Surviving Chi-beria

If I had a crystal ball last December, I would not be training for this marathon right now.  No maybe, no doubt.  If I had seen then the winter of ’13-’14 that was ahead, I would have said “not this time”.  However, the fact that my running friend and I have run right through to the other side makes this marathon even more valiant.

I admit I was not especially enthusiastic about this marathon at the beginning.  Last year had been a difficult one, with the spring marathon, summer half ironman, fall metric century ride, and the crazy idea I conceived for November, “5K a Day”.  When December 10th rolled around and we were kicking off our training with an 8-mile long run, I felt more like I was doing it because I should, not because I wanted to.  I hoped and assumed the passion would strike at some point, because dropping out wasn’t an option but neither was slogging grudgingly through hundreds of training miles.

For my very first run of this marathon cycle, I wrote in my training log:

“Run 8 in 1:15:49 (9:28 pace): 20-degrees and 22 mph winds.  Tried to run perpendicular to the wind but [the road I chose] is so HILLY and there’s nothing to block the wind for 5-10 miles; I was almost blown off the road, and when trucks passed it was like hitting a wall.” (December 10, 2013)

The second run wasn’t much better:

“Run 9 in 1:31:14 (10:08 pace): Lots of snow on ground, more soreness prob bc of running so tentatively to not slip.” (December 17, 2013)

By the third, we should have been reading the clues:

“Run 6 in 55 (9:12 pace): on TM due to crazy cold, and sad to miss annual Christmas Eve run w/ Dawn.” (December 24, 2013)

Third time’s a charm?  After three in a row like that, we should have seen the signs!  As anyone familiar with the weather of this past winter knows, it got no better.  We did our 12-mile run inside my gym, alternating between 3 miles on the treadmill and 3 miles on the 16-laps/mile indoor track.  The constant turning/leaning left us with minor but undeniable injuries.  Fortunately, a running friend told us about a much bigger indoor track, and that became our savior.  Spending each week fretting when the weather and our schedules would allow us to do these long runs was exhausting.  Now, we could plan a time and just go to that track if needed.  Which we did.  A lot.

Adding up my miles from January and February, I ran 124 miles inside – treadmill or track – compared to only 84 miles outside.

I know better than to taunt Mother Nature when it comes to Chicago weather, but it looks like we are through the worst of it.  While we were not relishing the idea of 124 laps around that track for our 19-mile run, we were ready for it.  Fortunately, the day of our planned 19-mile run arrived sunny and 40-degrees, with most of the never-ending snow cleared off the roads.  Side note: I got us lost and we did 20-miles by accident; something that would not have happened on the indoor track!

Next week’s “official” 20-mile run is forecast to be 47-degrees with a 40% chance of rain.  Not great, but after what we’ve been through, that’s manageable.  I refuse to speculate on what St. Louis weather will be on April 6, but I am optimistic.  Somewhat.  There’s also the part of me that thinks Mother Nature will make it 80-degrees just to torment us.

This is one of the worst winters in Chicago’s history.  We ranked 3rd in total snowfall, though I don’t know the actual statistics for temperature.  I do know, however, that we had four days off school because it was too COLD, which has never once happened in my life, nor have I ever been aware of the ice cover on the Great Lakes before this year.  So, it’s been nasty.  On many a day, we were colder than Barrow, Alaska, which is north of the arctic circle.  The term Chi-Beria was coined, combining Chicago and Siberia.  We heard the term “Polar Vortex” just about every time we flipped on the news.  Road salt became scarce about mid-January, and the temperature never cracked freezing for weeks, making running on the roads nearly impossible even in between bouts of snow and dangerously cold temperatures.

When I was training for my first marathon, I was told to never look more than two weeks ahead, or it would be too overwhelming.  I believe that’s what helped us Survive Chi-Beria.  We had no CHOICE but to focus only on the next run, and the next, and the next.  When can we fit it in, what will the weather be, where can we do it?  There was absolutely no way to contemplate what was farther ahead, so we didn’t.  And my inner Pollyanna kept convincing me that “THIS has got to be the last of it”.

The ten-day forecast looks great in terms of temperature, but I remind my inner Pollyanna that some spring weather conditions are miserable, too.  Like wind.  I remain cautiously optimistic.

Still, never ONCE, through all this, did we skip a single run due to weather.  We adapted, rearranged schedules, laughed at our own insane fortitude.  Clicked off lap after lap on the indoor track.

Excuses get you nowhere.

Rest Day

Rest days are important.  In past training seasons, they were also pretty easy to come by, back before I became a fitness instructor.  Now, there’s a very delicate balancing act between my training plan and the classes I teach.  This is not a complaint, because I love it!  Before, I’d always slack off on strength training or flexibility, but that’s no longer an issue since I teach BodyPump and yoga.  When all I was doing was running four days a week, I could rearrange or reschedule runs pretty easily.  But now, with triathlon training, I really need to keep my workouts on the planned days or it’ll throw everything off.  Long swim, long bike, long run – I maintain those on my schedule as strictly as though they were a job.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve learned I need to schedule my rest day just as strictly.

I love working at our Y, we are like a family and we help each other out as much as we can.  Sub requests are sent around all the time and it’s rare for anyone to have a hard time getting their classes covered.  A few weeks ago, I found that I had accepted a few too many extra classes. In addition to my regular stuff, I had a Pilates and three extra cycle classes to teach within four days, one of them on my rest day.  That meant five days in a row of cycle, and 13 days in a row of hard workouts.  I told myself I’d take it easy, keep the gears low while keeping the intensity high for the members.  But that didn’t happen.  I get on that bike, I get fired up, and I can’t stop myself from going all out.

I was so beat down after that it took me about two weeks to feel right again with my training.  And that’s when I truly recognized the importance of a rest day.  You can hear all the experts and amateurs alike talking about its importance, but sometimes it takes a little personal experience to drive it home.

There are several important benefits to a rest day.

Physical Recovery – When you work out, your muscle fibers are literally torn apart.  They rebuild to become stronger, but that can only happen when you stop tearing them down.  Going too many days in a row without a break will lead to serious muscle fatigue.  A rest day gives your muscles a chance to knit themselves back together stronger and tougher.  What’s more, rest gives muscles a chance to refill their glycogen stores.  Without this stored-up glucose the muscles use, the fatigue can become hard to fight through.

Prevent Injury – Guess what happens if you keep training with your muscle fibers broken down and depleted of glycogen?

Mental Recovery –  Most training plans are about 16-weeks long.  That’s a long time to keep focused, to keep increasing your efforts, to keep kicking your own ass.  You need that one day a week to look forward to if you’re going to stay focused and work hard.  Pushing through a hard ride knowing that you have the next day off is much easier than pushing through with no end in sight.

Enjoy Life – Waking up at 5 am to cycle 40 miles has a way of making you somewhat useless for the rest of the day.  So you send your kids to play in the backyard instead of taking them to tear up the woods.  You let them spend a little more time on the Wii while you sit with your legs up reading the latest Runner’s World.  You need a rest day to do all those things you might otherwise be too worn out to do.  Rest days might include like strolling along the river while your kids chuck rocks into the water or hunt for snakes.  Maybe it’s spending a few hours in the kitchen whipping up a whole bunch of yummy Paleo goodies to freeze and enjoy over the next month.  Or maybe it’s as simple as agreeing to a hula hoop contest with your daughter.

Today, I’ll be heading to Michael’s to buy supplies to make cool cards for the kids’ teachers.  Then actually making them.  Then seeing Epic with the family.  And staying clean and sweat-free all day!  Training is great – but sometimes NOT training is pretty awesome too.

Rain Over Me

During my previous marathon experiences, I followed the schedule to the L E T T E R.  I only skipped a run if I was on death’s door, and I almost never flip-flopped days.  This time, we’ve flipped the long runs from one week to the next to accommodate our schedules, illnesses and injuries, and I don’t even think I have a routine for the other two runs I do.  It’s usually Saturday and Sunday, but there’s no real pattern to which day I do the medium run and which day I do the shortie.

This morning, Friday, I was looking ahead to figure out when I should do these runs.  I have an extra cycle class to teach on Saturday, my normal cycle class on Sunday, and then the 20-miler is coming up on Tuesday.  Even though I was looking forward to going to Master’s swim this morning – something I’ve rarely done in the past 14 weeks – I decided to go ahead and do the week’s medium 9-mile run this afternoon.

A big part of my decision process was the weather.  The forecast at 8:00 am said that at 1:00 pm it would be mostly cloudy, 44’F, 0% chance of precipitation, and 3 mph winds.  Runners have a word for that kind of weather: “perfect”.

So imagine my surprise when I dropped my daughter off at school at 12:15 pm to see the first drops of rain starting.  Huh, I thought.  Well, surely it can’t last, since there is a ZERO percent chance of rain for right now.

I drove out to my favorite trail, my dismay growing along with the intensity of the rain.  Granted, it never got much beyond a serious drizzle, but I had been promised the elusive perfect weather.

My music often speaks to me during my runs, coincidences happen far more often than is statistically likely.  Today, I chose the first song, Eye of the Tiger, because I’m obsessed with it.  But the second song, the first one that chance chose for me, was Pitbull and Marc Anthony’s Rain Over Me.  

I had been feeling a bit cheated, but mostly okay.  Then I started to remember that I like running in the rain.  I started to take note of all the awesomeness about this run.  My legs were feeling tired but loose from the swim.  I was wearing capris for the first time since last fall, and only a long-sleeved and short-sleeved shirt.  I felt light and unencumbered by the layer upon layer I am used to wearing.  The trail was not flooded.  I noticed with relief that the lake had risen back to its normal, pre-drought level.  The birds were chirping and flitting across the path.  I saw my deer friends.  I could watch the drops mottling the surface of the lake, and creating cool patterns in the trail’s puddles.  I saw all the brown brush and bare trees and sensed their imminent explosion into green, all thanks to the rain.

My partners and I ran 10 miles on Tuesday at a 10:30 pace.  Today’s soggy run came in over a minute per mile faster – at a 9:26 pace, and that’s after 2500 yards in the pool this morning.  While this run wasn’t what I expected, it felt amazing and wonderful.  I’m glad I got that reminder.  You don’t always get what you were hoping for, but with the right attitude it can still be a win.

 

Mother Nature Hates Me

When my friends and I decided to run a spring marathon, we were so enthusiastic about training through the coldest part of the year.  We picked Tuesdays for our long runs to keep our weekends open and also because it seemed like a good idea, what with the kids being in school and all.

We failed to realize that good ole Mother Nature was going to save the winter’s ugliest weather for Tuesdays, waiting until the runs get really long.  We were spoiled in the early part of the winter, with hardly any measurable snow.  It’s only now – in late February and early March when the runs are well past the half-marathon level, that the snows have come.  I wrote about last Tuesday’s snowstorm in my Brutal 16 post.  In that case, we chose to run the previous night.  We want to never have to do that again.  This week we’re up to a very intimidating 18 miles, though, and we’re hit with yet another wicked winter storm.

The schools had already called a snow day at 9:15 last night.  The snow was supposed to start around 3 am, but I woke up at 7:00 am to find barely a dusting.  We got at least an inch before 9 am, though, and, the weather map shows a storm system wider than the state that’s barely moving.  It should begin to taper off at roughly 2 am with a grand total of 6-10 inches.  Even if tomorrow was an option according to our schedules, there’s no way we could expect the plows to have sufficiently cleared the roads for us.

Lovely day to run 18 miles

So, the 18 will have to wait until Thursday.

As for today, I plan on getting in six miles on my treadmill.  My treadmill…which I discovered yesterday was dead.  If only I could find a way to blame Mother Nature for that.  Fortunately my husband is a master of all things technological and ripped the whole thing apart, cleaned some contacts, replaced some fuses, and got it working again.  Pshew!!

If anyone has any ideas on how I can appease Mother Nature, I’d really appreciate it.  We have our ultimate training run in two weeks – 20 miles.  I’d like nice weather for that, please.

My New Obsession: BodyPump

Those who know Les Mills BodyPump, love Les Mills BodyPump.  I had very little idea what it was when I, along with six other instructors from my gym, signed up for the training.  I had only heard it was low-weight, high-rep group weight training.  I thought, sounds cool, sign me up!  What I found is that it is so very much cooler than I hoped for.

The training was a bit intimidating.  It was two full days, 18 hours total.  Prior to this, I had done workshops for TRX and Spinning, both just a single 8-hour day.  I was certainly perplexed about what could fill up that much time.  Even more perplexing was that we were to receive materials ahead of time and had to be prepared to teach on the first day of training.  Whaaa?  I’m going to learn how to teach this, and they want me to be able to teach it at the training?

BodyPump is a branded and licensed class; Les Mills pours countless hours into finding the perfect songs, and then choreographing moves to them.  Every class has ten tracks, and each track corresponds to one muscle group.  The first song is warm up, the second song is squats, third is chest, etc.  The movements are all pretty basic, but become elevated by the seamless connection between the music and the moves.  In the squat track, for instance, you literally doing squats for five minutes with a loaded barbell on your shoulder.  It sounds hard, and it is, but it is NOT tedious.  The tempo changes of the music are echoed in the tempo changes of the squat.  Down for 2 counts, up for 2 counts for a few reps, then you hit some super slow 4 counts down, 4 counts up.  It burns.  Then you take it low for a few more, and that burns harder.  Just when you think you can’t take any more it switches to singles – 1 down, 1 up – and this feels so liberating after all the slow motion.  All the tracks work similarly to that.  The tempo changes and precision of movement make the move a million times more efficient than just squatting up and down for five minutes.

My training group
I’m in the gray hoodie, fifth from the left in back

It’s always good to add new things to your fitness routine.  You just keep going along at your normal routine, thinking you’re in good shape.  It takes something new to show you where you are not.  I’ve been aware of my need to add in strength training to my routine for some time now.  But frankly, I’m not a big fan of just lifting weights.  There was that Planet Fitness commercial awhile back with a huge bodybuilder, who could only say, “I lift sings up and I put dem down.”  That’s how I feel in the weight room, and it’s hard to get excited about that, on my own.

That’s where BodyPump is so different, especially as the instructor.  I feel so connected to the music, letting it lift me up and carry me through the hard activities.  There are all the members there who put their trust in me to lead them through an amazing workout.  I connect to them, encouraging them to carry on and in turn receiving energy back from the crowd.  I worried that the members would get bored repeating the same workout, and some might.  But for me, I’ve listened to the songs and practiced the tracks so much that it would probably be six months’ worth of weekly classes, and I’m not sick of it yet!  And as soon as I get my video submitted I’m going to begin working on the alternative tracks and variations, and before I know it it will be time to learn the next release.

Since the training in January, I’ve been coteaching two classes a week with two of the most wonderful women I know.  We work well together, are all humble about giving and receiving advice, and are all crazy excited about this class format.  We’ve each learned one or two more tracks a week, mixing up who teaches what, until we all know them all.  I am so grateful to have gone through this journey with them, and know that the bond forged over BodyPump is going to last.  So that’s why I’m both excited and saddened that we’re ready to go solo.  Last night was my first time teaching solo.  In my next post I’ll let you know how it went!