citizen of the planet

In continuing with the whole communication thing I’ve had going over the past while, today I gave a small speech to a 5K clinic at my usual Running Room.  About a month or two ago, the guy currently running the clinic asked me if I was available to give a talk.  See, he was once part of my half marathon clinic back when I was coaching it.  I guess I left a good impression on him if he actually sought me out.  In the past, I’ve given talks on the topic of motivation before.  That topic felt easy, if only because the easiest way for me to cover that topic was just to give an outline of my running history, which I think is fairly inspirational.  It’s not like I’ve had to overcome tough obstacles like cancer or blindness, but the whole averageness of my journey makes me easy to relate to.  At least, that’s how I’d like to think about it.  So yeah, that’s what I’m used to talking about.  Instead though, I was asked to give the talk on goal setting.

Whaaaaa?

I’ve seen this talk given before by a few people.  It’s a fairly straightforward topic.  There are a lot of basic ideas to convey.  For my speech, since I was somewhat comfortable talking about my journey, I decided to talk about goal setting as seen through my experiences.  I brought in a few of my medals to help carry the ideas along.  I actually spent some time jotting down points that I should cover.  Each talking point had a story attached.  In my head, the talk was going to go over wonderfully.  Truthfully, I should have practiced, but there was just no time.  I figured that if I talked from the heart that I’d be able to wing it.

Well…

I’m sure if I asked people that I knew that saw the speech, they’d probably tell me that it was just fine.  I got that much from one of the staff that knows me.  Personally, I kind of feel like I was rambling and scatter-brained.  I’m not sure anyone came out with a better idea of how to set goals.  Perhaps I’m being far too hard on myself (as usual).  I’m sure there have been worse speakers out there.  I’m sure there have been better ones.  I wonder how many of the better ones are actual speakers though.

I think this is just another example of just how I need to lighten up and not apply so much pressure to myself to perform perfectly every single time.  I didn’t kill anyone, and I didn’t make a horrible fool of myself.  I did what I could do.  Time to move on.

You know, ever since the race on Saturday I’ve been laying off the running  Granted: that was less than a week ago.  Still, I’ve been attempting to take it easy and recover.  Prior to that, my running schedule has been a little bit off as well.  I haven’t been getting in all of my runs as required.  I mean, the Sunday runs have been manageable, but lately the weekday runs have been killing me.  Actually, it’s not so much the runs that have been killing me, but really it’s the act of scrambling up north after work on time to catch up with the rest of the group.  There is a lot in terms of planning ahead that needs to be done just to get there on time.  Sometimes I have to ask myself whether it’s all worth it.  Is it worth it to expend so much energy?  Is it worth it to bring myself to points where exhaustion is just steps away?  Those are some serious questions I’ve had to ask myself, for sure.  Thing is, all it takes is a good run to answer all of those questions.  Yes, it’s worth the effort.  If I train properly, I won’t hit exhaustion.  There’s something about running that boosts endorphins.  My God, yes, yes, yes, running is an awesome activity.  I really just need to be more fair to myself.  If I’m ridiculously tired, I should not put so much pressure on myself for not performing.  It’s the body’s way of warning me that I need to take my foot off the gas pedal.  There’s no point in driving myself into the ground, right?  Anyway, I guess that’s all I needed: I just needed to refocus.

I’m sitting on the couch, watching TV with my laptop beside me.  There’s a bottle of Mill St. Organic beer sitting on the coffee table in front of me.  I can’t help but focus on how my quads are still a bit sore.  And why wouldn’t they be sore?  I really put in a crazy amount of effort into last night’s race.  Overall, I’m quite proud.  I was expecting to just go slowly and treat it like another Sunday training run, but somewhere along the way I decided to take things a bit seriously and go for it.  This is my race report.  More after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

I survived, somehow!  I really put a lot of effort into it!  I got a snazzy medal!

Seriously, I want to spill everything out into this entry, but I’m just so tired.  Report will follow tomorrow.  Meanwhile, rest…lounging…sleeping.  Yeah.

And somehow it came to be that Saturday is a race day for me.  It’s not the race day–that one comes in a few weeks.  No, this race is a 30K race along the eastern lake shore of Toronto during the evening hours.  I’m still quite humbled by the fact that I can sign up for such a race an not freak out about it being far too long.  As long as I break the race up into smaller chunks for my consumption, and move wisely I should be fine.  I think that at this time what I do after the race is more important.  I’ve been going about my business all week on a bit of a rest deficit.  My body knows it and hasn’t been shy in reminding me all week.  Heck, that’s honestly why my blog posts have been skewed by many hours all week.  Post race, I just need to sleep, and use Sunday as a day to sleep in.  I’m so used to making up early on the weekends that this will be different for me.

Anyway, wish me luck.  This should be a fun race.

A few weeks ago, as part of the marathon clinic a doctor came in to film us run.  We were all taken to a parking lot and asked to run up and down the driveway a few times.  Today was the day that the doctor gave us feedback on how we can improve our form.  Yeah, if I’m being honest, I figured that my running form would be pretty bad.  Yeah, I’m improving, but I’m clearly not the most efficient.  A lot of people have pointed out that I’m a shuffler; my feet don’t really make it that far off the ground.  You see a lot of fabulous runners that kind of look like gazelles out there.  In contrast, I’m more like a penguin.  It’s not pretty.  Anyway, knowing that, I was afraid to see what the doctor ended up capturing on camera.

When my turn came up he immediately pointed out that my legs seemed to be doing the opposite of what most people would do.  I think he said that I tended to lean toward the outside instead of pronating.  Interesting point because I naturally have flat feet, which means that I naturally pronate.  I wear some really high stability shoes, so I wondered out loud if that had anything to do with my leaning outwards.  As I watched myself run, I felt that my movement in my upper body was just odd.  I can’t put my finger on what it was, but it’s definitely not how a typical runner would move.  Indeed, the video captured the fact that I didn’t get much air time.  I was told that I should lift my leg more.  As I landed, the doctor pointed out that my knees just looked unstable.  There was a lot of movement going on at the joint.  He was baffled.  Seriously!  He said that he couldn’t immediately tell if it’s a muscle imbalance, or if there was just something else going on.  I think the words he used were “definitely not normal.”  Seeing as how I agree, I couldn’t help but laugh.  In comparison to all other people who were analyzed, I stuck out like a sore thumb.  He did say that it seemed like it wasn’t a structural problem, and that whatever it was it could be trained out of me.

So, at this point I’m thinking of heading in to that sports clinic and letting him do a proper analysis.  I know that improvements can be made.  Thing is, if what I’m doing at the moment is working for me, is there really a need to change how I function in some revolutionary way?  My technique may not be the most cool to look at, but it gets the job done, no?  Maybe I’m just daring to be different.  Hmm.

Training’s important, yeah?  That’s the only way to get better at anything you do.  It’s why I’ve been putting in so much time on the road over the past few years.  Of course, if I compare my running abilities now with how I was then, of course I’m a lot better these days.  Duh.  There are still things though that don’t seem to get easier.  No matter how mentally prepared I am to do a particular distance, if the weather conditions don’t cooperate I’m going to have trouble.  There’s no shame in it, but it’s something I have to be aware of.

This morning I had a 32 kilometres run scheduled.  I was mentally psyching myself up for it since the day before.  I knew that such a run would likely take me around 4 to 4.5 hours at a slow speed.  I wasn’t intending to go fast at all because I wasn’t sure how my body would react to tackling such a long distance.  There was a light breeze going, and the sky was overcast.  I thought these were great conditions.  It wasn’t until an experienced veteran commented on the humidity level that I became worried.  How could I not notice?  It really was gross.  I didn’t want to let that stop me though.  By the 7K mark my shirt was already soaked with sweat.  It was so water-logged that my shorts became wet as well.  Not pleasant.  Now, as much as I label myself as a particularly sweaty person, even that’s pretty ridiculous for me.

I kept going as best I could.  I was starting to really feel heavy fatigue by 23K.  Along the way there’s a long up hill portion.  I pushed through it, but from that point I was wiped out.  At 27K I basically hit the wall.  It’s such an odd experience.  No matter how much I wanted to move my legs, I just could not maintain a run.  I was mentally telling myself that I could do it, and that the discomfort can be ignored.  My legs begged to differ.  Even as much as I wanted to move forward, I kept reverting to a walk.  There were a few moments where I felt like I’d just vomit if I tried to push any more.  Man, mentally I was feeling bad.  On the way back, things were really stop and go.  I did make it back, but I really had absolutely nothing left in the tank.

It took me a few moments and some pep talks from the store staff to help put things into perspective.  At the very least, I can say that I really pushed my body to its physical limit.  With better weather I’m sure I would have made it back without feeling so gross.  Yeah, I’m not happy, but when Mother Nature chooses such conditions there’s nothing you can really do.  This is one of the aspects of summer running that people don’t often consider.  It’s entirely why I prefer winter running to summer running.

I’m now at the point in marathon training where my distances on Sundays hit their biggest numbers.  Three of our runs are 29K long, and 2 of them are 32K long.  Today was our first 29K run.  Yesterday, when I received a copy of the route that I’d be running this morning I started feeling a little bit apprehensive.  The route took us way out into the countryside from which there really wasn’t any quick way out if there was any reason to bail.  Also, the idea of running 4 hours was freaking me out.  Sure, God knows that if I want to run a marathon I’ll be out there for a longer period: probably somewhere between 5 and 6 hours.  Even so, four hours is a damn long time. The sour cherry on top of all of this was the thought that I’d be running the full thing alone.

In order to mentally digest the route, I route it all out on a sheet of paper.  I listed the path, turn by turn.  I wrote down the estimated distance covered at each turn.  I also used Google Maps street view to get a good idea of what I’d be seeing.  All of that helped to ease my mind.  Also, I put the run into perspective.  Two weeks ago I covered my 26K run well enough.  If I could tap into that source of running Zen that I did last time, I’d be fine.  Besides, what’s another 3K on top of that?

As we all gathered for a quick briefing before leaving I just stood in silence, pondering what the day would bring.  It was breezy, but the sun was shining brightly.  I was glad that I slapped on sunblock and brought sunglasses.  Before I knew it we were off.  Immediately I felt like the whole group was running a bit faster than usual.  I chose to have none of that, so I took my time.  They pulled out far ahead, and really, after the first 2K I had lost sight of them.  I’m used to running alone, but today seeing how quickly I lost sight of them was hard.  It didn’t matter though.  I mean, what was I going to do?  Just turn back?  No.  I knew they route and was determined to cover the same route they were doing.  At around 3.5K I crossed paths with two of my previous running coaches in the half marathon clinic.  They expressed concern saying that I shouldn’t run alone.  Well, in an ideal world that wouldn’t be the case, but I can deal with that.  I told myself that if I keep my focus I’ll be fine.  When we parted, I started to feel even lonelier, but again I set that aside and decided to just focus on my body.

When I got to the farthest eastern point I felt like I was way out on the edge of town.  I started heading north and there was no sidewalk, so I ran on the side of the road, always conscious of the occasional car that passed by.  Off in the distance, I could still make out housing developments, but man, they seemed far.  A couple of kilometres north and the scenery became more farm-like.  Oh man.  I didn’t let it scare me though.  During a run, I’m generally successful at keeping my mind clear, or occupied enough to not let unnecessary things creep in.  People often suggest that I run with music to keep myself occupied.  Personally, I don’t like doing that because I want to maintain a level of awareness of my surroundings.  As well, I need to be able to focus on my body’s warning signs instead of focusing on earphone cords, or songs that I don’t want to listen to.  So what do I think about?  Sometimes I focus on what’s aching and whether it’s serious.  Other times I have an ongoing dialogue with myself with reassuring messages.

“Jason, you’re strong.”
“You’re getting sloppy. Check your posture.”
“Of course you’re tired. Work through it.”

All of that helps.  When I’m not thinking of any of that, I might end up singing songs in my head that would be on my iPod.  It works.  The time flies by with all of that.  I actually find a bit of strength in solitude.  I can’t afford to be weak when I’m running on my own.  At around 14K I started smelling cows, and for whatever reason I figured that it would be a great place to pass gas.  I started farting loudly out in the countryside.  I mean, everyone was far ahead; no one would hear me.  Just out of curiosity I looked behind and I saw another running a few hundred metres back.  Oops.  It was probably far enough such that he wouldn’t hear anything, but I still felt mildly sheepish.  I laughed it off though and picked up the pace to create some distance.  Funny…I never saw him again.  Even though I started out slow, I picked up the pace from about 7K onward.  It was a decent pace (for me) and I felt strong enough.

I started feeling a bit of killer fatigue at 23K and I felt myself slowing down.  I knew I had the energy to keep going though, so I focused my thoughts on my legs for a while.  I knew they were tired and kind of achy, but I didn’t feel that my forward motion was being impeded.  As long as I had the energy, I could continue moving.  This was the running Zen state that I felt two weeks ago.  I tapped into it again.  That last 6K flew by.

When I got back I saw a couple of other runners from my clinic stretching by the side.  I couldn’t help but cheer loudly.  Before my run I was afraid that I’d be a blubbering idiot, but no, I was completely proud and ecstatic.

So, at this point I’m no longer scared of my 30K race in a few weeks.  Nor am I scared of the 32K runs coming up.  The full marathon is still giving me a bit of apprehension, but I can deal with that.

Sleep calls.