Pig Recap - the nutshell version

My Pig decision ended up being to walk the half marathon. I got a new friend out of the deal, and as we were both injured, it ended up being a fairly therapeutic experience. It was mentally harder to walk that half than to run a marathon, for sure. I have a new respect for those who walk distance races. It's easy to take walking for granted when you're a runner, but that was SO not easy, and I don't think it would've been too much easier even with no injury. My feet!! OMG, my poor feet!! Feet hurt WAY worse when you walk on them - I guess more steps and more time on them really do make a difference.

I did get them a nice pedicure yesterday (one of the few girly things that I will indulge in) and I think they forgave me.

Sexy feets!! (I need a tan!)

 Check out that scrape on my right foot. That's my first swimming injury, folks. The pool where I swim for Masters is made out of that bumpy concrete (the kind that tears up your swimsuit when you sit on it) and I scraped my foot on the wall trying to circle swim. Ouch.

Oh! Masters swim is going great. I'm going to use that to replace my boring solo workouts for a while. It's SO MUCH BETTER. I'm one of the slow kids in that group but I'm catching up. Plus I get to swim OUTSIDE!! Wheeeee!!!!

AD/HD moment. Back to the Pig. I was going to mention, I don't think I made anything worse, injury-wise. I wondered for a moment after a big hill - I was HURTING - but after a couple of miles of relative flatness, my leg felt fine. It still feels ok. My glutes were pretty sore from the walking (again, newfound respect for walkers!) and my calf tightened up a bit, but it's not painful. I almost tried running yesterday but I think it still would've been hobbly. I have PT this morning and I'm not leaving without some answers. I haven't been in much actual pain for a couple of weeks, but my leg is stiff and weak enough that running is still not possible.

I have not run since March 31. Arrrrrgh!

But, back to the positives. There were some unique things I got to do Sunday that I never have done, and may never do again, during a race:

-Ate Oreos and a slim jim. (I can't imagine being able to stomach that while running!)
-Booty danced with a random volunteer at a water stop. (With a gimpy leg, combined with the fact that I can't dance anyway!)
-Crossed the finish line with a beer in my hand.

I will say more about that later. I may even post pics. There are no booty dancing pics. This is probably a good thing. I have seen a few of the official race pics and there's enough blackmail material there.

I gotta be honest....

....I can't wait until the Pig is over. My current plan (that changes by the minute) is to walk the Pig half, but it's not the same. Better than being totally sidelined, but I'm finding that I really can't get too excited about it. All the excitement in the air is killing me a little. Time to hide from the running world for a bit.

An update

Wow....I didn't realize people actually read this blog, but I got a comment on my last entry, so at least one person reads this and wanted an update. :) So here ya go!

I haven't updated this lately because I haven't had a lot to say. I haven't been doing a lot. I've been Grumpy McIrritablepants. I still can't run. I attempted over the weekend and it was a pretty ridiculous effort - four very hobby quarter mile repeats at a slow slow pace. I've been trying to cross train but I've been slacking a bit on that, too. For a couple of weeks, my knee hurt to do ANYTHING - cycle, swim, anything but, oddly enough, the stairmaster. Umm, that thing kicks my butt.

Ultrasound, electro-stim, and ART treatments have pretty much taken care of the knee problem. In its wake, the calf is still mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. I went to the ortho yesterday because, man, it's been over 4 weeks. I was starting to worry that it was more serious than I thought. The good news is that it's not. It's still a calf strain, but a pretty hardcore one, and it's right at the top of the muscle where it meets the knee, so it's in a crappy place. It's healing much, much differently than the last one did. Basically, according to the doc, it's got my whole leg shut down so it can protect itself and heal. The result isn't so much pain as it is weakness. My leg feels so weak and unstable. I've tested it on weight machines at the gym - my left leg currently has half as much strength as my right. It doesn't HURT, it's more like things just don't compute, if that makes sense.

It does seem to be healing, but so so so slowly. I can walk a lot more than I did, and I can swim and do easy cycling. I still walk a little like Bambi on ice at times. As for the Pig, I do have the doc's permission to ambulate through it however I choose without making things too much worse. I still don't know what I'm going to do, and I probably won't decide until the absolute last minute. I'm very, very bummed about it, but a spirit of acceptance is starting to take over, and I suppose it will be in full force after the race is over and Pig-mania leaves Cincy. What's helping is knowing that this is the year of the Ironman. It doesn't sting as much as last year when I had to put off my first ever marathon. I have an even bigger goal that I'm looking at - two, really, if you count the half IM in July. And the heart half marathon was not only a 9 minute PR, but hands down the most solid race I've ever done, EVER. I still have that. That's my spring 2012 victory.

I'm trying to motivate myself out of the funk I've been in. When this injury kicked in, I slid waaay down. I'm going back to eating healthier again, and eating regularly (when I'm in a funk, I have a tendency to barely eat, and then when I do it's crap) training regularly (even if it's not running, I'm going to try to get back to the number of hours I was doing IM training and sub something else for the running), and I'm joining a Masters swim group THIS WEEK. I've been so bored with swimming lately and I can't tell if it's genuine or just a product of the grey "no running" cloud hanging over my head. Regardless, I think I've gotten as much as I can get out of swimming solo and now it's time for a coach, and other people, to kick my butt in the pool.

I'm never as happy when I'm not running as I am when I'm running - and not necessarily while I'm actually running, but when I have running in my life, it affects my brain so so so much. Remember, I was on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds before I discovered running. I can slip back into that so easily (which is why I've now seen SIX health professionals for one injury - obsessive much?) and I need to regain control again. I have next week off from work - it was going to be my Pig recovery week, but it's also my week to tackle a growing list of house projects.  It will also be a chance to refocus my training and clear my head. Meanwhile, I have been so inefficient and fuzzy-headed that I am insanely far behind on work paperwork and trying to catch up by the end of this week. This Friday, I will be locking myself in my office until that's done!!

My husband should be a candidate for sainthood after everything I've put him through this past month. If he thought my hours and hours of training were bad, it's nothing compared to dealing with being around me when I'm NOT training. I have been a HOT MESS.

But I'm gonna reclaim my sanity. Then I'm gonna reclaim my calf muscle and then I'm gonna reclaim my running and then I'm gonna CLAIM my 70.3 and my 140.6. I promise.

the waiting game

I am still waiting for my knee to feel better. At this point, it hasn't been close to ready for running again.

Two weeks with no running. Nearly a week with no cycling. Yesterday I did put the bike on the trainer and spun, fast, in the easiest gear for 40 minutes. I was thinking maybe that would loosen things up. It didn't seem to help, but it didn't seem to hurt either. At any rate, it helped my mood. I was so stoked to be on my bike, even on the trainer. I put on the fastest techno/rap music I have on my ipod and was dancing like crazy. Yes, dancing. On the bike. It's possible.

Not running makes life a little harder. It's like, if happiness is a horizontal line, when I don't run I permanently hover just below the line. I can't QUITE be happy, ever, if I can't run.

But I'm hanging in there with it. I've actually been so busy that I can't imagine how I had so much time to train before. My theory is that subconsciously, I've managed to fill my schedule because I'm just that type of person that needs a full schedule.

So I've done some fun things. I went to one of the practice 5k's for Girls on the Run and helped out and took some pics for them. Holy cow, that was FUN. I was initially bummed because I was planning on running with the girls, but handing out rubber bracelets (to count laps, how clever!) and taking pictures and cheering them on was every bit as much fun. I got some pretty good pics, considering I don't have a super awesome camera. And the girls' enthusiasm was infectious. They were hilarious. The fastest girl ran it in 24 something - yep, faster than I've EVER ran a 5k! But they all cheered each other on, and when the slowest girl - who walked a lot and looked rather discouraged at times - crossed the finish line (they were holding out crepe paper), the other girls all made a tunnel for her to run through!! I got a good pic of it, and I totally wanted to cry when they did it. It was totally the girls' idea. LOVED it.

I still can't seem to get a straight answer from anyone as to WHY my knee is still driving me nuts, so my best guess is a bad case of tendonitis. At least, I'm told by health professionals that it's nothing serious, nothing broken or torn - it just really hurts and nobody is sure why. It feels super stiff most of the time, especially if I've been spending much time OFF of it. Today, I took a tactical shooting class with my husband, and I was standing for about four hours. The knee felt better than it has in the past week. But as soon as I sat for a while, it was all stiff and painful and unstable when I tried to stand on it again. It gets stiff and painful if it's in one position for too long, period, which means I wake up several times a night to change positions.

I'm trying to make it better. I stretch. I massage. I do exercises that seem like they may help. I ice. I'm taking herbal supplements and rubbing arnica on it. I've tried taping and bracing (with two different knee braces) and compression. And it's not better.....yet.

Honestly, my plan for the Pig now is that, if my knee is well enough for running at any point in the next three weeks leading up to the race, I will still run it. I will run it for fun and for the big old party that it is. That's really why I wanted to run the Pig - it's my hometown race and it's known for its massive spectator support. I'm bummed that I probably have to ditch my original plan - to run it for time and get the best time I'm capable of doing - but maybe at this point in my training, I shouldn't be so hardcore about marathons. I'm getting to the point where I can push myself and my training for half marathon, and I totally want to continue to do so (sub 2, here I come!) but marathons can be a fun adventure thing for now. At least until I figure out why I get hurt every time I try to train for one.

Oh yeah, back there I did say tactical shooting class!! It's funny, I realized that I got into shooting guns - a little - last time I was laid up and couldn't run. What can I say, it's something of a substitute adrenaline rush. Anyway, I never got REALLY into it, but recently my husband bought a handgun and so I took a concealed carry class with him. Primarily, I did it because his gun still intimidated me a little, and I wanted to make sure that if it was in my house, that I could be more confident with it and know that I could handle it safely if it came down to it.

I loved doing the ccw class. I loved it so much that, in addition to applying for my ccw license (which is on my 30 by 30 list, actually) I got a gun of my very own and decided to take a more advanced shooting class with the huz. That was today, and it got me out into the beautiful weather, which was good for me too.

So that's where my life has been lately. Not a lot of training. I should be swimming more, but it's so hard to motivate myself to swim when it's not part of the swim/bike/run package, if that makes sense. Swimming has been frustrating me as of late, since I've hit a plateau and my attempts to improve aren't doing a whole lot. Hopefully I'm not losing too awfully much fitness here, but I was training hard for a while and as long as the knee is better SOON, I'm not worried. Yet.

Can't wait until I can blog that I'm back to running again. Hopefully it's soon!!

STUPID!!!!!

UHF is one of my favorite movies of all time. If you haven't seen it, you're missing out!!

STUPID!!!! That's what the voice in my head is yelling at me right now.

So I couldn't run last week. Since I've dealt with the ups and downs of training, I deal with that better than I used to. A little. I still get mopey and moody when I can't run, but I don't freak out about future races and future running like I used to. Last week, the weather was beautiful, so I looked at it as a chance to do some extra biking.

Monday I did 25ish miles on my own, mostly in an easy gear - except when I got in an impromptu race with this guy who passed me. There I was, riding easy on the flat bike path like a good little injured triathlete, and this guy flew by me. Sooo, I decided to challenge myself for a minute and see if I could catch him. I shifted into a harder gear, and not only did I catch him, I passed him. What's he do? He gets up behind me and absolutely sucks on my wheel for a good 2 miles. As soon as I slowed down for a second, he flew by me. I tried to catch him again but got stuck at an intersection and couldn't do it.

Stephanie Tanner says, "HOW RUDE!!"

That led to a discovery.....I'm a much stronger cyclist than I was last year. (Thank you, hours on the trainer!! UHF was one of the movies that got me through a boring trainer ride!!) I can ride in a higher gear (err...lower? I still get the terms mixed up!!) Two days later, I met up with a new(ish) biking friend - I remember her from a few group rides last year but never really talked to her much - and we did an easy 25. It felt awesome.

So, since that felt great, and since most of my Pig training friends were doing 20 mile runs on Saturday and I was madly jealous, I decided to bump up the mileage a notch. Saturday, I did 40. It was one of my faster rides ever. I kept it above 17 mph for most of the ride, and it felt easy, until I ran into some hills. (Yeah, I planned a ride that was half flat, half hills, on the wrong half!!) Since I rode from home, I had a 300 foot hill climb toward the end, which is unavoidable when you live uphill from most everything. My knee felt a little sore, but no biggie.

The next day was a group ride. I hadn't totally planned on it, since it was Easter and the group didn't figure out the time or route until pretty much the last minute. But when it turned out I could make it, I jumped on it. I miss group rides SO MUCH. They were doing an hour out and back, but it was a flat flat route (those do exist in Cincinnati!) and most of the cyclists are also runners who had ran 20 the day before, so nobody would be pushing the speed. I could do an easy ride, right? Oh, and since they were meeting up 6 miles from my house, I could ride there and back, too. Sure!

The ride was NOT easy. Well, the out was easy. Super easy. Because we were on the nice end of 15 mph winds. The 17 miles back was pure hell into that headwind. My legs were shot by the end of it; thankfully I got a ride home (in a car, not on a bike) because I was too fried to ride uphill back home.

So, two decently hard 40 mile rides within 24 hours. And three days later, I feel like Nancy Kerrigan. My left knee (left leg is also the site of the muscle strain) feels like someone took a baseball bat to it. It HURTS. And all because I was too dumb to realize that amping up the cycling could probably lend itself to an overuse injury as well. I'm all kinds of hobbly and I can't quite be sure which injury is causing it more. I tried to swim - to freaking SWIM - yesterday, and swimming hurt.

The plan now is to go back to the massage therapist today - I booked an appointment with him before all the knee stuff, to give him a chance to work on more of me than just the left leg (he spend an hour and a half on it last week), and now he'll probably have to focus most of his time on that leg AGAIN. Then I'm going to see a doc at the local running store's free injury clinic.

I'm still decently optimistic - my self-diagnoses are either patellar tendonitis or bursitis, and I'm half hoping that this is one of those things that a shot in the knee might relieve. I soooo want to get back to running!!

I'll be careful from now on. I promise.

New mantras

The world is not going to end because my leg hurts. It's just a freaking muscle strain. I can still swim. I can still bike. I have done an awesome round of both in the past 24 hours to get this funk out of my system. (Including my longest swim ever - 3000 yd.) I don't think it's the worst thing that I got injured and got so freaking frustrated about it; it's the worst thing that for a day or so, I contemplated just giving up on training for everything and allowing myself to settle into "this is too hard" pity partyland. I barely ate, I sat on the couch doing nothing but feeling sorry for myself; I caught myself sitting there staring at my toes.

EFF THAT NOISE. I am training for an Ironman, not an Ironwhinylittlebitch.

This cracked me up. Not just because the cat is swimming, but because I have an orange cat with one permanently flat ear and this soooo looks like him!!

blah, not again

Peroneal tendon has been feeling near 100% again. Last week was my longest run since the Air Force Marathon - 18 miles. It went pretty well. I was a bit bored by the end, and naturally a bit tired, but I did it at the prescribed 30-45 seconds/mile slower than marathon goal pace, and I felt like I had more left at the end.

Later that day, my left leg was way more sore than my right, and I had to limp to get around. My calf especially felt very tight. Strange, but I chalked it up to, well, running 18 miles. I mowed the grass the next day (with a push mower, uphill, which seemed to loosen things up a bit) and did yin yoga. The day after, I knocked out 6 miles at marathon goal pace. After the first 2 miles of suck (calf was tight and the first 2ish miles of my route are a net uphill), I felt AWESOME. Wednesday was speedwork, and I killed it. Thursday I did a brick, and though my leg was a little tight, running was still ok. One bad moment came when I stopped to pet a friendly cat and had trouble getting up off the sidewalk, but I foam-rolled that night and felt better the next day.

Yesterday, I ran 15 miles with the group, again at marathon goal pace + 30ish seconds. After the initial tightness subsided, I felt fantastic. I felt like I could run forfreakingever at that pace, and I was telling other people in the group how AWESOME running felt that day. It felt great. If only it had been a 7-8 mile run.

...because at that point, the tightness started coming back, but it was bearable without changing my pace or gait. Then it started getting worse, but only when we stopped. If we stopped for water or traffic, it would lock up and take a few minutes to feel normal again. That's when a coach noticed that I was favoring my left side, but my stubborn butt decided to test it out a bit longer, and a few minutes later, he said I seemed to be back to normal.

Around mile 12 it started to affect my running when we hadn't stopped. Grr. Running got a bit harder at that pace, but still far from impossible, and I wasn't limping that I could tell. Two miles later, while running downhill, the leg locked up. I had to hobble to keep it moving, so at that point, I walked the rest of the way - just a mile or so. Walking was a little owie but overall fine.

Got back to the running store, wasn't thinking too much of it other than I need a massage ASAP. Stretched, gave myself a charlie horse in my thigh that had me screaming all sorts of foul things, hobbled to my car. Hobbled around while running errands. Booked a massage for Monday.

Later that day, things got worse. After I sat on the couch for a while, I seemed to lose all ability to walk. Putting weight on my leg activated a screamy spot on the inside of my leg, not quite at my knee, about at the top of the calf muscle. My husband actually carried me to the bathroom at one point. I fell asleep on the couch and I had to crawl to get to bed after I woke up.

Next morning, still way gimpy. Couldn't walk without leaning on something. Could only stand with the majority of my weight on the other leg. After agonizing about what to do and talking to the PA on call with my doctor's office, we ended up at the ER. The not being able to walk thing was freaking me out a bit - not to mention that I can't go about my life being immobile!

After 4 hours in the ER....I got nuthin'. I am walking better now, and I discovered that wearing shoes helped that quite a bit. (Yeah, I know, duh.) I think it may be muscular, but my bloodwork came back a bit funny. There's something called a d-dimer that indicates the presence of a blood clot, and my levels are 3-4x higher than normal. It can also indicate other things, including run of the mill inflammation/injury and pregnancy (so I got to pee in a cup to rule that one out for 'em.) When they came in with the cup, I thought maybe they decided I was acting crazy and wanted to drug test me! So now I have to book an ultrasound in the morning to make sure that isn't it. (A blood clot, I mean, not pregnancy. That has been ruled out. Pregnancy would also not be an explanation for leg pain.)

Ugh. Not how I wanted to spend my day, and running is all a bit up in the air for now. The doc said no marathon...then again, so did my podiatrist a few weeks ago. He was also in the "running marathons is bad for you" camp and was telling me about cardio studies of marathon runners and how it can damage your heart and so on. So is it bad that I want to take his advice with a huge grain of salt? Especially since he couldn't tell me what IS wrong if it's not a blood clot? Our first 20 mile run is scheduled for next Saturday and I'm not super hopeful about it. Best case scenario, I'm thinking of maybe running with the run/walk group that day, and that's not likely, considering how craptastic my leg feels now. At least there's another 20 on the schedule 2 weeks later. If I can get that in, I'll be good with the idea of the marathon. If not, maybe I can do the half...that's assuming I can run.

Arrgh. My husband said to take it one day at a time but I'm sooooo not good at that sort of thing. And I'm dipping into my HSA/Lasik fund once again to pay for the fact that my body apparently does not agree with my brain that distance running is an awesome thing.

35 days until the Pig. Heal, body, heal.