Year: 2016

Yes, even though it’s now Friday, I’m still going to do a wrap up of the previous week. I need to rely on my notes for anything that happened before I left for New York, though.

I’ll save any comments about how I feel physically post-marathon for either the race report or next week’s wrap-up.

Weight Check: For my official weigh-in, I’m gonna go with Friday morning, pre-run, and that’s 159.9, unchanged from my last official weigh-in. I got down to 159.3 after my Friday run, so I’m going with that as my Race Weight.

I didn’t take good notes on my eating. I think I limited myself to one can of Mountain Dew each day I was in the office (Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday), not many snacks, and one beer on Wednesday night and Thursday night. So, not too bad.

Total: 44.65 miles

My notes for Monday just say nice weather (it was 55) and my legs felt OK, so I have no idea why I ended up with .02.

Tuesday was my last workout run for a while, but at least it wasn’t too complicated. The weather was crappy (63 and humid in November?!?), but I don’t think it affected me too much. My splits on the intervals were 10:46, 10:27, and 10:14, and my legs felt OK.

Thursday my legs felt fine. I had been doing my 4 mile runs on the treadmill, but for reasons that I don’t remember, I actually did this one outdoors. I made the comment that the weather was pretty close to what I’d see in New York City, and I was pretty close.

Friday was my last run, and as I expected, I had to make it a 5K. Not a great run, not great conditions (62 and humid), but I got through, and officially ended my training program.

Sunday was The Big One. 5:28:01. More details to come in my Race Report. Early next week, maybe? It’s not a PR, but I’m OK with it. I’m still going back to run it again and get a PR, though.

For whatever you want to call the week of November 7 (Normally I’d call it next week, but it’s now Friday, so…?), my plan was to rest until Thursday (which I did), then go out again on Saturday, and ideally end up with at least 10 miles so I can stay in double digits.

I’ll be back with another weekly wrap-up in, uh, 2 days.

So, I’m back home. I don’t have much time, but I wanted to pop in just to say that I made it through the New York City Marathon in 5:28:01. Sadly, that means I won’t be able to change the banner, as City of Oaks is still my marathon PR. I’ve already decided that I’m going to run New York City again, but probably not next year.

The Race Report is going to take some time. I’m feeling better about the race than I thought I would, considering I missed all 3 of my goals. I’m still slightly disappointed in my time, especially since I know this one was my fault. On the plus side, I know exactly what I did wrong. I’ll go into more details in the full Race Report.

One thing that I have to say, the crowd support was absolutely amazing. It was so much fun running through the city, even on the miles when I wasn’t feeling so great. I shouldn’t really be surprised, but I’m proud of how New York City showed up on Sunday, and I’m proud to say that I was born there.

That’s why I’m determined to run NYC again. I know I can fix what I did wrong, and the spectators were the best.

As I write this, it’s less than 3 days until the New York City Marathon.

First, the easy part. The race will be on ESPN2. Coverage starts at 9 AM, the elites start at 9:50, I start at 11, and the odds of me getting on TV are pretty slim, but if they show anybody near the back of the back, you might see me. (I’ve never actually watched a marathon on TV, so I have no idea if it’s exciting or boring. I suppose that, like most other types of sporting events, some races are more exciting than others.)

If you want to track me, my bib number is 63359. Here’s a page on the race website where you can download the official app and use it to track me (or anyone else you know who’s running), or you can just go to the website during the race and do your tracking if you don’t feel like downloading another app and you’re going to be at home anyway.

I’ll definitely post updates on Facebook, and while I can’t make any promises, I’ll try to post some stuff on Twitter and Instagram (@pjsmith73 in both places) for anyone who isn’t actually friends with me on Facebook. (I won’t be posting anywhere during the race, though.)

Even though my car will be safely parked 500 or so miles from the finish line, I’ll still have my car key with me for the required post-race picture.

OK, on to the hard part, my actual thoughts.

Even after over 3 months of training, I still don’t have a clue how this race will go. The good news (well, sort of) is that the more I look at it, the more I think I underachieved at City of Oaks last year. (I finished in 5:24:37.) So in theory, I’ve got lots of room for improvement. The bad news is that my average pace on my training runs this year has been slower than last year, about 25-30 seconds slower per mile. Yes, the summer months were brutal and much warmer and more humid than last year, but October has been pretty nice, and my paces are still slower than last year.

I think if things go fairly smoothly, I can finish in around 5:10 without a crazy amount of effort. That’s almost a 15 minute PR, and nothing to sneeze at. But man, I’d really, really like to get under 5 hours. I’m close, and I feel like if I was in the shape that I was in for the Charlotte 10 Miler in February, I could do it.

The problem with shooting for a sub-5:00 marathon is that if I can’t do it, the last 6 miles of the race will be really painful. If I shoot for 5:10, I’ll probably be OK. So, I don’t know.

Part of me thinks I should just go out there and see how I feel. Well, I felt fine for the first 11 miles of the City of Oaks Marathon, and that went south pretty quickly after around Mile 15 or so.

New York City may not be “flat and fast,” but as far as I can tell, it’s not a brutal course like City of Oaks. The bridges are tough, and there are some hills in Central Park right near the end, but it seems like it’s still a fairly reasonable course. (Reasonable for a marathon, anyway.)

The interesting thing is that over the past week, I haven’t really felt nervous about the race. There’s maybe a little bit of worry about getting to New York, and getting to the starting area on race day, but I file that under general travel anxiety, pretty normal for me. I wouldn’t say that I’m actually excited about the race. There’s still time for me to get either nervous or excited, though. More than anything else, I feel this mixture of wonder and curiosity. How well can I run? What am I capable of? It’s kind of a strange reaction, but I’ll take that over a complete and total freak-out.

This is my dream race. It’s in the city where I was born. More than anything else, I want to reach the finish line feeling like I did everything I could to honor this race. And I’d really like to have some fun out there. All of that is pretty vague, though, and I really should have some concrete numbers. So here are my goals.

Goal A: Under 5:00
Goal B: Under 5:10
Goal C: New PR (Under 5:24:37)

I know Goal A is aggressive, but if I have any doubts, I’ll drop it pretty quickly and shift my focus to Goal B. And if I get a PR, I get to update my banner.

I’ve put in my training miles and overcome obstacles, I’ve completed 26.2 miles once before, I know I can do it again. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.

Central Park, here I come.

The New York City Marathon is one week from today. (On a related note, I don’t think I’ll be posting my Weekly Wrap-Up next Sunday.)

I’m not really nervous yet. Mostly at this point, I’m just wondering how it will go. I’m watching the weather. I’m not going to jinx it by saying anything, but the fact that you don’t see me complaining about rain/wind/heat/cold should tell you everything you need to know. Then again, things can definitely change in the next 7 days. Mother Nature’s gonna Mother Nature.

I mentioned last week a potential family gathering this weekend, and sure enough, I drove over to Raleigh Saturday for my nephews’ baptism. Yes, both of them in one ceremony. While I was in the church, I didn’t get struck by lightning, so there’s that. Also, my nephews are the best.

Toe Update: No toe pain. Occasionally, I feel the inflamed joint. It doesn’t hurt. I wouldn’t even call it discomfort. I just…feel it. I don’t notice the same non-inflamed joint in my right foot. As long as there’s no pain (knock on wood), it’s not going to affect my stride, and I should be OK (knock on wood some more).

Also, I stopped taking the industrial strength anti-inflammatory drugs on Friday morning. That meant that when my family went out to eat Saturday afternoon after the baptism, I was able to drink a Big Boss Angry Angel Kölsch. Normally, I think it’s a decent beer. After not having any beer for over 2 weeks, it was glorious.

Weight Check: Normally, when I do my official weigh-in, I write the number down somewhere and refer to it when I write this post. In spite of the fact that my official weigh-in was Saturday, and my write-up is being done on Sunday afternoon, I didn’t need to write anything down, because I wasn’t going to forget this number: 159.9. Holy crap! There was maybe a day or two during my marathon training last year where I dipped below 160, but it never lasted, and all my official weekly weigh-ins were over 160. By the way, that’s a loss of 3.2 pounds since last week.

Now, this was from Saturday morning (pre-run), so it doesn’t include yesterday’s 5 miles, but it also doesn’t include the soda I drank to stay alert while driving, or the big meal yesterday afternoon, or the fro-yo last night with lots of toppings, or the big breakfast I had this morning. (Is it too early to start carb loading?)

Still, I’m really happy with the result. For the rest of this past week, I limited myself to one can of Mountain Dew on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I stayed away from junk food, and tried not to snack too much. It worked, in spite of a significant reduction in miles.

Total: 30.91 miles

Monday was nice and cool. My performance, well, as I put it in my notes, I’ve had better runs, and I’ve had worse runs.

Tuesday was the last of my possibly too complicated workout runs. They seem to work, but I still think I could come up with some more simple workouts that still make me better. My intervals were 10:20/10:18 (average 10:19/mile), 10:18/10:11 pace (average 10:16/mile), and for the last one, 9:49(!). So I finished strong. The extra mileage at the end was just me trying to get home. By the way, it’s nice to have a cool down that weather-wise actually feels like a cool down.

I generally don’t pay attention to the number of calories burned, because I have no idea how my Garmin calculates it, but I did notice for this one it said I burned 999 calories. Guess I should have run another .01.

Wednesday was a planned rest day, but it was definitely the coldest morning of the week. I do believe that if I had run, it would have been my first run in long sleeves in months.

Thursday was the treadmill. You know the drill by now, mentally excruciating, but easier on my legs physically.

Since I had my trip to Raleigh planned for Saturday, I swapped my last two runs of the week, and Friday became an 8 miler. I hate adding on to my neighborhood run to get to 8, since it either involves two trips up the really big hill, or more repetition than I’d like in the flatter parts of my neighborhood. I went with the repetition. The weather was a little warmer, but still didn’t affect me. I did OK. I somehow managed to finish in exactly 1:30:00. I don’t really pay attention to my times, only my distance, when I’m running, so I’m not sure I could have done that again if I tried.

Finally, on Saturday morning, I did my 5 miler that had been scheduled for Friday. Weather was nice, legs felt OK, and I ran fairly well.

Next Week
Monday: Easy 5
Tuesday: 1.5 mile warm up, 3 x 1 mile at Marathon Pace (11:00/mile) with 1:30 recovery, 1.5 mile cool down
Thursday: Easy 4
Friday: Easy 3
Sunday: 2016 TCS New York City Marathon

I probably should note that my actual Marathon Pace probably won’t be as fast as 11:00/mile, but that’s what I’ve been using for my workout runs. Also, in case you’re wondering, this is what I consider this a more simple workout.

That Easy 3 on Friday is in all likelihood going to end up being 3.1. There’s something about my internal wiring that, barring injury or other extenuating circumstances, I can’t just stop at 3 miles, I have to make it a 5K. (A similar thing happens when I’m scheduled for 13 miles, and I almost always go 13.1 and make it the half marathon distance.)

I’ll have one last post near the end of the week before I leave town with my last minute thoughts about the race, information for anybody who wants to track me, and possibly some freaking out.

This post isn’t strictly about running, although running is certainly part of what I did to lose weight. And yes, losing weight has definitely helped my running.

First, I need to throw out the usual disclaimer. I’m not any kind of medical professional or nutritionist. The last biology class I took was in 10th Grade. This is what worked (and for a couple stretches, what didn’t work) for me.

Next, I really want to emphasize that I’m not criticizing anyone else’s weight. There’s a lot of fat shaming out there, and I don’t want to be a part of it. Only you can decide if weight loss is something you want. Some people are happy with their weight, and that’s OK. If your doctor doesn’t have a problem with your weight, and you don’t have a problem with it, that’s cool. For me, at least in 2011, I don’t think it was about weight loss as much as it was about not wanting to gain any more weight. (At the end of 2012 it definitely became about weight loss.) I wasn’t happy, so I made changes. It was completely my decision, and I don’t remember anyone else criticizing my weight or suggesting that I lose a few pounds. If my story inspires you to lose weight, or gives you some ideas for how to do it, that’s great.

For reference, I’m 5′ 8″, so according to the BMI chart (Yes, I’m aware of the problems with BMI, but at the very least it’s a measuring stick), if I’m over 164 pounds, I’m overweight.

I weighed about 150 pounds in college. I ate like a typical college student. (The Lunch of Champions: M&Ms and a Coke.) At that age, I could get away with a lot. Once I entered the real world, my weight slowly crept up. I was around 160 by the time I turned 30, which is still OK. My diet wasn’t very healthy, and I didn’t really do any cooking at home. (I still do very little, only basic stuff like pasta, so that’s something else I need to work on.) Also, I did pretty much no exercise. (I occasionally did push-ups, because they actually helped alleviate wrist pain from using a keyboard and mouse all day. Seriously, after a couple of weeks of doing push ups, the pain was gone. But again, see the disclaimer about me not being a medical professional.)

Through my 30s, my weight kept creeping up. If anything my diet got worse. I discovered craft beer, which is delicious but not very low in calories. I would drink Mountain Dew at work to deal with stress. By 2011, I was 38 years old, and up to 189 pounds.

That’s when I started running. Right after I started, I also made a conscious effort to replace soda with water during the day at work. Initially, I saw results. By the time I ran my first half marathon, the Thunder Road Half Marathon in November 2011, I was down to 181 pounds.

After my race, for reasons I don’t completely understand, I stopped running. The best explanation I have is that after completing a half marathon, I asked myself, “What’s next?” And I didn’t really have a good answer. I fell off the wagon with the water thing too, and went back to soda, often drinking three 20 ounce bottles of Mountain Dew in a single day at work. I drank lots of beer, I ate like there was no tomorrow, and my weight kept going up.

I remember sitting in my parents’ living room on Christmas Day 2012, and even before dinner, I felt fat. I don’t remember ever feeling like that before, even after a large meal. At the end of 2012, I stepped on my bathroom scale, and I saw 199. Even though nobody was around, I let out an audible gasp. I had my answer to the “What’s next?” question: 200 pounds. This was completely unacceptable.

On New Year’s Day 2013, I went out for a run. I was the Human Cliché, going for a run on January 1. This time, though, I stuck with it, and since then, except for a couple of times when I was injured and couldn’t run, I haven’t stopped running.

Running was good, but I’ve heard people say that you can’t outrun your diet. (I’d argue that it’s possible, at least for me, but I have to put in a whole lot of miles to do it. And in early 2013, I was nowhere close to being able to run that many miles.) I needed to make some other changes.

I didn’t want to start an actual Diet. I wanted flexibility. A diet is no good if you can’t stick to it. I didn’t really want to give up every type of food that I love. Initially, I did 3 main things.

1. Water instead of soda.
2. No more than one beer per night. (And don’t go out for beer every night.)
3. Portion control.

A good example of portion control is at work, we have a Moe’s. I used to get a burrito at Moe’s. I switched to getting a taco instead. It’s much smaller (and cheaper). Every little bit helps. (I’m aware that it would be even healthier if I brought a lunch from home. Baby steps.)

I never really cut back on carbs. I did cut back on the soda and beer, and most other carb-heavy junk food as well. I still managed to lose weight, but I have noticed that carbs don’t fill me up as fast as fat and protein. My diet is still pretty carb heavy, and maybe I’d be better off changing it, but for now, it’s still working.

As far as I can tell, I never did get above 199. Slowly over the course of 2013, I lost weight. I know I slipped up occasionally and drank Mountain Dew, or ate more than I should have, but by the end of the year, I was down to 178. That’s a loss of 21 pounds. I was really happy with my progress.

I hurt my foot at the beginning of 2014 and couldn’t run for a couple of weeks. Recovery was slow. I started backsliding on my eating habits, and that combined with less running meant that the pounds came back. I got back up to 186 before I finally buckled down again during the summer. And at the end of 2014, I finally did it. 164 pounds. For the first time in about 10 years, I was no longer overweight. Down 14 pounds for the year, and 22 pounds(!) since the summer. I had lost a grand total of 35 pounds since the beginning of 2013.

Since then, I’ve stayed mostly in the 160s. I had an ankle injury in early 2016 that caused me to briefly get up to 175, but by late summer, I was back down below 164.

Side note: Until I lost weight, I had no idea how much weight I carried in my face. People were complimenting me on my weight loss, and I was wondering how they noticed, since I don’t really wear anything that’s skin-tight, and then I realized it was my face. I guess the weight showed up on my face (and then came off of my face) so gradually that I didn’t notice until after it was gone.

My diet wasn’t (and isn’t) perfect. Far from it. And maybe if I made some other changes, I would have lost weight faster. But it was good enough for me. For the most part, it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice. I think that’s the key. If it feels like a sacrifice, I’m more likely to slip up. Really, at this point, as long as I’m in the low 160s, I’m think I’m OK. I need to keep an eye on my weight, just to make sure it doesn’t start creeping up again, And let’s face it, I’m in my 40s now, I don’t have the metabolism I used to, and I don’t have as much margin for error.

It’s not easy. There are times when I feel like if I have one night out with friends I end up 5 pounds heavier. There have been many times when I’ve wanted to order a second beer. (I’ll bend that rule for special occasions like a wedding, but the rule is really for the times I go out with friends, typically during the week.) There have been times when I sat in my cube at work, really tired and wanting a Mountain Dew so badly, but instead I got up, walked around, drank some water, and got back to work. Sure, I’ve slipped up from time to time. It seems to go in cycles. Honestly, right now I’m going through a cycle where I’m drinking more Mountain Dew. Eventually I’ll (hopefully) buckle down again and choose water instead most of the time. There’s no finish line, I just have to keep fighting.

I guess my overall point is that it’s difficult, but possible, to lose weight. And when I look at my progress as a runner as I’ve lost weight, I have say, I think it’s worth it.

Two weeks from today. Not that I’m counting.

In spite of the toe recovery, the fall, and the distinct lack of beer, I’m going to have to say it was actually a pretty good week. I wasn’t expecting that either.

It’s now time for me to taper before the New York City Marathon. Shortly after my long run on Saturday, I realized (and posted on Facebook) that my next double-digit mileage run will end in Central Park.

I saw a statistic this week that was downright depressing. The average pace at the New York City Marathon last year was 8:14/mile. My fastest mile ever was 8:25.3, at the end of the Charlotte 10 Miler earlier this year. It may take me a little longer, but I plan on finishing the race anyway.

Toe Update: No pain this week. Woohoo! There were a couple of times, mainly early in the week, when I could actually feel some discomfort in the inflamed joint, but I’m pretty sure I could run through that without changing my form. Since it felt better later in the week, I’m cautiously optimistic.

Also, they gave me a bottle of 60 pills. At 2 per day, that would last a full month, and would definitely last through the day of the New York City Marathon, November 6. Not being able to have a beer after the race would be completely unacceptable. So I checked with the doctor, and he said that I just needed to take the pills as long as I’m experiencing issues. My current plan is to take them for a couple more days this week just to be safe. (I don’t have any plans to meet with friends for a few days, so I won’t have any trouble avoiding beer.)

Weight Check: 163.1, up 1.4 pounds from last week. I can’t blame it on the beer. Twice this week I found myself in an Irish pub drinking water, and that’s no fun. This week, my problem was Mountain Dew. Lots and lots of Mountain Dew. Like, maybe I should have bought some stock in PepsiCo levels of Mountain Dew. All I can do it buckle down this week and drink water. (And no, not Aquafina, also made by PepsiCo. Tap water is just fine for me.) Oh, and I won’t be running as many miles next week, so I can’t outrun my diet either.

Total: 40.07 miles

Monday was a good run. At the very end, my toe bothered me a little, but it wasn’t enough to slow me down or alter my stride. This was the first run where I finally felt like all the work I had put in over the last 3 months was finally starting to pay off.

There’s no need to go over Tuesday again. I don’t need to link to it again, either, because I did that in the second line of my introduction.

On Thursday, I considered trying to do the workout that had been scheduled for Tuesday, but ultimately, I decided I’d be better off taking it (sort of) easy because of my toe. I did decide to purposely go for a reverse split, with each mile faster than the last. I think I’ve heard some people call this a progression run. I’d never planned to do this before, but I figured it would be better than a regular easy run, but not as taxing as a workout. I succeeded, although I lucked out that the big hill in my neighborhood got split up between miles 4 and 5. If I had run a slightly different route that put all of the hill within the same mile, I’m not sure if I could have pulled off the progression. Like on Monday, I felt like I was benefiting from the last 3 months of training. Also, I have no idea why I ended at 7.02 miles.

By the way, this was my 19th and final 7 mile run for this training period. I had one 7 miler that I had to cut short because nature called (although I made up the miles later in the week), and I probably lost a 7 miler or two when I changed up my schedule to do two long runs in the same week. The 7 miler is a staple of my plan, so doing the last one feels like a milestone. Will I miss them? Meh.

Friday was a treadmill run. Mentally excruciating as usual, but probably what my legs needed the day after Thursday’s run, and the day before a planned 16 mile run.

So, Saturday. It was kind of chilly at the start, and had it been a shorter midweek pre-dawn run, I probably would have worn long sleeves, but for 16 miles where it was going to warm up, I went with short sleeves, and I was OK. I also forgot my Gu, but I survived.

Now, at this point, I knew that I wouldn’t be doing a 20 mile run during this training. I had it scheduled for last week, I had to stop early because of my toe, and I decided I shouldn’t try to run 20 this week. I’ve noticed that there are two schools of thought in marathon training. One thinks it’s a good idea to do as many as three 20 mile runs to get used to the long distance of the marathon. The other (and my co-worker who created my plan agrees with this) thinks that 20 mile runs present a huge injury risk, and at the very most, you should only do 1. Now, going into my training last year, I thought that doing a 20 mile run would provide a psychological boost, since I had never run a marathon before, so I convinced my co-worker to include a 20 miler in my plan. He left it in this year, but the week before my run, he said that if I was experiencing any pain, I should stop. (So he jinxed me.)

The point is, I may not have needed the 20 miler this year mentally, but part of me felt like I needed my 16 miler to go well (and go the full distance).

During the first 3 miles, I felt like I was going too fast, and took a couple of extra walk breaks just to try to control my pace. Eventually, I just ran, and figured eventually, I’d slow down due to fatigue. Around the 10 mile mark, my stomach started bothering me. That was really odd. I’ve never had that happen during a run. Also, I was only drinking water, no Gatorade, no Gu, no oranges from friendly strangers, so I had no idea what could be causing it. I struggled a bit in miles 10 and 11, but got through them, and eventually my stomach settled down. I sped up at the end, with mile 16 being my fastest mile, and finished strong, even adding an extra extra .01 at the end.

I was happy with my Monday, Thursday, and Saturday runs. (I guess Friday was OK, but it was the treadmill. And Tuesday, well, you know.) So that’s why I put this into the “good week” category.

Next Week
Monday: Easy 6
Tuesday: 1.5 mile warm up, 2 miles at Threshold (10:30/mile) with 2:00 recovery, 1.5 mile at Threshold with 1:00 recovery, 1 mile @ Threshold, 1.5 mile cool down
Thursday: Easy 4
Friday: Easy 5
Saturday: Easy 8

I may end up juggling my schedule next weekend, I’ve heard rumors of a possible family gathering. Otherwise, it’s definitely a taper.

No, I didn’t just hurt my ankle. Both of my ankles are OK right now, knock on wood. But since injuries have kind of been on my mind, I wanted to write about my ankle (and related) issues from earlier this year.

The problems started around late January. I noticed my left ankle felt a little sore during some of my runs. It wasn’t during every run, it seemed to come and go. It was annoying, but most of the time, it didn’t reach a point where I wanted to stop running because of it.

I made it through the Charlotte 10 Miler with no problems. After that, though, my ankle started bothering me more often. Originally, I had planned on starting up my new website (this one) on March 1, but after a pretty bad run on February 29, I decided I didn’t want to start the new site while I was having these problems with my ankle. On my old blog, I wrote a post titled, “My Ankle Ruins Everything” to explain what was going on. (It was hard to laugh at the time, but now I think that title was pretty funny.) I pushed back the launch of the new site indefinitely and started focusing on the Tobacco Road Half on March 13. My ankle seemed to hurt pretty much any time I was on pavement. I figured if I could just make it through Tobacco Road, then I could rest.

Well, you can read all the gory details in my race report, but the tl;dr version is that I made it to about the 9.5 mile mark before my ankle gave out. I managed to finish, but it was painful. (Also, right after the race, but before I posted my race report on the old site, I had another post, “My Ankle Ruins Everything, Part 2.” With any luck, I won’t need to make it a trilogy.)

I took almost a full week off from running. It was a Sunday race, and the following Saturday, I tried the treadmill. While I was running, my ankle felt OK, but after I stopped, my ankle started hurting. At that point, I decided to stop running until I could find a specialist to look at it.

I finally got an appointment on April 7. The podiatrist poked and prodded and stretched my ankle, looked at my X-rays (nothing broken, by the way), and determined that I have a condition called Equinus. It basically means I have short Achilles tendons. This puts pressure on pretty much everything that’s attached to my Achilles, and while it doesn’t really affect walking (Except for a tendency that I have to walk on my toes. And yes, when I was in elementary school, the other kids loved to point that out.), with running, it was pretty much just a matter of time before something would give out. My left ankle just happened to be the first thing to go.

The good news is that it’s treatable with orthotics. Initially, I used these cork heel lifts until I could get the orthotics custom made and delivered, which took over a month. It took a few days, first walking around in the orthotics, then running in them, but eventually my legs adjusted, and I was able to keep running, although I had to keep my mileage down at first.

The most important thing is that I’m still able to run. I know that between the race and when I finally saw the podiatrist, I had no idea what was wrong, and had no idea when, or even if, I’d be able to run again. It was not a good time. (I do realize I have an awful lot of my eggs in the running basket, and I really need to work on spreading them out a bit. This website is almost all about my running, so it doesn’t qualify as “spreading them out.”.) I got through it, though, and I’m still running, still training for the New York City Marathon.

Well, that was a week.

I was hoping to get two posts up during the week, but that’s not exactly how I expected it to go. When Friday rolled around, I had one idea that just wasn’t worth a separate post, and one that I’m working on that’s not ready. So I threw together my flashback to my last (and, as it turns out, still my only) 20 mile training run. Maybe that wasn’t worthy of its own post, but I figured it was a fun story. Then, of course, getting a scare that I thought could keep me out of the New York City Marathon was absolutely worth its own post.

Big Toe Update: The redness on top of the joint was gone this morning. I had a planned rest day today, but I decided to try 10 jumping jacks. I didn’t have any issues. Knock on wood. Tomorrow is going to be my first run where I’ll have a chance to test it out. By the way, the anti-inflammatory drugs they gave me are not only industrial strength, but industrial sized. Yikes. (Side note, maybe they’ll also help with some of the random aches and pains I’ve been experiencing from running so many miles.)

Dental Update: I got 2 fillings on Tuesday. The one on the right side was fine. The one on the left required a second dose of Novocain, which caused the left side of my face to be numb for about 3 hours. Then, once I got feeling back, I realized that the filling was keeping me from biting down all the way, so I had to go back and get it filed down a bit. Not fun. Also, just below the tooth with the filling on my left side, my gums are sore when I brush my teeth. Other than that, I guess my fillings are OK, and so hopefully I can now retire the Dental Update.

Weight Check: 161.7, down 0.9 pounds from last week. I expected a loss, since I had two long runs since my last weigh-in, even if one was shorter than I expected. I’m also lucky that I lost, because I went overboard with the Mountain Dew this week. Thursday was really bad, because I had something I needed to do at work that was absolutely mind numbing, something that makes the treadmill feel like a run through Freedom Park, and the only way I could plow through it was with Mountain Dew. My eating wasn’t too bad this week. I had a beer on two nights, but apparently with these industrial strength anti-inflammatory drugs, I’ll have to pass on the beer this week. Like I said yesterday, it’s a bummer, but New York City is worth it.

Total: 35.15 miles

Monday, my legs recovered surprisingly well from last week’s long run. The weather helped, it was beautiful out there.

Wednesday I gave my legs (but not my mind) a break and got on the treadmill. My legs felt fine, my mind did not.

Thursday wasn’t great, and I noticed some fatigue in my legs, but that’s pretty normal at this point. I can’t complain about the weather, 48 degrees is ideal for me.

Friday was a little warmer, but other than my toe, I felt pretty good and finished strong. I even got a reverse split, which I haven’t been able to pull off recently.

I don’t have much else to say about Saturday’s run, other than my toe issues didn’t seem to slow me down. I’m still disappointed that I had to stop early, but I managed an 11:30/mile average pace, which I’m pretty happy with. Also, it was 54 degrees, but felt cooler, and was overcast for the most part, so that’s pretty good running weather.

Next Week
Monday: Easy 7
Tuesday: 2.5 mile warm up, 6 x 90 sec @ 5K pace (9:15/mile) w/90 sec recovery, 6 x 1:00 Repeats (9:00/mile) with 2:00 recovery, 6 x 30 sec Repeats with 1:00 recovery, 1.5 mile cool down
Thursday: Easy 7
Friday: Easy 4
Saturday: 16 miles LSD

I guess all of those runs should have an asterisk. I’d really like to get my 16 miles in this weekend. It’s still not 20, but it’s more than the 13.1 I did this weekend. It’s definitely a mental thing, though. It all depends on how my toe (and really, the rest of my body) feels. We’ll see how it goes.

As far as posting here, I’ve got two posts in the works, maybe I’ll get one of them done. Maybe *gasp* I’ll finish them both.