Recovery run #2

My recovery from Hagg Lake is going better than I expected; I was able to run six miles tonight, two or three of them sub-eights. However, running that fast did tighten my left calf back up again. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing to do. Too late now!

Recovery Run #1

Sweetie and I walked 2.2 miles yesterday and my left calf was quite a painful knot. Trying to jump up to touch the rim of a basketball hoop didn’t help at all. Yes, I am an idiot. Tonight I went down to run with my usual group. It started out rough — that left calf was just a tight ball of knots. But after a mile and a half, it felt a lot looser and things went pretty well from then on. I got in four miles at a pace somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00 and my legs felt a lot better for having done so.

My toes are also recovering and I have a grim suspicion that they may take longer than the legs. Not only do I have some blisters, but my right index toe nail is in sad shape, looking dark and feeling painful. The toes don’t hurt while running — good socks and a good pair of shoes seem to keep it out of trouble — but I’m walking around the house a bit gingerly.

Race Report: 2009 Hagg Lake 50K

When you live in Tigard, it’s a really long way to Hagg Lake. It wouldn’t be too bad if there were a good highway going straight to it, but you have to take some pretty slow roads instead. Of course, I’m paranoid about getting to a race late, so I ended up getting there an hour early anyway. I sat in the car a bit, used the porta-potties, and registered.

I was surprised to see T, a friend I hadn’t run into in a while. He was also running the 50K. Steve, from my PRC running group, was there as well. I also saw Heather Daniels in the crowd at the start. I didn’t say hi, because I wasn’t up for the “you don’t know me but I read your blog” introduction. Checking the results later, I saw she came in over an hour before me, as fourth-place female. I bet she didn’t taper either…

I chatted with a few other people huddling around the heaters set up in the covered picnic area. It was around 32 degrees for the start, but warmed up quickly during the day. No rain, partially cloudy. Two years in a row now the weather gods have shined on Hagg Lake. Even so, there was a rumor going around that the course was really muddy. I decided to change into my waterproof socks. As it turned out, though, the rumor was mostly wrong. I think there might actually have been more muddy trail sections than last year, but there was much less of the deep stuff. There was almost nowhere where you were forced to dunk a whole shoe.

And we were off. There was a dead skunk (not smelling bad) lying on the road about a quarter mile up the out-and-back hill. It looked unflattened and intact, and its arm was draped lovingly around a can of beer. Did somebody arrange this scene for us, or did that skunk really drink itself to death? I may never know. (Sadly, I am not the only one who thought the skunk was a highlight.)

Three miles in, back at the start area, I stopped for a pee and ditched my jacket and gloves. I ran the out-and-back and the first lap, a total of 17 miles, with T. He needed to change shoes and I decided to change socks, since the mud wasn’t bad and the waterproof socks (plus the toe-sock liners I wear under them) are really warm. I had an extra pair of Injinji toe-socks, but decided to change into regular Smartwool socks instead, since the toesocks take a long time to get on. I paid the price later. My toes came out a lot more beat up and blistered than they normally would.

After we finally got started again, T gave me the old “don’t feel bad if I drop behind” line and I told him he shouldn’t feel bad if I did, since he had been running pretty strong until then: he definitely dragged me to a faster first lap than I would have ventured by myself. (We were back in the start/finish area in 1:52 something, which meant we had averaged 10:07 a mile.) But I guess he had said what he said because he was starting to feel it. Not long after, I started pulling away and didn’t see him again until the finish area.

I would say I got to mile 24 or a little further before I felt completely out of gas. That’s two miles further than last year, and I got to mile 22 quicker this year as well. So things were, objectively, going pretty well. Objectiveness don’t count for squat when you’re arguing with yourself to get jogging again at the top of a hill you walked up.  

Speaking of which, I really need to more seriously train for walking up hills. My “power hike” just sucks. It leaves me as tired as if I’d just run it. And it hurts my legs to switch between the two. I’ve never seriously applied myself to training for this aspect of long races, and it would probably pay off if I did.

Other than that, I guess I had some pretty good “flow” going… I can vaguely recall endless jogging, keeping on going when it didn’t feel like I could, but just hours later the time seems compressed and the misery seems abstract. I think that’s a good thing.

I didn’t absolutely kill myself during the last mile like I did last year, but my level of pain and immobility when I was done felt about the same. I would describe that level as: “ow ow ow ow.” I panted and stretched and sat and bent over and huddled and moaned and shuffled around getting some food and drink. Olga saw me and wisely observed that I was “walking funny.” Driving home through the west-side traffic was not fun, but I made it. I enjoyed my ritual celebration hamburger later that evening, this time at Five Guys Burgers and Fries. (Good burger, bad bun, good fries, atrociously crowded.)

I am not running another ultra in two weeks. I’m looking forward to a spring and summer of marathon-length or shorter road races.

Official results: 5:39:58. That breaks the 5:42 PR I set two weeks ago, and improves on my time last year by 16 minutes. 10:58 pace, 62nd finisher, 50th male, 17th in my age group.

Short Hagg Lake Update

50K in 5:39:58, my second PR for the distance in two weeks! My legs feel like they got hit by a truck. Did anyone get the license plate?

New Theme

I’ve changed the WordPress.com theme I’m using for the blog. I hope the new one doesn’t make your eyeballs explode.

Five days to Hagg Lake

It’s five days now until my second Hagg Lake 50K. The conditions might not be too bad: forecasts call for a little rain tomorrow, then dry for the rest of the week until race day, when we are supposed to see some showers. If that holds true, it will be muddier than last year, but nowhere near as bad as we deserve for tempting fate with a lakeside trail race in Oregon in February.

I ran just 5.3 miles this Saturday morning; I was going to do eight, but after two loops of the downtown waterfront I felt like stopping. A little voice was playing over and over in my head… “this run isn’t going to help you in a week, all it can do is hurt,” and I capitulated. My legs and everything felt fine.

I had a bit of a scare the day before the run, with some very strange transitory shooting pain in my right leg, seeming to radiate from the top of my fibula, the hard knobby thing on the ouside of your leg just a little below your knee. (I didn’t know that was the fibular head until I looked it up. I had never even noticed that knob until I was feeling around for where this crazy pain was coming from.) Anyway, this pain would come and go, maybe every three minutes at its peak, and last for about five or ten seconds. Between, there was no pain at all and nothing tender to the touch. There were no particular motions that made it happen, and I could be sitting or standing when it did. It felt like a nerve thing, maybe. I found a few people on the internet with similar issues, but it doesn’t seem to be a common runner’s issue. It’s not IT band syndrome, it seems — too low and the wrong kind of pain. It stopped happening after a while, came back once more that day, went away again, and hasn’t been back since.

Huffing and puffing

A brutal six-miler tonight, just me and one of the fast runners for most of it, him pushing me to sub-eight miles. Which it turns out is really, really fast for me when I’m still recovering from a 32 mile effort. My legs were OK; my lungs were exploding.

Recovery operations

I’ve got just two weeks after running 32 miles in six hours to get ready for Hagg Lake,  a muddy 50K. You know what? It’s kind of an exciting challenge for me. I’m interested to see what will happen. If I finish, I guess I qualify to join these fashion icons.

I’ve been eating protein, protein, protein to give my legs something to build their recovery on. Does it make a difference? Bah, it’s probably a placebo effect. If I think about it, I bet there’s a maximum amount of protein-reclaiming tissue healing that can happen in a day, and I bet a moderate protein intake is sufficient to reach that plateau. But we all know doing something is more fun than doing nothing, so I’m doing something and eating a lot of cottage cheese, chicken, almonds, beef jerky, yogurt, string cheese, eggs, sausage and ham for two weeks. My cholesterol will just have to suffer until then.

I ran 4.3 miles last night with the group and it didn’t feel too bad. I have some knots and painful spots on my left leg, but nothing bad enough to make jogging unenjoyable. The 4.3 miles put me into a new state in my virtual cross-country run: 2,352 miles in, I’ve left Colorado for Wyoming!

Race report: 2009 Pier Park six-hour run

I was trying to treat this as a long training run for Hagg Lake in two weeks. I probably pushed it harder than I should have, for that. But I had fun and I’m glad I did it. A couple of us PRC Beaverton runners carpooled from our corner of the city up to Pier Park in the St. John’s area of North Portland. The park itself was notable for its majestic fir trees and for the indigenous population of disc golfers that populated it. I smelled a lot of different kinds of smoke. 

The course was a 1.01 mile loop. Having run around it a few times, I can describe the loop pretty damned exactly, but I’ll spare you the detail and just say that it had its flat sections and its hilly sections, including two very steep little uphills and two very steep little downs. Here’s an elevation profile for the first 10 laps, but in this form it’s too compressed to really get much of a feel for it. 

Toward the start, I was mostly worried about my left leg. It held up fine through eight miles or so, then I started noticing it more and more. After about 14 or 15 miles, it’s discomfort seemed to top out and stabilize; after 18, all the rest of the pain in my body started to take my mind off that particular area. My hydration and nutrition through the race were good; I drank a lot of water and NUUN and Heed and I ate potato chips, Fritos, meat and cheese sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, half a bagel, chocolate gels, gummi bears, and Fig Newtons. No stomach problems.

After mile 18, things got harder as they usually do. I contemplated quitting any number of times. This was really hard and painful work for a damned training run. Crazy things were going on all up and down my left leg. My feet hurt every time I came back onto the paved portion of the loop.  Eventually I started taking it mile by mile. Any other approach seemed too ambitious.

After mile 24, I thought 25 would be a nice round number.

After mile 25, I thought I might as well complete a marathon.

During the 26th mile, I thought for a while about why I would want to run a 27th. I decided it would be because 27 miles would make for my second longest run ever. 

I have no idea why I did a 28th or 29th mile. Probably because people kept telling me not to stop. Peer pressure is a powerful force.

I ran a 30th mile because 30 is a nice round number. Also, I didn’t actually run it.  Sweetie showed up and we walked it together. That was nice. That was the only lap that I walked all of, though I walked long parts of a few others.

After that, 31 miles is 50K and  if I jogged it, I would break my old 50K PR by 18 minutes. Which I did: 50K in 5:42.

Anything after 31 would make my longest run ever, so there was no question about not doing 32. Besides, I knew the 32nd lap would be the last one I could fit in under the time limit — but I had a good 16 minutes to get it done, if I needed. In some ways, that was the easiest lap of all.

The organizers did a good job with this race. The support was great and everybody seemed to have a good time. Thanks, guys!

Betterish

Monday night I ran 4.5 miles, extremely slowly. I was hanging back with a couple of people new to the group run; one had IT band issues and the other was nursing a turned ankle. I didn’t check the pace, but it was probably in the 12 to 13 minute per mile range. My calf issue didn’t rear its ugly head during the run, so I’m happy.

My left leg

Well, crap.

I’ve still got the muscle pull or inflamed tendon or something in my upper calf. It starts feeling tight after running several miles. I made it just eight slow, flat miles Saturday before deciding to limit the damage and call it a day. My total mileage for the week? 15.8.

The six hour Pier Park run next Saturday? I’ll keep my fingers crossed. I can always show up and do just one or two hours if need be.