch ALL THE TIME. The only change to this are the periods of intense pain triggered by the wrong sort of food or too much of it. This means that mealtimes are a sort of Russian Roulette where the loser gets an excruciatingly sore tum. Most of the time I manage it pretty well but sometimes, tasty snacks get the better of me and I suffer the consequences.

The other buggery things are my insomnia and the ever present summer killer: hayfever. Usually, these things rear their ugly heads separately but as fate would have it, they have ganged up on me this last week.

To conclude: it's been a bad week of running and general health. The bad guys have definitely won this round. But, if I can drag myself out of this quagmire of tiredness I'll be right as rain soon enough.

P.S. Sorry about the moan but it's important to capture the bad times. It'll make the good times seem much more... gooder.

Dark & Hills

Sometimes it's just difficult to get out the door.

Yesterday, I woke up tired and by lunch time had decided that I wasn't going to go running. Content with my decision, I settled down for an afternoon of relaxation. After dinner, the guilt started to set in but I was held up by the fact that I had just eaten a big dinner. So, it was dark by the time I got out the door, 14 hours after I thought I was too tired. I need to start ignoring how I feel. All tiredness is relative.

Anyway, this was my first night run in a while and it was hauntingly beautiful. There was something hypnotic about following the circle of light made by my headlamp. I was soon in deep thought with a calm clarity which so often evades me from day to day.

My legs felt great and it was one of those rare occasions where I could have run and run all night. As I moved further away from home, the lights from all the villages down the valley looked small and lonely. I kept on imagining monsters in the dark but it was just sheep and cats on the end of shining eyes. At least I think it was. The only sign of human life was a man carrying a cat down the road in the dark. Seemed oddly suspicious. Cat burglar, maybe.

Today was going to be a tougher sort of run. I realised this as I stepped outside and a wave of heat knocked me for six. This was my first fell run in a while and the initial climb up Conwy Mountain was hard. As always, the view from the top was amazing and I had a great time on the descent. I love blasting down past the walkers at speeds I would never be able to sustain on the flat. My legs were feeling good and strong but I was suffering in the heat. Luckily, I had plenty of water with me.

I am still struggling with fitness on the ascents. Only one way to get better: keep running/walking/crawling uphill. I'll get to the top in the end. From the tiredness and lethargy of yesterday morning, this has been a wonderful weekend of running.

Interval Away

Yesterday I did my first proper interval session in absolutely ages. Usually, my quicker runs are just short tempo runs so it was nice to do some faster pace work. It was very hot but I pushed as hard as I could for quarter mile intervals over a three mile distance. I have forgoten how hard intervals are. Must do more.

Unfortunately, my right calf was left feeling a bit sore with a slightly strained muscle. It's nothing too serious but it is a warning to warm up and cool down properly with these faster session. I had to miss my easy session today because of problems at work which is annoying because I really wanted to gently stretch out the sore leg.

The nice weather continues though. Which is nice.

Some Hard Truths

Previously

I really must stop being a completely rubbish blogger. You see, I wait for an age then have to cram an entire months worth of running emotions into one post. This is hard.

Hard truths

After the health setback in February I was keen to rebuild my training mile by mile. I needed to tread a fine balance between increasing my fitness and not exhausting an already tired body. Initially, the main problem was getting my mind and body in sync. Throughout the last couple of months it has been very difficult to arrive at the start of a workout with both mind and body feeling fresh and energised. I was feeling constantly tired before and after my runs. I needed help from somewhere and it came from a quote from Tim Noakes’ book Lore of Running. The section on injuries says something like “running injuries [and ailments] are not acts of God”. Of course, this is obvious (especially for an atheist like myself) but its implications are important. It means there is always a reason or reasons for a bad run. These reasons may be difficult to identify but they are always there.

Lying to myself.

To find out my reasons I have to go back to the only real data I have: my training log. Everything else is just speculation and feelings. Since my hospitalisation I have done the following:

1. Tried to increase my weekly mileage from zero to a base level of 30.
2. Increased fell running work.
3. Increased gym work.

My symptoms have been the following:

1. Lack of motivation.
2. Constant tiredness both before and after runs.
3. A mild but persistent head cold.
4. Runners knee, especially after hill work.
5. Very tight calf muscles, especially after hill work.

Now, these symptoms are not just bad luck. As Tim Noakes would say, they are not acts of God. The reason was obvious after looking at my training log and after applying a bit of common sense. You see, I thought it would be relatively easy to build up to 30 miles a week. However, I took a good look at my training log and noticed that I had barely completed two weeks on the trot at that level for the past four months. Four bloody months!! I have consistently been getting up to 30 miles a week and then dropping back down because of injury, laziness or other commitments. The problems with my running have been going on long before my recent health issues. It has just taken up until now for me to realise this. I don’t know why I have been lying to myself. Maybe it’s just a mentality of progression without observation. Silly me. With this information it is easy to see why trying to consistently run a 30 mile week left me constantly exhausted. The key word here is consistency.

I have also been doing lots of fell and hill running. This is partly due to where I now live and partly due to a fascination with that type of running. I have discovered two things. One, fell running is really hard and two, I am absolutely rubbish at it. I had imagined that the transition between road and fell would be fairly smooth but it has simply amplified the inadequacies that already existed in my road training. I just didn’t have the consistency in my road training to suddenly switch to a harder type of running. I wanted to start taking part in some fell races this spring but I am simply not fit enough yet. All those hills have also taken their toll on my legs in aggravating my runner’s knee and leaving my calf muscles very sore. That’s not to say that I haven’t enjoyed getting up into the hills. I love the sense of freedom and adventure that it provides. The loneliness of the hills lifts my spirits and instils a sense of calm that is very hard to get anywhere else. I definitely want to do more fell running and doing fell races is still high up on my list of goals.

I have also been trying to go to the gym as much as possible to strengthen those areas of my legs which feel weak when running. So, I would do a run and feel that my quads were weak and then head straight to the gym to try and strengthen them. This would leave them sore for the next run. And so on, and so on. This was causing a downward spiral where I was just tiring out my muscles.

Rebuilding

So, on to the solutions. Firstly, I know that I have to cut back on my fell running adventures. I was doing too much too soon. For now, I have restricted myself to one fell run each week with a maximum length of six miles. I have started to do much more road running and the legs have been feeling much better for it. When I build up a CONSISTENT mileage base I will be able to slowly increase the length and frequency of my fell runs. With increased fitness and confidence I will then be able to consider doing some races. I think I have to admit that this is just going to take a few more months than I initially planned. In this instance, slow is good.
I have stopped using the gym as a cure for all my running ills. The strength work has taken a back seat to the running and as a consequence, my legs are feeling much fresher. I am simply doing core work and gently strengthening the quads to try and eliminate my runner’s knee problem. For the moment, I am trying to keep the strength work to a minimum.

Having curbed my over enthusiasm for strength and fell work, I have felt much better during runs. I have limited the number of fell runs to one a week. I have also made sure that my long runs are on flattish terrain.

Good going

The last few weeks have been good going. I’m putting in the miles and enjoying them at the same time. I was watching the London Marathon and decided, quite out of the blue to run a half marathon that afternoon. It was a beautiful day and a wonderful run. I can honestly say it was the easiest half marathon distance I have ever run. It was also the fastest in 1 hour 53 minutes. I still had plenty energy left and this has given me a huge amount of confidence in my running ability. It means that despite all the troubles of the past few months I am fitter now than I was when I ran my last half marathon in January. Progress is progress, no matter how slow.

Wake me up when we get there.

I only like to update this blog after a good or successful period of training or after a significant event in my running life. The lack of updates over the past couple of months is most definitely an indicator that all is not going well. I dislike complaining about things but in light of recent events, there really is not much else to do. Usually, I am tired during and after running but at the moment I am tired of running. Every run, no matter how short, feels like an expedition. The tiredness I feel after a run seeps through my very bones. Running has become a very important part of my life. Without it I feel useless, like a failure. When I miss a run I feel like I have betrayed one of the foundations of my quiet existence.

A lot has happened in the past month. I have moved house and have a new part of the world to run around. It is an amazing place with perfect hills and mountains for fell running. Everywhere I look I want to run. I have had some great runs. It feels great to run to the summit of what seems like an impenetrable tower of a hill. And then coming down is a blast. I might struggle to the top in a wheezing, half conscious daze of exhaustion, but descending, I am a master. In a blur of crazed speed, every sense tingles with the knowledge that even the slightest lapse of concentration will result in a large measure of uncomfortableness. And I love every second of it. However, before I could get into the swing of a new place and a new training schedule, a large spanner was placed expertly into the works.

For a couple of months I have been having random stomach aches that have slowly got worse. They were more of an annoyance than anything else. They would wake me up for a few hours at night then subside. This left me tired but nothing that I couldn’t handle. Then, out of nowhere, the pain got to excruciating levels. Now, as a runner, I consider myself to be fairly well acquainted with pain and know that I have a good tolerance for it. You learn to ignore the screaming muscles or blistered feet or rotting gut and just press on no matter how uncomfortable. But this was different. This pain cut to my very core and no position or mindset would alleviate it in the slightest. When trying to stand my mind would go blank and I would find myself, seconds later, on the floor. I have never fainted in my entire life so it is not an experience that I am familiar with. However, on the floor of my new home, the darkness was crowding my vision and there was absolutely no escape from the gut wrenching pain. Time for the hospital.

I won’t go into the lengthy and uncomfortable details but I was poked and prodded, given morphine (good stuff), poked and prodded some more and then told I had a problem with my gall bladder. Nothing life threatening but they would have to operate and whip the little fella out of there. Unfortunately, due to the severity of the attack, the whole general area was too inflamed to do it any time soon. I was eventually allowed to go home feeling sore and sorry for myself. At least I wasn’t in pain but the whole ordeal had taken its toll. During my stay at the hospital I wasn’t allowed to ingest anything until they had diagnosed what the problem was. This meant that I hadn’t eaten anything for almost 48 hours and eating was uncomfortable in the weeks afterwards. In the last couple of weeks I have done very little exercise and have lost a stone in weight. I am slowly getting back to strength but feel like I have well and truly had the stuffing knocked out of me.

I am struggling to run 20 miles a week and consequently have had to have a serious think about what my running goals are this year. Whilst the operation I need to fix me is not particularly complex, it will most probably prevent me from doing any serious running for a few weeks. In addition to this, with the NHS waiting lists, I am unlikely to get operated on until summer time. This would put it right in the period when my training would be peaking for my first ultra-marathon, the High Peak 40 Mile Challenge. With a heavy heart I have decided to postpone my ultra-marathon plans until after I have sorted out this problem. Maybe it’s just my body’s way of telling me that it’s just not ready for that sort of challenge yet. I suppose there is no need to rush into these things.

My main goal is to keep running and racing but I feel I need to start again; wipe the slate clean. I will go back to the absolute basics and build up my fitness mile by mile. The most important thing is to never stop running. I have used that age old trick of sticking to what you know and so my goal for this year will be the Snowdonia Marathon (sound familiar?). Little by little I will build back the fitness that I had and more and in doing so, become better. I will keep moving forward and eventually I’ll get where I’m needing to be got. I’ll look back and be mystified as to why I’m making all this fuss. It will just be like one of those horrible miles in a long run where you just want to sit down and sleep. But when you don’t stop you soon forget why you wanted to stop in the first place.

Running at the Mercy of Time

I am very busy with moving house at the moment so haven't had very much time to do the blog thingy recently. It also explains the tardiness of this race report. When things have settled down a bit I am going to make a conscious effort to update this more often and with a little more care and attention. I promise, it's in the New Years Resolutions. Which reminds me, Happy New Year to all. Now, I am going to be really lazy and just include the notes from my training diary as a race report. I know, I know, it's not on but it will have to do.

"... 02/01/11 - Central Lancashire New Years Half Marathon

Although it is a new year, this half marks the end of my first YEAR (!!) of running. Whilst I say goodbye to the old era I am truly excited about the new one. My training hasn't been going particularly well. My biggest shortfall is the lack of consistency in my training. This has been amplified by the Christmas holidays. Together with my lack of a healthy diet, this is something that I wish (and need) to rectify throughout this new year. I was very aware of this lack of training as I lined up on the start. I had no hopes of a good finishing time and just decided to try and enjoy the experience.

As I was unsure of my level of fitness I had to run by feel. I started off quite quickly: first 10k covered in 53 minutes. By mile seven I was struggling to keep pace and made a conscious decision to slow down. This lost me a lot of places but was necessary not to blow up. I am pleased about this. When I ran the Newark half I ran myself into the ground over the first half and had a horrible time in the second. This time I thought "take a few miles off then finish strong". It was a good decision.

From mile seven to ten I slowed down and the miles slipped by quite amiably. After this respite I concentrated on slowly increasing my pace. I pushed as hard as I could and felt proud that I managed to finish strongly. It wasn't the best race strategy (the second 10k was 4 minutes slower) but I adapted and pulled through.

Surprisingly, my legs held up pretty well. There was a slight tightness in my right hamstring and my right foot hurt a bit towards the end. In terms of how my legs felt, it was the easiest half marathon I have run. I just ran out of puff half way round. My finishing time of 1 hour and 55 minutes make it the fastest I have ever run over that distance and a resounding PB. Not a bad way to finish my year of running = I AM HAPPY.

At the end I suffered slight cramps all over my legs and was very stiff after the drive home. Over the next few days I suffered delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) in my legs and shoulders but I will be fine when that goes.

NOTE ON NUTRITION AND FLUIDS. I drank water every 2.5 miles and took a gel at the start, mile 5 and mile 9. I DON'T LIKE THE GELS: they are sticky and awkward to eat and the wrappers are annoying to dispose of on the run. In future, I will try to use sweets (Jelly Babies?) and an electrolyte drink on longer runs and races. I will experiment with DIY, homemade electrolyte drinks. Spending the extortionate amounts of money required to buy the Lucozade sport drinks gives me the distinct impression that I am being ripped off (this applies to pretty much all the other brands as well). Investigate!

Whilst I am pleased with my race, my biggest shortfall is, not surprisingly, my fitness. It is nice to get a PB but I shouldn't get carried away. The course was flat and fast and I finished way down in the field. Of course, I am only competing against myself but I do need to start afresh now with new goals and dreams; and with a new sense of determination. I need to get better! I need to be consistent! ..."

I think it only polite to thank the race organisers and marshalls for the efforts that they put into the race. It was a very good event, flat and fast and well marshalled. Personally, I would have liked a couple more water stations (there were only two) but that's because I am slow and sweat rivers. I took a bottle around with me so it was not the end of the world. I am looking forward to 2011 which hopefully will include lots of fell races and an ultra marathon. I will post an in depth blog about my running plans for the year in the next couple of weeks. Until then, I leave you with a couple of well meaning quotes.

"There's no such thing as bad weather, just soft people" - Bill Bowerman.

"I ran. I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. Then I ran some more" - Fight Club.