Knee Ups and Downs

The past few weeks have been rocky. The small amount of knee pain I had a few weeks ago got worse and worse. I did the 6 mile run on week 4 with Olga and it felt great. The following weekend I ended up getting new shoes and resting instead of doing the 6 mile run. Week 6 I did a 5 mile long run instead of the 7 because the knee was still bothering me. Today I did an 8 mile long run and felt great!


I'm not really going to go through each of these dates one by one, because I did keep to the training plan overall. Besides the long run adjustments above, I did stick to all of the mid week runs, along with doing Crossfit ~3 times a week.

Week

Dates

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

4	1/20-1/26	Rest	3 m run	3 m run	3 m run	Rest	6 m run	30 min walk
5	1/27-2/2	Rest	3 m run	3 m run (1 mile run, 2 mile elliptical (knee pain)	crossfit	3 mile run, November Project Hills	6 m run	Cross
6	2/3-2/9	Rest	3 m run	3 m run	3 m run	Rest	7 m run	Cross
7	2/10-2/16	Rest	3 m run	4 m run	3 m run	Rest	5 m run	Cross

I'll get better about recording stuff next week. The train start to ramp up here on out. Here's a preview:

8	2/17-2/23	Rest	3 m run	4 m run	3 m run	Rest	9 m run	Cross
9	2/24-3/2	Rest	3 m run	5 m run	3 m run	Rest	10 m run	Cross
10	3/3-3/9	Rest	3 m run	5 m run	3 m run	Rest	7 m run	Cross
11	3/10-3/16	Rest	3 m run	6 m run	3 m run	Rest	12 m run	Cross
12	3/17-3/23	Rest	3 m run	6 m run	3 m run	Rest	13 m run	Cross

Are we in California yet?

My blog has been given a makeover as inspiration for California.

It has been a COLD few weeks here in Boston. Because of that, the majority of my training has been treadmill-focused. Here was my prescribed training plan for the past two weeks and how things have been going:

Dates	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
1/13-1/19	Rest	3 m run	3 m run	3 m run	Rest	3 m run	60 min walk
1/20-1/26	Rest	3 m run	3 m run	3 m run	Rest	6 m run	30 min walk

Tuesday 1/14
Track workout at Tufts. I met up with a couple Crossfit friends for an early morning speed workout at Tufts. In our workout we did a 800m warm up,  then 3x200 with 100m walking breaks in between, 3 times, then some bodyweight stuff between each round. This is what is looked like:

800m warm up
track warmups: broad jumps, butt-kickers, high knees
3x200 max sprint, 100m walks in between
20 jumping squats
1 minute plank hold
3x200 max sprint, 100m walks in between
20 pushups
1 minute plank hold
3x200 max sprint, 100m walks in between
20 jumping squats
30 second side plank each side
800m cool down

I was surprised with how fast I went on the 200m sprints. My garmin says my top speed was 4:55 on the sprints and my overall averagepace was 6:47. zoom! I didn't do the total 3m as prescribed, but this speed work felt great.

Wednesday 1/15
AM: 3 mile run on treadmill, easy 9:20 pace

PM: Crossfit!

Shoulder Press (3 RM)

12 Minutes to hit a 3RM

Metcon

Sweet Pea (Time)

2 rounds for time
- 1K row
- 50 DU
- 20 TTB
- 1 rope climb
rest 5 minutes between rounds

Woof.

Thursday 1/16
3 miles on treadmill, easy 9:15 pace. Right knee feeling a little weird but not bad. I also developed a pretty bad cold for the next few days so i took them off from working out.


Sunday 1/18
3 miles on treadmill, 9:00 pace with some speedwork in the middle. first day back from feeling sick,


Monday 1/19
MLK Jr day so off from work! Had the chance to go to the noon WOD which was nice:

Weightlifting

Press Complex ( 5 x complex ascending)

2 Push Presses + 1 Push Jerk without putting bar down.

Metcon

The Ants Go Marching (2x 2) (AMRAP – Rounds and Reps)

Alternate with a Partner
2 Minutes on, 2 Minutes off (x 5)
- 10 Pullups
- 20 Double Unders

I did pretty good at DUs.My longest sets were ~10, but I didn't whip myself too much which was a small victory.

Tuesday 1/20
3 miles on treadmill, hill work. did a 3-5% incline every other song

Wednesday 1/21
3 miles on treadmill, Tempo run
mile 1: warm up (6.0-6.9 every minute increasing)
mile 2: 8:27 pace
mile 3: 9:00 pace

Thursday 1/22
3 miles on treadmill, 9:20 pace. Right knee hurting the whole time. My knee continued to hurt throughout the day, especially when walking down stairs

Friday 1/23
 Rest!

Saturday 1/24
Long run day! For breakfast I had oatmeal made with vanilla almond milk, banana, and a scoop of Teddy's PB. Eaten about an hour before the run:

I met up with Olga for this run and it was great. We were going to run on Sunday but Saturday ended up being the warmest day in recent history, a whopping 25 degrees! I parked at my gym, ran the 0.5 miles to her house, then we did a 5.5 mile course around the river. We ended at my gym and she finished her 6 miles by running home again. Here are the splits:

Mile 2 was a little slower since we had to cross a couple streets. Overall, I'm super impressed with these times.I know these are no record breakers, but are definitely way more consistent and fast than I used to be.

My knee didn't hurt at all during yesterday's long run. A couple hours later (after eating lots of food and sitting on a couch at a Crossfit brunch), it bothered me a bit. This morning when I woke up, my right knee felt fine but my whole left leg was super tight: glute, hammy, calf, knee. 

Sunday

75 Minute All levels yoga class at the Corner Studio. The stretching felt so gooood. I'm going to keep doing some lunges and glute stretches this afternoon to try and work out this left side. Here's me now! Icing away the knee and relaxing with a book. Can you spot the pup? Hint: stairs.

Goal this week: go to crossfit more than twice. Definitely haven't been getting my money's worth this month but I have stuck 100% to my running plan so I don't feel too bad.4 weeks down, 18 to go!

San Diego Training Week 1

Oh hey! Since the last time I posted, a lot has happened. Mainly, Olga and I have decided to run the 2014 San Diego Rock N Roll Marathon on June 1!

That gives us roughly 6 months to train, and we're going to take it nice and slow. My goal only for this race is to make it there. And by that I mean, not get injured. I found a nice Hal Higdon novice plan that builds the mileage very gradually so we have high hopes. We already bought the plane tickets to at least we have that much going for us.

This past week kicked off week 1 of marathon training. Here is what was prescribed:

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Rest	2 m run	3 m run	2.5 m run	Rest	5.5 m run	30 min walk

and it was a success! Which is really exciting considering I was in Cancun Monday-Thursday on a work trip.

Monday-Wedesday

I did my short runs on Tues and Wed at the hotel treadmill at the Fiesta Americana in Cancun, which overlooked the Caribbean Sea. Very Nice.

Thursday

rest

Friday

Thursday was an exhausting travel day so I ended up doing the 2.5 run on Friday. I actually ended up doing 3 since my legs felt pretty good. i did that one as a speed workout on a treadmill at the gym, this one to be precise:

Saturday

Double workout! Saturday morning I woke up planning to go to crossfit. I was feeling pretty tight though so I decided to first go to a 75 min vinyasa yoga class at the Corner Studio, followed by crossfit. The WOD yesterday was a good one, filled with lots of different movements.

Metcon

1/11/14 (Time)

With a Partner, 4 rounds of 4 minutes of work, 1 minute rest between rounds. 1 Partner works at a time

Round 1
- WallBalls (Min 1 and 2)
- Partner Medball situps (6′) (Min 3 and)

Round 2
- Thrusters (95, 65)
-OH Squats

Round 3
- Air Squats
- Burpees

Round 4
- Pullups
- Toes to Bar

For round 2, I did shoulder to overhead and squat lunges since my left hip has been really fussy when I squat lately. I just finished up 4 weeks of physically therapy on it, but I'm pretty sure i have a hip impingement that will cause deep squats to hurt forever. yikes.

Friday

First long run! Today was great, my first long run of the training, with almost all negative splits! 

 

I was supposed to do 5.5 today, but the route I chose ended up being close to 6.5. I went all along the Charles and it was gorgeous. I decided to run to the 6 mile mark, then walk the rest of the way as a cool down.

I want to do a better job of tracking and experimenting with what i eat pre and post long runs. I've had stomach issues in the past with running, and want to rid them once and for all. Today actually went really well! I had a little bit of cramping around mile 2, but nothing too bad. Here was breakfast, eaten about an hour before the run:

2 Kashi 7 grain waffles with Teddy PB and a banana. I considered only having one, but I had so much energy throughout this entire run that 2 might have just done the trick.

Post run: Fage 2% plain greek yogurt with a chopped apple and kashi cinnamon wheat squares

And that's all! Now for some pics of pups:

Olive before I left on my run. She's mad I"m not taking her.

And this BEAST of a pup at the dog park in the afternoon::

Rebuilding

I'm BACK. I feel like I start most of my blog posts with some sort of statement like that. I'm not very good at this whole thing. I'm back for real this time though because I've got the itch again.


About 2 months ago, I lost the running bug. In a big way. I just hated it. I decided not to do my marathon in early August for a few reasons. First and foremost, running just was not fun. It became I chore, and I felt like I was only getting worse at it. If I woke up in the morning and had a run on my schedule, I dreaded the thought of going outside and doing it. I was just mentally negative about the whole activity. In addition, I was getting a weird pain in the back of my right knee (more on that later). So I just decided to ask myself

If it's not fun...why do it??

So I didn't :)


In fact, I pretty much stopped running completely by late August. One problem however, was that I did still have Reach the Beach on my calendar for mid September. I was very nervous for this race. My 3 legs covered over 18 miles in 18 hours, which was far more miles than I've ever put in in that period of that. But I sucked it up, and ended up loving that race. Like I always do.

I did decide to continue my running break for a while though. After Reach the Beach was done, a pretty weird thing happened to my running schedule...I had no major races planned. And to this very moment I still don't. This is the first time since January 2011 that I haven't had a half marathon on my calendar, and it feels very liberating. I can go to the gym on my own terms, and I don't feel the painful guilt that I used to get when I didnt go every single day.

That being said, I am starting to get the itch again. With more crossfit and short, high-intensity track workouts under my belt under the past month, I feel stronger. I want to start slowly bringing running back into my life.


I told this to Bill this morning, and he had some great advice. Don't register for anything yet. I have a very bad and impulsive habit of signing up for races the second they get in my head, without starting any training. This has been my consistent recipe for disaster. Instead, I'm going to start slow. I'm going to set small goals for myself week to week until I feel that I'm ready for a race again.

That being said, my goal for this week will be to run TEN miles. Not a ten mile run, but 10 miles total. This should be totally doable, so I'm excited to take it on.


We'll see how it goes!

Overwhelmed with Olive

So what's been going on lately over here?

The puppy has arrived!! We picked up Olive about 10 days ago today. We named her Olive after a little Olive tree that we have growing in a pot in our kitchen. No real other rhyme or reason to it.
She is the greatest little puppy ever. She's super smart, spunky, and overall obedient. It doesn't hurt that she's freaking adorable too.

This puppy has a LOT of energy. As I sit here writing, she is going absolutely insane over a bunch of tissue paper I gave her to play with. Bill and I really had no idea what we were getting ourselves into with an 8 week old puppy. We knew it would take a lot of time and patience, but we didn't really know just how much energy it would take to keep her fully trained and entertained. We've been sleeping in shifts and neither one of us has really been able to fully relax. The good side is that Bill works from home so he can spend lots of time with her during the day.

Needless to say, I'm tired. My schedule has pretty much become wake up ~5, take Olive out to poop/pee, give Olive breakfast, try to tire her out before 6am crossfit/Run,  (if it doesn't work, Crossfit/Run doesn't happen)commute , work, commute, eat dinner, take Olive out to pee/poop, feed Olive, play with Olive to tire her out before bed, sleep. Basically it's Olive's world and we're just living in it :)

My marathon training hasn't taken too much of a beating from it...yet. I did my 11 mile run on Monday, did a Yoga for Runners podcast on Tuesday, and now I'm mustering up the energy to go for my 5 mile Wednesday run.

What I really want to do right now is this...

Happy National Running Day!

This week I've been a good little marathon trainer, sticking to my plan every day! Here's what's been happenin:

Yesterday I went to 6am Crossfit for the first time in a while. Now that's it's warm and bright out at 6am, the class is much more crowded. During the winter there would usually be 4-5 people in the 6 am class, and yesterday there was ~12. The more the merrier!

Strength

3x5 negative pull ups

2x5 dips (blue band)

WOD: 4 Rounds for Time

• 4 Squat Cleans (75#)
• 8 Deadlifts (75#)
• 200m run

This workout took me 11:20. It was a good one! The combination of leg strength work in the squats & deadlifts + fast short runs left me super exhausted. Surprisingly my legs feel good today, but my arms and back are super tight. super super super.

Today I went for a 5 mile run around JP pond after work. I was feeling pretty tired for most of it so it definitely wasn't my fastest run ever. Oh well, 5 miles is 5 miles when my goal right now is to just get my weekly mileage up.

Then I came home and made this ugly dinner. Chicken, mashed caulilower, sauteed mushrooms. It was a pretty bland meal, but I was tired and it did the trick.

Now I have a tummy ache while watching the Bruins. There's 8 minutes left in the third, and I have no hope of staying awake for the finish. Bedtime for this old lady.

Monday Runday

Today has been a lovely little Monday. Work was pretty good, slower than usual. Day One of Puppy Challenge was also a success.


Lunchtime: salad with kale, quinoa, mushrooms, baby tomatoes, and 2 hardboiled eggs. 4 dates for "dessert" :)

I snacked on some cherries and almonds in the afternoon.


After work I headed to the track at Tufts for a track speed workout.

• 1 mile warm up (9:40 min/mile)
• 400 meter @ 7:10 min/mile, 200 meter walk, repeat 5 times
• 1 mile cool down (9:40 min/mile)

total: 4 miles:

It felt really great. The weather was beautiful- much cooler than the past few days. After the run I did two 1 minute plank holds with 30 second side planks in between.

I was ravenous when I got home. Big salads with romaine, mushrooms, raisins, corns, baby tomatoes, a hardboiled egg, and broiled salmon. 

NOM!

Okay, time to keep catching up with Arrested Development. Night!