5k on the brain

deciding i needed to give my poor defenseless shins a rest, and wanting to break away from the monotony of starting my blogs with olie whining at 5 am, aj and i decided to take friday morning off. we thought it would be more beneficial to cross-train that evening and save our last two runs of the week for saturday and sunday.

cross-training has been both enjoyable and entertaining the past few days. to our amusement we have been inadvertently working out with this kid named andrew. my guess is that andrew is in the seventh grade, about 4'9" and sitting pretty at 85 pounds. to paint you an even more vivid picture he looks like he'd be the default kid casted as "boy number 2" in a diary of anne frank remake. i'm sure this poor kid gets made fun of enough at school, so i really do not plan on jumping on the bandwagon, but he is quite interesting to watch.

yesterday andrew came into the workout room with another pubescent and equally awkward kid. apparently andrew had been raving about the 60 pounds he could now curl and wanted to show off to said pal. you see, normally i am the person who roots for the underdog. normally i would take one look at andrew and applaud him for all of his efforts. you can tell that inside his tiny frame he is just dying to be like some of the boys at his school that are starting to fill-out and come into their manhood. poor andrew is far from filling anything out.. except maybe a scantron test in seventh grade social studies. i'm sure he'd excel at that.

but anyway, i am digressing from digression. i really have no moral of the story with andrew. he is fun to watch when he makes fish-faces while doing lateral pull-downs and i just thought he deserved a cameo in here somewhere. (i'm hoping he'll become a regular.)

today aj and i slept in. we woke up to the sun shinning in though our window and the wind crashing into the side of our building. i took olie outside to see that it was a beautiful and sunny 46˚ day with some frightening 37 mph gusting winds. we got all wrapped up to protect ourselves from the wind and set out for a 5k run. my shins where doing pretty good, even though there was some pain on impact here and there when i started. as i continued on, the pain got a little more intense and breathing became an issue as well.

over a year ago i was having a lot of chest pains and breathing problems. i went to the doctor and she told me that she did not want to declare me asthmatic, but that i did breath like someone with asthma. she put me on medication and the problem started to go away. feeling like i didn't want to be on medication forever i chose to stop inhaling steroids and the breathing problems never returned. i don't think that i have any kind of breathing problem and i know i don't have asthma. i think that my lungs just aren't as strong as they could be, and through all of this training i feel like they are getting stronger everyday. the natural way.

with that in mind while i was running, i knew i was not going to have an asthma attack or keel over from lack of oxygen into my lungs so i kept pushing. i realized early on that it is just more difficult to breath when the wind is smacking you in the face at over 30 miles per hour. i really tried to focus on a rhythm to my breathing and it seemed to help. in addition to the pain in my shins and the difficulty breathing, the mucus in my face was going nuts! i always try to throw a napkin or two in my hoodie pocket before a run and luckily today was one of the days i remembered it! every time i slowed down to catch my breath i blew my nose and spit out the incredibly thick funk in my mouth. nice imagery, i know, but it's what helped me keep going.

i altered my route today so that i did not have to run the cal de sac with the hill, and i tried to not run directly into the wind too much either. running into the wind is pretty much like trying to swim in chocolate pudding. it might feel a little refreshing, but you get nowhere.

as the man in my ipod starting counting down the kilometers i tried to not walk too much, despite the fact a kilometer means nothing to me. as i closed in on 800 meters left i got a sudden burst of energy. i had just passed aj a block back and i had really expected him to finish his 5k hours before me. i had to keep running. making a turn around a small cal de sac and into the wind, i knew my final stretch was going to be a struggle. i passed a kid on a bike who looked like he'd never seen a person run for fun before in his life, but luckily he knew some runner/biker sidewalk etiquette and gracefully peddled in the grass giving me ample room to pass. at that moment the man in my ipod congratulated me on completing my goal of running 5k and i abruptly cut him off by ending the workout. i generally leave my ipod on during my walking cool-down just to have the added milage, but this time i was very focused on short run time and a quick average pace.

i headed back to the apartment and saw aj still standing outside. i waved my arms at him from a distance and he started heading towards me. seeing that he was not huffing and puffing like i was i knew he had finished before me but the fact he was still outside made me feel great. maybe i had actually finished with a pretty good time. we walked over to the sauna and shared our experience with the 5k and our results. aj had finished in 31 minutes, cutting 40 seconds off of his last 5k! i, amazingly, only finished about 4 minutes behind aj at 35 minutes! i couldn't believe it.

while i didn't run the entire thing, i am very confident that i will be able to run the entire 5k we just signed up for on march 15!!! (yes, that was worthy of three exclamation points!) this will be our first official race and we are very excited! we are going to continue to run four times per week and cross-train as often as we can find time for. come race day we are going to be fit and ready!

something to write home about

this morning i awoke to the sound of, you guessed it, olie and his whining. i scanned the floor for my alarm clock but it wasn't where i usually keep it. i pulled myself up as far as i could in my state of confusion and located it on the floor on the far side of my night stand. as i strained to read it's display through the blurriness of just waking up it read: BOS. bos? what kind of time is bos? i stared at it a bit longer thinking the letters would magically turn into numbers but they didn't. instead i came out of my delirium and realized the clock was sitting upside down. i remembered grabbing it off of the night stand after i had accidently fallen asleep at 10 pm, set it for 5:30 am, then carelessly tossed it in the general direction of where it usually sits. it all made sense. it was 5:08 and that also made sense since olie was crying. like clockwork, if he's not in bed with us, he bitches at 5 am. you'd think we owned a rooster.

i got up to get the little cock (pun intended) out of his cage and put him back in bed with us. we all dozed off for about 20 minutes until the delightful sound of the alarm clock was disintegrating my ears. i thought about moving it ahead to 6 am so i could get some more z's, but remembered how excited i was last night for this morning's run. plus, i didn't want to hear the damn thing go off again. i told aj it was time to run, flipped on the lights and left the room. as i was getting dressed aj took the little cry baby outside and came back in with bad news. it was cold out. aj wasn't so pumped to run yet another cold and windy morning, but he continued along with our routine as usual. i grabbed a scarf and wrapped it around my head as if it were snowing klondike bars outside. i knew i'd warm up early in the run, but i also knew i complain a lot (inside my head) if i didn't have extra protection against the cold and wind.

we got outside a little before 6 am and i was more than pumped. keep in mind, i hadn't run since the hurricane of '08 hit beavercreek, ohio two days prior. in that storm i had run over 10 consecutive minutes before i got washed away with the flood and i was determined to do the same today. now that i run the same route each day i know (within feet) where certain minute marks are. (ie. 5 minute mark, 10 minute mark.) before i knew it i was blazing by 5 minutes. then i hit 10 minutes. i couldn't believe how easy it came. i decided i could start walking once the man in my ipod told me i had reached a mile, so i kept going. still in running-mode i approached a cal de sac. not the cute little five house wooded cal de sac that i like, that one is in my five minute mark. no, this was the big daddy hill cal de sac. the one that i had just mastered. i knew that i'd reach my one mile on this cal de sac so i just kept going. when the man in my ipod gave me the go i could walk again and the cal de sac wouldn't be so bad. as i reached the top of the cal de sac the man in my ipod still hadn't alerted me of my first mile. had i not gone as far as i had thought? did i make the man in my ipod mad and now he's not talking to me? i felt like i had almost ran another five minutes since the last time he had spoken to me. it was with that thought that i remembered he only tells me how i'm doing at five minute intervals. "fifteen-minutes completed," he told me. wow. i couldn't believe i had not walked a step of it yet.

i usually begin walking when i feel as though i'm not getting enough oxygen into my lungs. going at a slower pace for about a minute helps me catch my breath and then i can continue on my merry way. well, i had ran through all of that and found myself breathing very steadily and deeply. i realized it was never anything i needed to walk over, it was just something i needed to push through.

"halfway through; only 17.5 minutes remaining." all this time and i still was running. well, if you want to call it that. i was definitely going through the motions, but probably would have gotten run over if the mall walkers accidently wondered out of the mall and onto this road. that may sound far fetched, but i could see the mall from where i was. good thing they don't open the doors until i'm long gone and at work. blogging.

with my shins starting to hurt at this point i decided i should start walking. but when? i am way anal about things and like to use round numbers, make things even and always follow some type of order. (and no, i do not have ocd.) i chose to start walking once i had made one entire lap around the pseudo track i made out of my neighborhood. when i reached my landmark i hit the center button on my ipod to see how i had done so far. believe it or not i had ran 1.8 miles at an average of 11'2"/mile. amazing. i never would have guessed i'd be doing so well only a week and a half into our training. (especially considering my track record with running. yikes.)

as i took my first walking step i realized my shins were really bothering me. i tried altering my form a bit to see if i could get little stretches in without stopping. i succeeded with this a little and then tried running more. no luck. still hurt! i walked a little further, and from a distance i set a landmark where i'd start running again. as i approached the landmark (aka some family's driveway) i started running again, but this time with a little less discomfort. i realized the pain had faded enough with my brief walk that i could run the rest of it. and i did.

while the man in my ipod started counting down the minutes i had left, i rerouted myself to end my run closer to my apartment. with only two minutes remaining i ran on a small stretch of sidewalk that takes you away from my apartment, out to a main road with the intention of turning back at the one minute mark. when alerted, i turned around and couldn't believe i had almost ran for 35 consecutive minutes. the joy must have really thrown me off because i didn't see the two inch bump in the sidewalk ahead. you see, the entrance to our complex is a very cute, winding street that passes a few mallard-filled ponds and is lined with trees.. and, as trees grow, their roots often times push sidewalks up, right in front of unsuspecting runners who are off in their own dreamworld. all of a sudden i kicked what felt like the berlin wall (pre david hasselhoff performance) and everything went into slow-motion.

the music dancing from my ipod faded out into the distance, my hands swung out in front of me preparing for impact and time stood still. realizing what happening, my left foot came to the rescue, basically dislocating itself like a snake's jaw, and flew way out in front of my plummeting body. i caught myself! my music kicked back in, i brought my arms back down and time found it's rhythm. "congratulations," said the man in my ipod. was he mocking my sloppy near-fatal fall? he continued on to tell me i had completed my run, but i think he was laughing at me on the inside.

for my next run i may switch it over so there is a girl inside my ipod. i think she'd be more understanding with a mini crisis like that.