The Toughest Decision

The toughest decision to make (at least for me) is when to take a day off. And I'm not talking about the one day off per week that my schedule allocates to me every Sunday. No, I'm talking about the most dreaded of all decisions: having to call in sick or injured to both running and cross training.
Today I am yet again on the verge of a head cold. Some would tell me to push throught it, like I did yesterday, since it does not involve my respiratory tract. Others would tell me to take a whole week off, so  that when I return to the roads, there is no chance of relapse. Well today, I am going to settle somewhere in the middle. I will take an unpredicted Wednesday off, because I believe that it will eventually allow me to run more. Yes I said it. A day off to heal this little virus will let me run more.
I've learned this lesson before. Last spring, in the climax of track season, I decided to race with a little baby cold. And then I decided to do a tempo run with a moderate cold. And then I decided to do a long run with a major infection. I ended up off my feet, immunosuppressed, waiting for an end to the pain and pleading to the doctor: "what went wrong?"
The doctor of course ridiculed my training, saying that at the first sign of a cold, I should have "layed like mud." It is so agravating that the only thing that will eventually cure a cold is rest. And not just resting, like sitting down and writing a blog post. Rest as in bed rest. Bed rest as in laying down, eyes closed, ingorant to the outside world.
Bed rest is frankly laziness. And if there is one thing I hate more than a day off, it's a lazy day off. But if I would just take the lesson learned from last spring; if I would just take a day off before this thing progresses into a full blown sinus infection, I will save myself pain and agony, and many more forced days off.

Running Sick

Infectious diseases are, next to injuries, the most frustrating and fear striking entities in the minds of runners. Nothing, perhaps other than a chronic injury, is more agrivating than being forced to take a few days off due to an infectious disease. Yet a fine line exists between being too sick to run and just healthy enough to squeeze in a few miles. The "head down rule," (a traditional addage that states that one should only run if the symptoms are in the neck up) comes to mind. But I've run through terrible head colds that have lasted for weeks simply because of my refusal to take a day off, so I don't know how helpful the head down rule is.
Regardless, today I feel as if I am on the verge of a cold. I am pounding down the water, because I've found this to be the most effective at staving off colds in the past. I went to bed early last night, and got lots of rest. My condition seems pretty stable, just a lingering sense that something is not right, and I have taken some Vicks DayQuill. Now the question: do I run today?
I am currently leaning towards yes. In about a half hour, I will make my way over to the treadmill for a moderate 3 miles. This is much much shorter than any run I've done in a long time, but it's something. It might even kickstart my immune system. Either way, it's very experimental, and I will report how it goes. FIAGW.

Good Runs and Good Times

January was a good month for me. I limped into a half marathon with very little endurance training, and still posted a 1:29:12, which I was pretty happy about. After that, I spent some time recovering with some shorter runs, and a day off. Then I started running like never before. I began to run more miles that I ever had previously dreamed possible. I got healthy mentally, and emotionally. But mostly spiritually. The idea of running for God finally made sense to me, and my Christ-centered faith had began to inspire intense passion and devotion on all of my runs.
I am in a good place right now, and I praise God for that. Track season is approaching, and this time I cannot wait to start toeing the line again... I miss racing. This year it will be different though. Every race will be for God. And I think that at the end of the day, that is the best wat to do it.
FIAGW

Mundane Times

There seems to be an unpreventable burnout for my runining every three months or so.
Today I feel like I am back to being burnt out... or at least somewhere very near burnout. True burnout is aweful; a pure loss of desire. It's easy to not run when I'm truly burnt out because frankly, I am by definition burnt out on running. Indeed, I still want to run these days. I am full of desire and ambition, but things are getting mundane. I don't feel like I'm working towards anything despite the fact that I have a half marathon in 2 1/2 weeks, and a big track season after that.
I think what I'm currently pushing through isn't a case of running burn out. I think it's a case of running gone mundane. The roads are wet with rain, the sky dreary with clouds, and the landscape old and uninspiring. Perhaps I need some new routes, perhaps I need a rest. I still feel good after running, so I don't think that the latter is true. I am more in touch with my body now than ever. But constantly running the same roads, the same trails, the same treadmill, the same tracks; nursing the same injuries, trying solve the same problems... it gets old after a while.
Mundane times are difficult to get rhrough, but they aren't quite burnout. If I keep my goals close to heart, and my passion in my veins, I know I will eventuall bounce out of this. FIAGW

Cross Training Lamentations

One of the most frustrating things to work into my running routine is cross training. Although it is important for a couple of reasons, I'll be honest, sometimes (like today) I'd rather take my chances running and developing an injury (knock on wood). Okay, maybe not the injury part, but I'd rather run just a mile than spending half an hour on that aweful spinning bike. As if regular biking wasn't monotonous enough, someone had the great idea to actually take the fun part out of it (going fast) by putting pedals on a steel frame, attatching handles and calling it a stationary bike. Sure, the spinning carbon-fiber plate that simulates momentum was a nice touch, and it gives spinning bikes a slight edge over regular excercise bikes, but I'll be honest, the interest the little spinning disc inspired lasted about 3 minutes. For the remaining 27 minutes, I tries just about everything to make the time go faster, and my percieved effort go down. I tried blasting intense, moving music through my earphones, but that didn't seem to get me anywhere. I tried to disassociate with the situation, but I found that to be equally unhelpful. The horrible truth was that I was literally spinning my wheel, going nowhere, and hating the whole thing.
Now, I would never submit myself to this punishment if I didn't feel it was good for me. While I didn't enjoy it, my legs were working in a slightly different way than they do running, strengthening a few more muscles. Not to mention it was a nice break from the beating my calves have been taking recently from minimalistic running, which was the main reason I chose to cross train today. I find that while it is about as boring as listening to classical piano music for hours, working on the lower end of my aerobic rate allows blood to flush out the lactic acid and repair the micro tears in the muscle fibers of my sore calves. While that sounds beneficial enough, the actual act of cross training is absolutely abysmal. I love running. I hate sitting around. Logically, cross training should be somewhere in between a day of and a running day. But it totally isn't. No, cross training has a very special place in my heart. It's on a different plane... the same plane that sprint workouts and wieght lifting are on. The plane of things that are good for me but are really (simply put) not fun whatsoever. I mean, at least on days off I can at least feel good about doing something that is good for me. With cross training, there is no rush, no endorphines. Sure I sweat, but it's a different kind of sweat. And sweat that seems to toy with me; as if to insesantly remind me that I am not running. On days off, I can control this realization. I can go do some wood working, start a new book, distract myself from my non-running reality. But cross training is so tantalizing because with every motion, it feels I am reminded that I'm not running... I'm doing something else. I enjoyed cross training over the summer when I got burnt out on running. But in a time when I am more in to running than I've ever been, cross training just feels annoying.
But I must stay positive, even in obnoxious adversity. Maybe a day of indoor cycling is just what my calves needed to expedite recovery so I can put in the big miles. Maybe cross training is just the prescription my running needs to improve... if nothing else, and I mean if there was truly no other benefit, cross training days like today make me apreciate all of my runs... even the bad ones.

What They Didn't Tell Me About Minimalist Running

So recently I changed my foot strike from heel strike to mid foot strike. This was in the wake of reading a book that had a powerful impact on me: Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. It's a truly inspirational book... I would recommend it to anybody. It poses an interesting point: humans have been running without shoes for millions of years, and with injury rates at an all time high and rising, why is it we continue to look to the shoe companies to improve our running?
I instantly became a big believer in barefoot and minimalist running. I went out and bought a pair of Reebok RealFlex shoes, which supposedly simulate barefoot running. I liked the shoes, but they seemed a little too soft, a little too shoe like to be a true member of the naturalistic running shoe clan. So I recently purchased a pair of New Balance 730s, which have a very flat, thin, hard sole and an extremely wide toe box, which both help my running quite a bit. The mid foot striking was feeling good, except for one thing nobody warned me about:
When you land on the middle of your foot, you instantly put all of the stress that was being absorbed by your joints (with a heel strike) into your muscles. 
Okay, maybe they did tell me that. And I agree that long term, this is a good thing... It will save my joints and hips and make my muscles stronger so that I am ultimately a more efficient runner with a longer running lifespan.
What they didn't tell me was there would be growing pains.
My calves have been so sore, I can hardly walk. You want to know how many tiny muscles there are in your lower leg? Go for a 10 mile run, landing with a flat foot the whole time, and you'll know the next morning. All of the itsy bitsy supporting muscles in addition to the gastrocnemeus  and soleus muscles will be absolutely shredded.
I should have known to take a day off after that kind of pain developed... Rule of thumb: if you're so sore that you cannot walk, you definitely shouldn't run. But I did. I ran so far and fast because once I got warmed up, the feeling is incredible. If you stay light on your feet, land in the middle of the foot, you will feel it too. It's like landing on a loaded spring... except it's not a spring, it's your leg.
So I went out, and I ran. Fast and far. And then one day, about two weeks ago... and odd tightness formed in my left Achilles tendon. It exacerbated until I finally took a day off.
I am still nursing this injury... It's doing a lot better. I'm stretching, icing, and on a heavy ibuprofen regimen. I think I'll get through this setback in no time. I expect it to be minor. But the truth stands:
Don't jump into barefoot style running all at once. You will get hurt. 
And if you get hurt, like I did, do what you have to do to fix it. Rest it, ice it, blast it with non-steroidal anti-inflamatories. Do everything you can to make every setback a minor setback.

Taking a Look Back at a Year of Running

2011 yielded quite a few successes and failures for my running. I'll be honest, the proudest thing I've done this year occured last Spring when I broke 11 minutes in the 3200 meters. But that definitely wasn't the only high point. Running sub-18 in Cross Country felt liberating... as if the entire summer of dreary treadmill tempo runs had materialized into something wonderful. But XC was host to the most frustrating decline I've ever experienced. Shortly after running a 17:51, I started struggling to break 18:30. My training go thrown off by an ineffective training program that focused too much on short fast workouts and not enough on endurance, the foundation of the sport. I felt my dreams and aspirations of running in the State cross country meet slipping away... and then they did. The single most dissapointing moment in my life occurred when I failed to make the mediocre cut to qualify for State. I remeber laying face down in the grass near the finish line absolutely crushed. I  had let my dream slip away... I didn't want to get back up. I remember thinking something very disturbing: "Why even try? I put in a full summer of running and this is my payoff?"
I was falling in a bad way. I felt like I had lost my identity. As much as I would love to completely blame my coach for training me idiotically, that seems a little too easy. At the end of the day, I've got nobody to blame but myself. For days after this failure, I became very depressed. I sat around and did nothing but listen to sad music and eat lots of snickerdoodle cookies.
Somewhere in the middle of all this self-loathing, I found some kind of an enlightenment that changed my entire philosophy of running. Running isn't about winning, or even meeting personal goals and expectations. It's about having fun. It took me 3 years to realize why I run: It's fun. I felt like I needed to run... and I did. And I didn't stop for another 13 miles.
I firmly believe that all things happen for a reason. The rise and fall of my performances created in me a new outlook on running. It's about getting in touch with something deep inside all of us that is very primal. Going into 2012, I feel better about running that ever... as if I was born to run. Maybe this will be the year I have a performance breakthrough, or maybe not. But at least I know I will have fun hiting the roads, the treadmill, and the track for another year!