Manitoba (Half)Marathon

On June 19th I ran in the Manitoba Marathon’s Intrepid Dezine Half Marathon. It had been a long training process as I had allowed myself a generous 15 weeks to train. My time goal was to run a sub-two hour race (my private goal that I kept to myself was to run it in 1:50).

I felt great up to mile seven, at which point I finally started to feel tired. Even so, I kept a good pace until I crashed at mile ten. This has been my struggle on the long runs all season long – I feel great until the last couple miles, where I completely crash and burn. My secondary goal had been to avoid walking throughout the race, and I was able to hit this goal. Whenever I needed to slow down, I did a slow jog until I recovered but did not walk.

In the end, by sprinting the last 200 yards or so I was able to finish in 1:58, meeting my “out-loud” time goal, though just barely.

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I think that ultimately, what my training and racing are missing is proper nutrition. I eat well enough, and definitely often enough, but I have no notion of how to fuel up during a race or long run. How do I avoid that mile 10 crash?

I know that even a 2% drop in hydration levels will affect running performance. I’ve always been stubborn about not drinking during a run simply because I hate to carry anything with me. And in races, I skip the first couple of water stations because I don’t feel thirsty yet. This is important to note, because as we have been lectured in school so often, by the time you’re thirsty, you are already dehydrated. I should be drinking at those first stations to prevent dehydration, not drinking later in reaction to it.

In the week after the race, I selected my next challenge – the Treherne Half Marathon in September. It’s hilly, which will be new to me, and I’ll be looking to that 1:50 time goal again. I will need to make nutrition a priority on this one, as well as add hill training into my routine. There will be lots to learn for this one.

Bring it on.

Green Smoothie

I tried this modified version of a recipe I found online for a carrot and spinach Smoothie today. Now, I know what you’re thinking. My boyfriend thought the same thing and didn’t show a lot of faith in the green smoothie. He tried it, however, and went back for more. His one recommendation was to peel the apple before adding it to the blender.

Ingredients

- 2 cups spinach
- 2 carrots
- 1 apple
- 1 can mango juice
(original recipe called for a mango, this was the best I could do)

Purée everything in a blender. If you use real mango instead of mango juice, be sure to add a cup of water as well.

Though not what you’d expect from a smoothie, I thought this was a delicious and easy way to get your daily veggies and fruit!

Try it and tell me what you think.

- amanda

Halting the Hiatus

I’ve been neglecting the ol’ blog for a while. Since March 18, apparently. It’s not that nothing has happened worth talking about, only that I wasn’t feeling it anymore. Didn’t feel like sending my thoughts out to deep space in hopes that someone would find them.

Not long ago I found out that someone had been reading. Ok, so it was my mom. But truthfully, I care more about what she thinks than just about anyone else. So that’s good enough reason for me to make even occasional updates, if not the dailies that I had originally intended on.

So let’s play a little catch-up. Still running up a storm, although my training schedule has pretty much gone to hell as a result of holidays, work and study. I’ve had to miss or alter a few workouts due to injury (which I’ve pretty much got licked now). I’m keeping my long runs on track but the rest of the week is pure chance.

I ran 6.5 miles two days ago, and it was my best run since getting off the treadmill. I ran a sub-10-min/mile pace, which is getting closer to my desired race pace. I still want to run the half in less than 2 hours, and have full confidence that I will.

Yesterday some coworkers suggested that I try a pre-workout supplement and see how it affects my performance. As personal trainers, they know a lot about that sort of thing and the one guy in particular takes more pills each day than my grandmother. I myself have always been a naturalist. I take the occasional protein shake (to supplement my diet, not for performance gains necessarily) and do carb-loading before a race, which involves altering your diet to optimize energy production, not taking supplements. But, having said that, I’m open to trying new things. I may not incorporate it into my routine – I only want to give credit to myself for my performance in the end, not a synthetic drink mix.

The weather in Winnipeg is finally creeping into the double digits, making the running that much more pleasurable.

I’ll leave it there for today. Hopefully you hear from me again before the summer is out.

The Calf Curse Strikes Again

Tonight, I suffered my third injury to my right calf in just under a year.

I was volunteering with a local Midget-level hockey team as medical support tonight (as the “trainer”), and sustained an injury myself. A slapshot flew into the bench area and struck me in the calf. It was surprisingly painful, and I knew right away that it would make marathon training complicated.

My friend, who was assisting me at the game, slapped some ice on it the first chance we got, followed by some athletic tape to provide compression. I limped around the rest of the game regardless. I iced and elevated it again when I got home.

It’s a good thing that I happened to get my run for the day out of the way early, and that I also happen to have a rest day tomorrow. On Sunday, however, I have a 4 mile run scheduled, and I’m not terribly optimistic about my chances of being recovered enough in time for that. Or for the run after that.

This always seems to be the way; I don’t injure myself in the conventional ways. Say, playing a sport or slipping on the icy sidewalks. It’s always something obscure or embarrassing, like trying to hurdle a baby-gate and failing horribly (concussion and bruised just about everywhere), or spraining an ankle getting out of bed too fast (the phone was ringing and my foot was asleep).

I’ll try to avoid having a pity party here and make the best of it. I get to laze about on the couch and actually have an excuse to do so. It’s not all bad.

The Barefoot Movement?

You’ve seen them. At the park, at ultimate games, in the gym. Maybe not every day, but when you do see them – those goofy-looking Vibram FiveFingers “shoes” – you take note and wonder: “How do they wear those around without hurting their feet?”

I myself believed that wearing such footwear around, especially while running, was pure folly. I felt that my close friends who had lovingly purchased their own had been victims of yet another fitness fad (which may yet be shown to be the case). The short version is this: I just didn’t get it. Why? Why wear those as opposed to the expertly crafted and well-cushioned Nike’s or Adidas?

A warning: this is long. But it follows my logic process and how I have come to possibly endorse barefoot running.

When you impose a force on your body, be it a dumbbell to lift or a run to finish, the body responds by trying to make itself stronger. This is the premise of all fitness training; overload your body (within safe limits) and your body will adapt. To that same token, if you continuously overload your body, breaking it down without allowing adequate rest for it to rebuild itself, you set the stage for injury. Tendonitis. Plantarfaciitis. Muscle strains. All that good stuff.

When one has sustained injury, a common method for protecting it or preventing re-injury is to splint, brace or tape the affected area. Sprain your knee and you get a knee brace. Roll your ankle and you tape it until it heals. Break a bone and you cast it. The common thread here is that these devices are not meant to be permanent. Barring a catastrophic injury that renders your ligaments unusable and unfixable, you are not meant to wear a brace forever.

A brace will absorb forces that your injured joints cannot handle on their own yet. Once the injured structures are healed sufficiently, it is very important to ween the athlete from the brace so that their muscles, ligament and tendons can become strong enough to do the job on their own.

What if they keep wearing the brace? As I said, the body adapts. If it doesn’t need to be strong enough to handle the forces on its own, it won’t ever become strong enough. By keeping a healed joint in a brace you are effectively making it weak and dependent. If one day the brace or the tape doesn’t do its job, we are back full circle looking at injury again.

Specialized cushioned footwear, especially those that control foot motion, are designed to be protective equipment for the foot and ankle complex. They are supposed to reduce injury rates. They are, especially when used with orthotics, right up there with braces and taping as they absorb some of the force the foot would otherwise be taking. Via the logic outlined above, this makes the muscles of the foot and calf weaker as they no longer have to absorb those forces or control the movements themselves.

Eventually, the day comes when the shoe is not doing its job optimally, or you wear a different shoe, maybe for a formal function or for work. The foot is suddenly devoid of its brace, and can’t handle the loads. Here we are back at tendinitis, plantarfaciitis, muscle strains. It’s no coincidence that part of our treatment for plantarfaciitis is to strengthen the muscles of the foot.

Much of my inspiration for this post comes from the book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. The book profiles several marathon and ultramarathon (27+ miles) runners that run barefoot, and includes an entire chapter about the modern running shoe. As technology provides us with better and better footwear, injury rates are increasing as more time goes by. A study of marathon runners showed that those wearing the most expensive shoes suffered far more injury in training than those wearing the cheapies.

Here’s where we get back to the Barefoot Movement. The increasing popularity of paper-thin shoes like the Vibram FiveFingers and the Nike Free. For my whole lifetime (which granted isn’t that long yet), there has been this trend toward thicker and thicker shoes, more movement control and more cushion. Why would the industry, rather, why would Nike do a 180 and start promoting near-barefoot running?

According to the book, many of the top track and field coaches in the US (Vin Lananna, as an example) include some barefoot running in their training programs to help strengthen the feet of their athletes.

What really blew my mind was the book’s account from a physiotherapist who saw her patient’s painful plantarfaciitis disappear after he took up barefoot running, against her wishes. Such patients normally get prescribed orthotics. Heck, we give them out at the clinic like party favours.

I’m not saying to stop wearing nice running shoes or to throw our your orthotics. But there are still humans on this earth that can run down an animal in barefeet and think nothing of it. Why them and not us? What I’m saying is that I might start implementing a little (just a little) barefoot running into my own training. The shoe companies and shoe stores say I need to replace my New Balance shoes every 400-600 miles, but they still feel great and they’re long overdue by that count. Maybe I won’t replace them just yet.

And maybe we should take strengthening the feet just a little further when treating those common foot and ankle ailments. Hmmm… Lots of maybes. Strong feet have gotta be happier feet, right?

Homemade Granola Bars Version 2.0

This is my second batch of post-workout granola bars, and I feel that I’ve made some changes that improve upon the flavour. I wanted to share the updated recipe with all of you!

*Updated* Homemade Granola Bars

Ingredients:
-1.5 cups nut meal (explained below)
- 3 cups oats
- 1 cup coconut milk
- 1/2 cup shredded coconut
- 4 tbsp honey
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 3 scoops vanilla protein powder
- 1/2 cup dried cranberries


Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F (175 C).


To make your nut meal, you need to blend up a mixture of nuts until they’re almost a powder. Use a variety of nuts for this – this time I used a 2:1 ratio of almonds to peanuts and I preferred this to using mostly peanuts.





Once you’ve made your nut meal, you can blend all of your ingredients together. Level the mixture out in a baking pan. I sprinkled just a little brown sugar on top.


Bake for 15-20 mins or until top starts to brown.

Warming Up to Warm-ups

I had a track-and-field coach in high school that would advise us not to warm-up for very long before a major event. “You’ll have plenty of time to warm-up during the race,” he would say. “No point tiring yourselves out just yet.”


While there is some merit to this notion, there is something to be said for going into a run warm and ready. I took that coach’s philosophy with me into my half-marathon training two years ago, and would start straight into my runs at my desired peak speed. This worked fine, as I would be nicely warmed-up after the first ten minutes or so of my run, but those first ten minutes were always the hardest. My sluggish limbs would resist my efforts and nag at me to slow down. My “warming-up period” was easily the hardest leg of my runs.

I have read on the training plans and blogs of other runners that for a long run, lets say seven miles, they consider the first two miles the warm-up and the last two miles the cool-down. This means that only three miles of their seven mile run are performed at peak speed. I’m not sure that I’m willing to embrace the warm-up to such an extent.

I did what I hope will be my last treadmill run of the season yesterday (the temperatures in Winnipeg are tantalizingly close to melting the massive snow drifts everywhere). It was a 3.5 mile distance. For this run I broke my regular “all-out” stance and started my run at the modest speed of 5.5 mph. I was pleased at how comfortable it felt – the first ten minutes didn’t drag by and I actually enjoyed running on the treadmill for a change. After hitting the one-mile mark, I gradually increased my speed until I reached my peak of 6.5 mph.

As far as the cool-down goes, I will stick with my formula of running at peak until I reach my distance goal, then cooling down for a few minutes with a fast walk followed by a lengthy stretch of all my leg muscles.

-Amanda