Mission Accopmlished

4 easy miles this morning, with no shin pain.  This is great, I can ease back into my training without really losing much ground.  Plus I've got other activities that I need my legs working 100% to properly perform.  Fighting ninjas, break dancing in parachute pants with my friends down on the corner, strollin' up the street with a pimp walk that lets the all the other ballers know, pilates, etc.

Or maybe I've just been going a little stir crazy not being able to run, and I'm really excited to be back at it.  Also, I'd probably hurt myself trying to do any of those things.

I've started working on the new page layout.  Nothing fancy, nothing too radical, really just some decoration, perhaps rearranging some things and adding useful stuff here and there.  I want to make this thing look nice, like it was done by someone who cares and uses a computer as more than a fancy machine for playing solitaire.


My race schedule is pretty much shot.  I'll be "redesigning" that too pretty soon.  The only thing that is definite at this point is the Virginia Beach Half Marathon, because I've already paid, and I'll already be down there.  Hopefully I'll get to add a few more events before summer starts to wind down.

Still on The Sidelines

I ran about a half mile this morning to test my shin.  Still not there yet.  I'm giving it a few more days, and I'll try another short run to see how it feels.  It's definitely better than it was, but I can't train on it.  I must say, I don't care for this at all, not one bit.

Since I'm not running, I've got an extra hour each day to accomplish things.  What am I accomplishing with this extra hour?  Not much, it seems.  I slept in this weekend, for the first time in a long time.  I haven't gotten to work much earlier in the past week, even though I've been getting up at the same time.  I almost feel like I should have some guilt over how lazy I've been.  I don't.

I'm pretty glad I didn't have a race or long run this weekend.  I had plans for dinner at Red Lobster with my wife Saturday night.  Then I got a call around noon from my dad, he had a break in his water line and needed some help with it, so I hopped in the car and headed south.  My parents live about an hour and a half from me - so quick math, leaving at 12:30, 3 hours of drive time, if we could fix the line within 2 hours I'd still have time to get home, shower, and go to dinner without eating at a weird time.  The clock was ticking.

Luckily my uncle procured us a backhoe for digging up the line to find the problem, which cut out huge amounts of hand digging (and time).  We finished fairly quickly, and I found myself back home by around 5 - leaving enough time not only for getting cleaned up for dinner, but also to watch the US Track and Field Championships before we left.  Couldn't have worked out better.

I highly recommend the spicy habanero coconut shrimp, very good.  The desserts, meh.  I'm not much of a fan of restaurant desserts, they generally aren't that good, but it came with the meal thingy we were getting.

So I guess I'll just continue not running and getting fat while I wait on my leg to heal.  Perhaps I'll spend some time on my redesign of this page tonight...

Adam, M.D.

Among my many self-proclaimed qualifications (mechanic, physicist, philosopher, snake wrangler, brew-master, Iron Chef, lady-pleaser Ph.D, etc.), I am a sports doctor.  Not a doctor in the med school, residency, treats patients sense, more of a doctor in the "I have the internet and know how to use it" sense.

So after some (read:  2-3 hours) research, I've concluded that my injury is a mild case of Medial Tibial Stress Syndrome (MTSS).  What is this, you may be wondering?  MTSS is true shin splints.

What do most people feel when they say they have shin splints?  They feel pain in the lower front of their legs.  This is typically muscular, due to an imbalance between the muscles in the back and front of the lower leg.  The back muscles are either tight, or too strong, keeping the front muscles in a constant state of tension.  When you run, those front muscles provide the braking force for each step.  Doing this while stretched loads them eccentrically, leaving them sore, and leading the runner to think they have an impact injury to their shin - which it isn't.

MTSS is different.  As the name suggests, it is caused by stress to the medial (side nearest the center of the body) region of the tibia (large bone in the lower leg).  It is a pain in the tibia itself, not the muscles around it.  It comes from various things related to how you run - the way you land your feet, the degree to which you pronate, how quickly/slowly you increase your mileage, etc.  These things result in eccentrically loading and fatiguing the soleus muscle, the lower part of your calf.  When this happens, the soleus cannot do its job effectively, and you get increased torque about your tibia.  Ironically, one of the contributing factors to my shin splint is landing on the balls of my feet - the very thing that helps protect my knees from injury is causing a pain in my shin.  I suspect this, plus a few other factors such as my higher mileage (which I may have progressed to a little quickly) have caused this injury.

My case is mild, and the best thing I can do for it is rest.  I have to avoid repetitive stress on the bone, meaning some time off running.  How long?  I don't know.  I'm going to start with a few days and see how it feels.  I'm hoping it will heal quickly since it isn't severe.  I should be able to continue working out without stressing it, and I plan to do some swimming this weekend (or rather, plan to try to swim).

Who needs med school.

IR

So it seems like I may be injured.  Not sure when or how it happened.  That nagging pain in my shin that I mentioned yesterday was worse this morning, and it seems to be related to my ankle.  I plan to do some self diagnosis this evening to see if I can pinpoint the problem.

I'm taking a couple of days off, not racing this weekend (which is what really bothers me, since I like racing), and hoping the problem fixes itself.  Stay tuned for further updates.

No News Isn't Necessarily Good News

Sometimes no news is just no news. 

The page redesign is going slow.  Primarily because I haven't worked on or thought about it at all since saying I would redesign the page.  Little things like not doing anything tend to make it take longer to reach goals.

I've had some good runs and some crappy ones this past week.  I had a really good 6 mile tempo run, and my weekend long run was 12 miles this week and went really well.  My pace was very consistent over the whole distance, and I wasn't completely wiped out from it for the rest of the day.  But then I bailed halfway through an interval workout this morning.  I've been having this nagging shin pain for about a week, it comes and goes, but it really seemed to bother me today.  That, combined with the humidity, left me feeling flat and slow this morning, so I decided it wouldn't do any good to fight through a workout that my heart wasn't in.  Regroup, do better tomorrow.  I've got a 5k coming this weekend as a tuneup race coming Saturday, I'd like to approach 20 minutes on this one, but I'm trying not to set the bar too high based on my last couple of races.

I'm going to redesign the page.  Really I am...

Insert Cheesy Quote Here

So I've been away with a longer gap between posts than usual.  Not that nothing is happening, nor that I haven't been training hard as usual, I just haven't really had much of a spark of inspiration for writing.

Also, we've had 3 separate visits from house guests in the past week.  3.  While this might seem like an inconvenience to some people, I've discovered that it is a good idea to lump your house guests into the same time period - you only have to clean the house really thoroughly once, rather than 3 separate time.

The past week has been business as usual for me running, mostly.  I did some 200m repeats instead of 400m repeats to try and incorporate some speed into my running diet.  I did my long run this weekend.  Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing exciting or adventurous happening while I ran.  I could use something exciting while running, something to shake things up.  Maybe a land mine.  Or an angry goose.  Wait, geese are kind of big.  An angry duck then.

I went for a swim at the Y on Saturday morning, and realized a couple of things.  The first thing is that I am not very good at swimming.  I thrash.  I have no idea how to time my breathing, resulting in me breathing a lot of water.  I'm not afraid of the water, I wouldn't drown if suddenly tossed in.  But I'm sure many people watching me swim are thinking, "He does realize it's only 4 feet deep, right?"  My swimming could be considered as analogous to my dancing.  I am white, which is all I'll say about my dancing.

My second realization is that I'm not nearly as clever as I sometime think.  I was showering after my swim, lost in my thoughts about how I can improve my swimming technique so that I don't look like a marionette that has been tied to a ceiling fan.  I could smell body wash from the stall beside me, maybe Old Spice, then something with a fresh mint smell, when an odd thought came to me.  People would probably get a lot more bent out of shape over someone peeing in the shower at the Y than someone peeing in the pool at the Y.  Which is nuts, since you don't accidentally swallow water from the shower drain.  This thought really made me happy, I was already considering how to phrase this as my Facebook status when I got home, oh clever me.  Then I look down, and see a toothbrush.  Laying on the shower floor from the next stall.  And I realized what the mint smell meant.  And then I didn't feel so clever.


So, training is going well, I'll keep the blog updated on how that's going this week, since I'm less than 2 weeks away from another race.  I've also decided on a redesign of the blog.  I've been using the cookie-cutter template with very little personalization - I was so eager to move in that I didn't bother with redecorating.  It's time for a change, and in future posts I plan to try to include a lot more picture.  People like pictures, you don't have to read pictures.

Do As I Say...

Race Results:

So I failed again to turn in the time I wanted, instead ending up right around where I was at the last race - 20:45.  I ran a very consistent pace, I hit the turn around at 10:22 and didn't feel like I was faster or slower in any particular part of the run.  I'd been talking about 20 minutes for 2 weeks.  So what happened?

It turns out I'm much better at coaching others than coaching myself.

1.  After the 1st race I said "more interval work".  I actually did a fair amount of tempo work.

2.  I looked at my running log and saw what I wanted to see.  For those of you who've been with me for a while now, you might remember Part 5 of a series I wrote about my personal training philosophy, in which I stated that I run 1/4 mile intervals at around 20-30 seconds per mile faster than my race pace.  I raced at a 6:42 pace, my intervals have been in the 6:15-6:20 range.  My training PREDICTED a time that was well over 20 minutes, and I shrugged it off in favor of optimism.

3.  Start small, build slowly.  I'm in 20-21 minute shape right now.  Breaking 20 by a noticeable margin would be a big improvement - not small or slow at all.  A can-do attitude is good, until it leaves you feeling disappointed when you fail to reach an unreasonable goal.

Truth be told, I had a great race on Saturday.  My warm up was spot on.  My race plan was a good one, and I followed it to a T (where does that expression come from anyway?).  I won my age group, I got 6th overall.  I ran exactly the race that I am in shape for, exactly the race that I was trained to run.  Now, I need to train to run a faster race.

My training needs some fine-tuning.  This should work well at the mileage I'm at, it won't bother me to sacrifice a little distance for some speed.  I need to get my 1/4 mile intervals under 1:30 (a 6 minute pace, indicating a race of just under 20 minutes).  This means throwing in some shorter intervals, 1/8 mile repeats (200m for those track alums out there) at an even faster pace.  I've got 3 full weeks before I race again, meaning 5 opportunities for hard workouts to try and improve.  To be realistic, I guess I should shoot for something in the 20:20 range for this one, and leave the sub-20 for later in the summer.


And I've got new shoes!  I'll be breaking them in tomorrow morning on an easy run (Tuesday), with a full report on that later this week...

Breaking News!


So I'm not getting around to posting this until today (Tuesday) because I didn't get my race pictures downloaded, so here's the shoe report - I hate the first run in new shoes.  I wore them around walking for a bit to start the process the other day, then went for an easy 4 mile run this morning in them.  It was hard to get the laces right, they hurt the outside of my soles for the first bit of the run, and just altogether felt new.  This is ok though, since the pain was in areas that I've felt it before in new shoes, meaning that another 5-10 miles on them and they'll be just right.

Ready to Race!

My next race is Saturday, and I actually feel ready - which is unusual.  I typically always feel under prepared for things.  Since my last race, I've been really focused and consistent, running 3 weeks of 30+ miles.  Even with a race, this week should end up with mileage in the mid 20s.

The Outer Banks was great.  A few days without a schedule - no clock telling me when to be somewhere.  We spent a lot of time lounging around, enjoying the company of some friends from college, and of course plenty of cold, distilled beverages.  Of the 4 days we were there, I ran twice on the beach - a 5 mile run and a 6 mile run.  Nothing too hard, just putting in some miles in the sand and surf, working on my tan.  We all got pretty badly sunburned on Sunday, spending too much time out on the beach having fun.  I'm starting to peel a little, but it's looking like that tan will turn out pretty nicely this year...

Enough reminiscing, back to business.  The plan Saturday is simple - get on pace, stay on pace, turn up the pace when the finish line comes into sight.  I'm hoping to settle into a 6:20 pace early on and maintain it until the last half mile or so, then dig deep and find a bit more.  I'd be ok with a a little slower, but this would give me enough cushion to deal with any slowdowns mid-race and still get under 20 minutes.

Once this race is over, I'll use the results to recalibrate my training paces and update my plan for the coming weeks.  I've got a big increase in mileage on the way, my body has responded well to 30 miles per week.  For the next race (end of the month), I'd like to be training with my mileage in the high 30, cracking into the 40s soon after that to begin preparing for half marathon training.  It's been a long time since I had my mileage at this level comfortably, I'm kind of excited about moving into higher mileage (nerdy, I know).