Saturday

On the road, and sweltering.

We had a nice relaxed night yesterday, at a barbeque round pete & em's. I even treated myself to a glass of wine (see that boat- it's pushed right out!) Turns out iced tea is an excellent beer substitute- much less sickly than most other drinks, & great for hydrating.

Speaking of hydrating, water intake's going to be all important today - tom's driving us up just now and it's very hot indeed, so keeping the levels topped right up is order of the day.

Latest weather reports are still hot, but mercifully predicting some rain showers in the early afternoon tomorrow. C'mon Scotland- surely a bit of rain isn't too much to ask for!

Alex is making us home made lasagna this eve (star!), then an early night. As you might tell from the way this post is jumping about between different topics, the nerves are back. Hopefully a nice chilled out eve will settle them down so we can get a decent sleep.

Today's mantra: it's just another run.

It's just another run.

Thursday

Did the Manchester 10k at the weekend. I wasn't going for any particular time, but felt good so ended up going quite quick- I got 42:25, which is quite a chunk off my previous personal best. It's strange how sometimes, if you take the pressure off, you end up doing better than you expected anyway.

I felt a slight twinge from my knee around 4km, but it went away & didn't come back for the rest of the race. Excellent news, except it didn't feel all that great later in the evening. After a few days of rest, light cross training & stretches, it's pretty much gone, so it looks like I'm on for Sunday.

It's an odd waiting game at the moment- we can't go out, but can't do any useful training either, so want it to be Sunday and get on with it.

I had a quick look at the weather. I figure it's probably pretty accurate at this point, and it's looking a bit on the hot side- 21 degrees and patchy clouds. Not great news, so slow with plenty of water is order of the day.

3 days. Bring it on.

Three lessons in sports therapy, learnt the hard way. Part 3

Lesson 3: Iliotibial Band Syndrome is bad (but hopefully not really bad?)

Remember that knee I was telling you about?

During my next 7 mile run, it was fine for the first 5 miles. During the 4 mile run after that, it was fine for the first two miles.
Recognising this was heading in the wrong direction, I held back. I didn't do any running that weekend, and went to a physio the Monday after.

Turns out I've got something quite common called iliotibial band syndrome (ITBS).

There's a band of tissue running down the outside of the leg, from hip to knee joint, that's key in keeping your knees straight when running. On the left side, it's rubbing against the knee, causing inflamation. In my case, it's caused by excess tension in my glutial muscles (I am, quite literally, a tight-arse), meaning they can't do their job properly.

The upshot is I'm basically fine, until quite a way into a run (about 6 miles, currently), when it starts hurting, and if I ran through it, it starts hurting a lot. So I don't :)

Good new is that it's nothing difficult to fix- the inflamation should go down with rest & ibuprofen, and I've got a foam roller & some exercises I'm doing everyday to release tension in the thigh.

I've decided there's nothing to be gained a this point by trying to do long runs, so I've just got to try to keep as fit as poss over the next few weeks without exhasperating it. I went for a swim last weekend, which was good (well, I hate front crawl, so not that good, but still). I did a couple of hours on cross-trainers at the gym this week, which I seem to be able to use without feeling hit, which is very good news.

It's frustrating, cos it doesn't hurt at all when I'm just walking about, and the rest of me is hankering to do some really long runs, but gonna resist.

I've got a mini dress rehearsal next weekend, with the Manchester 10km. My brother's coming up to run it, and my folks are coming down to watch. I'm gonna do it, though I'm not going for a PB.

If I get serious issues on that one, I might have to reconsider, but for the moment I'm still gonna at least give edinburgh a shot.


W.

Three lessons in sports therapy, learnt the hard way. Part 2

Lesson 2: ice baths are surprising good
The sciencey bit here is a little more controversial, but it's thought that by sitting in feckin' cold water for 10 minutes or so helps to:
- numb your aching legs, stopping them from hurting, and
- cause a rush of blood to the legs, flushing out the built up lactic acids, reducing the time for recovery

Studies into these effects have had varied results, but I thought I'd give it a go.

Luckily, the first run I decided to do this on (the 20-mile epic from the last post) was a warm day, so it didn't feel like that much of a chore when I got back. I filled the bath deep enough to cover my legs with cold water, then added a bag of ice (with a second back for top-ups.

Warm tea on-hand, I jumped in, and swore. A Lot.

After about 2 minutes of violent shivering, your body gets used to it, and it isn't actually as unpleasant as I was expecting. Your legs go very cold and kinda numb, stopping them from hurting, which helped. After about 12 minutes of this, I got out, rubbed feeling back in my legs, and waited for them to warm up a bit before a very welcome, and very hot, shower.

It's not exactly a controlled trial, but I certainly found I felt a lot better than I would have expected the next day. I'm convinced enough to keep trying ice baths after long runs. Except, right now, I can't do any long runs anyway. More on that in my next post...

Three lessons in sports therapy, learnt the hard way. Part 1

Before we start, I'd like to apologise to anyone who really knows about sports science and/or physiotherapy, for undoubtedly getting the detail horribly wrong.

I've had an eventful few weeks, and right now I'm seriously worried about whether I'll be able to run this damned thing.

It all started on the saturday after my last post - my first go at a 20 mile run.
Miles 1-18: fantastic.
Miles 19-20: Oh dear God.

In the last few weeks I've learnt a bunch of really hard lessons about distance running, so I thought I'd go through them in 3 parts

Lesson 1: hitting the wall is really bad
Your body can store a limited amount of fuel known as glycogen, in the liver, muscles and red blood cells. This can readily be broken down into glucose for you to use when doing things like running. The problem is, the body only stores around 1500-2000 calories worth. Which, on this particular run, got me through the first 18 miles.
After which...

•  I couldn't think straight – I was nearly in tears, and got lost despite being in my own back yard, and having a GPS watch telling me where to go
• my legs Just Wouldn't Work Any More
• the outside of my left knee started hurting. A lot. (Unfortunately, we'll be coming back to this in lesson 3)

I've since learnt that the key to not hitting the wall is to load up on carbs in the days before big runs, and to eat sports tablets, gels or jelly babies every 20 minutes or so during the run itself, to keep the glucose levels up.

I'm very glad I've found this out now, and seriously hope I get another shot at at 20-miler before the marathon to try it out in practice.

Meanwhile, I eventually got home and jumped straight into an ice bath. more about that in lesson 2...


p.s. In better news, I Just met my sponsorship target! :-D Thank you all so much - it's going to a wonderful cause, and is a big motivation to keep going right now.

W.x

New Toys

Woo - new toy! :)

We had significant birthdays for both me & my mum at the easter weekend (I'm no longer in my twenties - sob!), so we had the whole family back in Preston. Lots of tasty food and wine later, I was on the way home with a bag full of champagne, tasty goodies, and one of these :-D

Which means the garmin pages I've been linking to now have even more stuff on them, including maps of where I've been. Which I reckon is way cool, in an geeky kinda way :)


Examples are here (from monday) and here (from this evening).

The first was a heart rate interval session.  After a mile or so of warming up, run a mile whilst trying to keep a high heartrate (around 180bpm in my case), then half a mile at a much lower recovery rate (150-160).  Repeat.

Doing this kind of training repeatedly helps make your heart more efficient, meaning you can work harder at the same heartrate.  In other words, it makes you faster.  I'm pretty happy with where I am so far with the distance, so I've been able to concentrate on some more varied training over the last few weeks, including some fast runs, some intervals, and even fell running (shudder!)

The other big change is that we now have showers at work, so I can do runs from work at lunchtime or running in in this morning (as I'm planning tomorrow).  Less than 7 weeks to go, so having opportunities to squeeze in more miles always helps.

Longest week so far

Great weather this week. For the first time this year, I ran home on Wednesday down the canal. You can get on the canal at the end of deansgate, follow it all the way out past old trafford and stretford, get on the waterpark, and pop out at the back of chorlton. Running home after work is significant, because the route isn't lit, so you can only do it in daylight. It'll be even easier in a few weeks, when the clocks change :) Garmin details here.

After a quiet saturday, I got up this morning for an uber-run. Check out this map. My original plans was to head down a cycle lane along an old railway track, heading anti-clockwise across south Manchester, out to gorton reservoir, around the reservoir and then back. However, the railway line turned out to be not particularly inspiring (it's essentially a big ditch).

So instead, having got to the reservoir, i turned left, and headed off looking for the ashton canal. Turned out there was an easy route there, and so I could follow it into town, back out again, and back on the usual route home through stretford.

18 miles felt like a bloomin' long way - I'm trying not to think about the 8 miles more I'll have to do in a few months time :-/

I've been pretty wiped out this afternoon, but many meals later I'm not feeling too bad. 33 miles in total this week, which is a new record.

Garmin data for the 18-mile loop this morning is here.

Will.

p.s. Who knew that the mighty Alan Turing could run a marathon in 2:46?! Very interesting opinion piece in The Guardian, here.