New month, new plan

I spent most of November in and out of a bad head cold, resulting in no running for the entire last week of the month.  The violent coughing finally subsided enough for me to resume running on Friday of this week.  Thankfully the afternoons have been in the high 50s, if it was much colder I probably would have had to wait even longer before running again. It's supposed to get cold again this coming week, I'm hoping I'll be able to continue running without bringing back the cough but I will be taking it one day at a time and trying really hard to stay healthy!

While running over the past few days, and thinking about the past month, I made the decision not to start marathon training until January.  I wanted to jump straight in, but I've decided that's not the smartest decision.  I need to make sure I am fully healthy before I start putting the demands of marathon training on my body.  So, December will be about running for fun.  I still hope to keep my mileage at 25-30 miles a week, but I'll run whatever feels good distance and pace-wise.  I think I'm going to try to get to 5 days a week of running so that each run can be a bit shorter, but I may or may not manage to fit 5 days into the schedule.  Really, I'll be taking it one day at a time! 

This week : 

 M : rest

T : circuit training 35:00

walk 1 mile

W : rest

R : TRX 30:00

F : run 4 / 8:09 / 210 ft

Sa : run 6.7 / 7:53 / 341 ft

Su : TRX 40:00

run 5.1 / 744 / 384 ft

total miles : 15.9

I realize that running 3 days in a row after 7 days off may or may not be the smartest choice, especially given how sore my legs have been from Thursday's TRX, but I just had to go enjoy the warm(ish) sunshine!  It was hard to keep the runs as short as I did, but I did manage to contain myself and not run 10 milers.  

Sick again

Clearly ignoring the fact that I have asthma is not going to work for me.  I like to pretend it's not a big deal and that I don't have to take extra good care of my lungs...but here I am, sick for the second time in a month.  And this time the cough is 5 times worse.  So, I'm trying really hard to rest this time.  It has something to do with the fact that this cough is trying to rip me in half, but hey, whatever it takes.  I really want to go for an easy jog, but instead I'm keeping myself locked up inside. 

Cold air often makes me cough, but this year it's going to a whole new level.  Even jogging in the cold air the other day seemed to make my cough get worse, and my lungs barely have to work at a jog.  I'm starting to rethink the intensity of my marathon training plan for this winter.  First I have to get rid of this cough, and then see if I will be able to slowly build training back up or if I have to keep it light in the cold air.  Once I get rid of the cough I should at least be able to work on endurance training, if not speed work and tempos.

This Week : 

M : 34:00 circuit training

T : run 10.5 / 7:37 / 673 ft

W: rest

R: warm up w/Diane 3.1 / 8:42 / 33 ft

Turkey Trot w/Diane 3.1 / 7:45 / 105 ft

F : rest

Sa : rest

Su : rest

total miles : 16.7 

It's been a few years since my runner-siblings and I got together for a race on Thanksgiving, but we made it this year!  4 of us running, and another sibling driving us around and being our photographer.

We started out slow and gradually picked up the pace as each mile went by. 

Here we are picking up the pace in the final half mile.

I got home from PA yesterday mid-day, napped all afternoon, and then slept 9 hours last night.  I haven't felt feverish in 24 hours and my cough no longer makes my head feel like it's splitting in 2, although it's still giving my abs quite a workout.  I made a giant pot of vegetable soup today, and have succeeded in not exercising for 3 whole days.  Hopefully another good night of sleep tonight will help as well, as I head into a full week of work.  I'm going to try really hard to also take tomorrow off, and then I teach my circuit training class on Tuesday.  

and then I got sick for the first time in over a year

I really need to learn to acknowledge/heed the warnings my body sends me so that it doesn't have to hit the self-destruct button just to get my attention.  I know that I can fight off head colds when I'm doing everything right, and it's not hard to figure out exactly what I did wrong in the last 2 weeks. My nightly sleep slipped down from 8-9 hrs/night to 7-7.5, which is probably what hurt me the most.  And then there's the fact that I let myself freeze in my apt, while bordering the underweight line, instead of just paying the extra $20/month it would probably have cost me to keep the heat higher.  My body wasted so much energy trying to keep me warm, it couldn't fight off the head cold.  Lesson learned: it's not worth it to save $20 a month.  I'm two weeks out from my race and now I have a cough that is unlikely to be gone by then, since it usually takes me an average of a month to fully get rid of a cough.  The only good side to this is that I'm being forced to take it easier in these weeks leading up to the race, when I would have kept training hard until the last week.  So the forced easier runs will probably help in the end.  But, depending on the coughing situation, I may not be able to get the PR I've been working so hard for.  My lungs have been the only thing preventing me from getting one before this, and they are now compromised.  I haven't completely given up hope yet, and I know there will be other chances next year, but this PR is what all my training has been leading up to for the last year, so it will be really hard if I show up to race day knowing it's not in the cards.  BUT I've been taking extra good care of myself since Wednesday, and even made chicken soup from an entire chicken for the first time ever today.  All I can do now is continue to take extra good care of myself and hope for the best!


The plan this week was a 4 mile tempo on Tuesday and 10 miles on Thursday.  But Tuesday we got out of school at 1 for Halloween, so I decided to take advantage of the extra time and do my long run.  After making plans to run a few miles with Chuck in the middle, I decided to push the first few.  I'm glad I ended up getting those fast miles in, because when Thursday came around I was too sick to do a tempo run.  The last mile was my fastest at 6:50, and miles 2 & 3 were also under 7:00, so I definitely got some tempo miles in this week.

This week : 

M : hill run 6.3 / 8:34 / 725 ft

T : circuit training 33:15

run 9 / 7:27 / 397 

(3.6 hard, 4 moderate w/Chuck, solo finish with last 1 hard)

W : rest

R : run 5 / 9:02 / 344 ft

F : rest 

Sa : walk 1.6

TRX 35:00

Su : run w/Corey 12.45 / 8:09 / 814 ft

total miles 32.7

In other news, there are only 2 months left in the year and I am 80+ miles ahead of my goal for 1500 miles in 2017.  October saw the fewest runs of any month, but the 3rd highest mileage, 2nd highest elevation gain, and it definitely had a greater percentage of faster runs!  I've already passed last year's mileage, and the 2 years before that were each under 1000.  It's nice to be injury free!

A week of running and the allergy plague

Allergies are so annoying.  I miss the blissfully allergy-free existence I had for my first 4 or so years in WV.  Now they are worse every year.  I ran out of Claritin a few weeks ago, but had plenty of Zyrtec left, so I switched to that.  This Tuesday my nose started running like a leaky faucet.  I went to CVS as soon as I got off work and picked up Claritin.  Sadly, not soon enough.  I got a sore throat.  And then my nose stopped dripping and got stuffed up.  And then the cough started.  Of course, this coincided with the first week of my full teaching schedule at school.  Teaching PE on Friday was...hard.  Any time I had to talk for more than about 5 seconds, and any time I had to raise my voice, I went into a coughing fit.  Hooray for whistles.  Anti-hooray for the fact that I chose activities that required explanations and question-answering.

Thanks to being sick, I messed up my running/sleep schedule this week.  I ran first thing in the morning on Monday and Tuesday, but it was chilly in the mornings this week, and on Wednesday there was no way I was dragging my allergy-ridden self out of bed to run in 50 degrees.  That's just asking to get sicker.  I took Wednesday off.  Thursday I had to drop my car off at Ford in the evening so it could get new parts installed on Friday morning.  I jogged home from Ford...the 6 mile wandering way, not the 1.5 mile direct way.  It felt really, really, glorious to run in the warm, sunshiny daylight after so many dark, cold, skunky runs.  I was hoping my car would be done by lunchtime so I could pick it up in my planning period, but it wasn't.  I didn't get to pick it up until after school, and didn't get home til 4.  I wanted to bike, but I had to be at a school picnic at 5, so there wasn't enough time for anything but a bike sprint and I was not in the mood for that.  I finally got on the bike today.  Not so much because I was in the mood for it, but because I needed to get on it before I forgot how.  I can't let myself give up the bike quite yet.  I just don't want to bike so much now that I am running a lot.  I like running so much more.  But my new bike should get here and get built sometime this week, and I'm guessing the shiny new bike will help me want to bike more.

This week : 

M : run 5

T : run 5.1

R : run 6

Sa : jog 1.5, race 3.1, jog 0.2

Su : bike 23

total miles run : 21

total miles biked : 23

an unfortunately lazy week

...because I have been coughing up a lung.

I took Monday off because there was no running water and I didn't want to run if I couldn't shower.  Tuesday I ran 6.1 miles and enjoyed a luxurious shower after 72 hours of filth.  I know it's a first world problem, but I hope I never have to go that long without washing my hair again.  Clearly I will not be going on any camping trips anytime soon.  Or possibly ever.  I ended up taking off the rest of the week because my cough got too bad to ignore.  I was coughing so hard it was making me gag.  Not much fun.  Really hard to sleep at night with that kind of a cough.  Lucky me I had a previously-scheduled doctor's appt on Thursday.  The doctor recommended Delsym cough syrup, so that's what I went with.  It seemed to make me cough even more violently at first, but once that wore off I coughed less, so I guess it worked somehow.  I decided that running in freezing air was probably not the best idea for my lungs while I have this cough, so I haven't run since Tuesday.  Last night I finally slept through the night without being disturbed by coughing fits, which was really nice.  I was so tempted to run today, but decided to give it one more day.  I will probably run tomorrow, before I go completely stir-crazy.

I was on the fence about the Blacksburg 10 miler for this year, but I found a friend to go with me, so I signed up a few days ago.  I am looking forward to it, I miss racing!  I just hope I am able to get some training in during the next 2 weeks.

I didn't get to run today, but at least I was able to venture out for a bit of fresh air.  

what a burr-filled mess!

hello there!

Rest and attempted recovery

My lungs are making me angry right now... I just about took the whole week off trying to give my lungs time to recover from last Saturday's race, but I still have a bad cough every time I lie down.  I only ran twice this week, and really didn't have a problem with coughing during or after the runs though.  So now I'm thinking that time off wasn't necessary.  Also, in the last day or two I could feel my leg muscles start dying a slow and painful death.  I had to run today because I could tell that restless leg was about to set in and that is not something I want to deal with right now if it can be avoided. (Actually, it is not something I EVER want to deal with again.)

I clearly strained my lungs during the race at Beckley.  It's possible that I need a new asthma medication, but I suspect that that is not the problem.  See, when I have an asthma attack, the only thing that will make it go away is medication.  No amount of "waiting and seeing" or water drinking or rest will ease my breathing when I have an asthma attack.  I just struggle for breath until I give up and use my inhaler.  However, when I lost my breath during the Beckley race, I regained the ability to breathe within 10 minutes of crossing the line.  Without medication.  Therefore, I don't think it was an asthma attack.  I think my lungs were just weaker than normal.  And I have a hypothesis about why.

I was proud of myself for learning to "jog" this summer.  I have always had a tendency to make every run as fast as I feel capable of.  I've never been good at "conversation pace" or slow jogs or anything other than going out the door and running hard.  If I wasn't out of breath and tired at the end of a run, it wasn't a good run.  But as I've started racing more, and increasing my weekly or daily mileage, I've gradually learned to slow it down.  I've learned to start out at an easy pace and keep that easy pace until I'm done.  I assumed that this could only be a good thing.  I was taking it easy on my legs so they could be fresher for races.  I was decreasing the chances of an overuse injury.

But over the past week as I have been wondering why I had so much more trouble breathing during the race than usual, it has occurred to me that while my legs still get exercise during a jog, but my lungs probably do not.  When I jog, I don't get even remotely out of breath.  When I get home, my breathing is just as easy as it was when I left.  So, I am suspecting that I have begun to un-condition my lungs.  I had just about cured my asthma from all the hard running I was doing.  My lungs were much stronger than they used to be.  And then I stopped exercising them.

My plan now is to start running harder at least a few times a week.  Just because I learned how to jog doesn't mean I should be jogging every day.  And if I do feel like I need to jog on any given day, I think I will skip the inhaler so that my lungs still get a workout.  I have jogged without the inhaler before; there was awhile where I could run without it as long as I didn't push too hard.  At some point, I caught a cold and went back to using it, and then never got around to trying to run without it again.  I think it's time to go back to trying to run without the inhaler.

Obviously my hypothesis could be wrong.  It could be that since I've been on Albuterol for so long, it is time to start a new medication.  But I wouldn't want to switch medications if that is not actually the case.  So I am going to give it some time and see if this blows over.  I'm going to give my hypothesis a chance and see what happens.  I've got 2 weeks til my next race to try and shock my lungs back into submission.

This week:

T: 3.87 / 30:23 / 7:51

Su: 11.21 / 1:28:26 / 7:53

total : 15.08

I got the new "Great Gatsby" from Redbox last night and watched it this morning.  While I was on the couch watching it, I was getting more and more restless.  I hadn't run since Tuesday and my legs were dying to pound some pavement.  I could hardly sleep last night because I was coughing so hard, but it seems that as long as I don't lie down, I don't cough much.  I decided it was time for a run, before my legs could drive me crazy.  I figured I'd start out with my normal loop, which is a 4.7 mile minimum, and that I would see how it felt.  If I felt like I needed to keep it short, I would do the bare loop.  If I felt good, I could add a neighborhood for 5.56, or a second neighborhood for 6.3.  It felt GREAT to stretch my legs and pound some pavement.  I added both extra neighborhoods and was still feeling fabulous.  So I just kept going.  I didn't start to tire until 1:10/9 miles.  I had a plan for the end of my run by then, and knew it was only about 2 more miles, so I decided to stick to that plan and not take a shortcut home just because I was starting to get tired.  (I am supposed to be training for a marathon, after all.  Gotta get some miles under my belt.  And practice running tired.)  I was really pleased with the overall run.  I ran strong until the last 2+ miles, when I was doing more of a jog.  I didn't cough at all.  

equine therapy

pretty lights

from one of my students:

Interruptions

Things were going pretty well.  I wasn't getting super high mileage, but I was at least running consistently, and I felt like I was on track for a decent 20 miler this weekend.  Then, Monday morning, I caught a cold.  And then my back decided it wanted to start hurting for no apparent reason.  By Thursday, I felt like I would throw my back out at any moment, and I had a terrible nasty cough, so I had to call it quits on the running.  This also happened to be my first full week of classes at school.  That was fun, since every time I talked for too long, or had to raise my voice at all, I went into a painful and nasty coughing fit.

So, I had to call off the 20 miler.  Technically, I don't mind at all since I didn't actually have any desire to run 20 miles.  However, I feel like it would be a good idea to get a 20 miler before I run a marathon in November.  I may try to do it this coming weekend, but if not, I'll just have to run the marathon without the training run.  I am not going to run 20 miles too close to my October half marathons.

Monday thru Wednesday I ran at 5 in the morning.  Thursday I almost went for a run but convinced myself to stay inside and do a light workout instead.  Sunday, after 3 days off that made my back neither better nor worse, I decided to try to get some mileage in, so I did a nice slow long-ish run.  I kept it slow enough not to strain my lungs and induce coughing, and I avoided steeper hills so as not to aggravate my back.

This week's runs:

M: 6.3 / 51:05 / 8:05

T: 4.7 / 42:44 / 9:05

W: 5.54 / 47:39 / 8:36 

R: mini workout

F: off

Sa: off

Su: 7.8 / 1:05:24 / 8:23

total : 24.34

This week's "workouts":

M: 10 burpees, 10 squats, 12 lunges

T: 10 squats, 10 lunges, 10 push-ups

W: 15 squats, 12 lunges

R: 4 rounds: 12 squats, 50 boxer twist w/10 lbs, 12 lunges, 10 leg raises, 30 sec plank, 5 push-ups

On Saturday, I did some office work at the bike shop, and then got to take pictures of this:

pretty cool.

I love playing with my camera.