Every Wish That We Put Into Motion.... (comments welcome!)

[Herding_Cats]

And then the wheels fell off completely.

This week was supposed to be rest/4/4-ish (with hill repeats)/4/rest/10/4(with hill strides) which comes out to around 26mi.

It ended up being: track meet/rain/rain/4-ish with hill repeats/preschool field trip and then pack for camping/walk (and fall)/4.5mi which came out to around 12mi.

So yeah. It rained and was cold all week, was cold for camping until today when we packed up to come home. While we were walking between spots along the lakeshore where DS1, DH, and DD were fishing, I rolled my ankle on a root and fell. My leg is still sore if I push on it, but there's no bruising, my ankle is fine (it didn't try to stop itself from rolling at all), and I managed to not fully extend my arms to catch myself. *sigh* The campground is the one that is adjacent to the trail I've been running, so I know how uneven and root-y that trail is!

Those hill repeats though. I wasn't looking forward to them or that run in general (too many days in a row off!) but after the first one I was like oooooooh, I feel STRONG. But then the next day my quads were quad-y. Soooo yeah.

Today was finally warm enough that we set up DD's new inflatable shark waterslide (from Costco); drained, cleaned, and refilled the hot tub; and I got bunch of stuff done in the garden. I should go walk on the treadmill tonight but I think I'm just gonna roll with where I'm at in the plan. This week is scheduled to be a "cut back" week, so I'm just planning on extending my midweek runs by a mile, and keep the weekend longruns their scheduled lengths since DS2 has state finals on Saturday.


ETA: I got DS2 to run on the trail for his "on your own" scheduled run for track this morning. I asked him how it went and his response was a succinct, "Hills." Apparently he also fell but "not bad" when he clipped a root. On a downhill. Hopefully he's not scarred for life because we are trying to recruit a kid for XC in the fall and he lives really near that trail and it's also centrally located for about half his team. And they should run it in the summer because they need more hills in their life.

 

[avondale]

Honestly, I trip and fall just as much walking/hiking as I do trail running. The constant is usually "not paying attention".

Once, my DH and I were walking out of the asphalt parking lot to the trail for a hike - NOT EVEN ON THE TRAIL YET - and I tripped in a hole in the asphalt (not paying attention!) and munged up several spots on my knees with copious blood loss (all superficial) - and I get faint at the sight of too much blood, so I had to sit with my head down on the sidewalk until that passed and then we had to go find copious amounts of band-aids and ended up calling off the hike for the day!

I did something similar about 20 feet into the trail on another hike several years later, but fortunately there wasn't as much blood, so no fainting and we continued after band-aid application!

Hope the ankle continues to not be too bad.

 

[Herding_Cats]

Checking in with a few quick items, and also post-annual-physical.

No concerns from my dr. Keep doing what I've been doing. I did mention my exhaustion that seems to be happening at the start of the luteal phase of my cycle and asked if it seemed to coincide with my zoloft use for PMDD/SD, but I haven't taken it in 4 months, so that's not it. She thinks that I am "just" having a strong reaction to my hormone level fluctuations.

We are working through the end-of-summer schedule and planning some camping trips. Our XC team has done a family camping trip in the UP (Upper Peninsula for anyone who may not be familiar with the Michigan jargon) that includes a meet on Thursday or Friday. The past few years we have only gone for 3 days, but have discussed going for a week since we are hauling the camping 5-6 hours each direction for the trip and it would be nice to have enough days to actually relax. So I looked at the dates. Yall. If we do end up going on this trip it's gonna be:
Saturday: huge meet that our school hosts and parents work (course marshals, catching kids at the finish line, etc)
Sunday: my trail race
Monday or Tuesday: get in the car and go camping for a week. Which would include hiking. I'm cringing a little bit thinking about it.
The following Sunday or Monday: come home
Tuesday: first day of school


Also:



Coming home in a month….

 

[col1]

Checking in with a few quick items, and also post-annual-physical.

No concerns from my dr. Keep doing what I've been doing. I did mention my exhaustion that seems to be happening at the start of the luteal phase of my cycle and asked if it seemed to coincide with my zoloft use for PMDD/SD, but I haven't taken it in 4 months, so that's not it. She thinks that I am "just" having a strong reaction to my hormone level fluctuations.

We are working through the end-of-summer schedule and planning some camping trips. Our XC team has done a family camping trip in the UP (Upper Peninsula for anyone who may not be familiar with the Michigan jargon) that includes a meet on Thursday or Friday. The past few years we have only gone for 3 days, but have discussed going for a week since we are hauling the camping 5-6 hours each direction for the trip and it would be nice to have enough days to actually relax. So I looked at the dates. Yall. If we do end up going on this trip it's gonna be:
Saturday: huge meet that our school hosts and parents work (course marshals, catching kids at the finish line, etc)
Sunday: my trail race
Monday or Tuesday: get in the car and go camping for a week. Which would include hiking. I'm cringing a little bit thinking about it.
The following Sunday or Monday: come home
Tuesday: first day of school


Also:

View attachment 969241

Coming home in a month….

What a lovely puppy congrats

That trip and schedule wow I am tired just reading about it.

 

[Herding_Cats]

That trip and schedule wow I am tired just reading about it.

me too!!!

 

[nancipants]

A PUPPY!!!!!!!!

Camping after a trail race would be good active recovery - but I'd also be tempted to send everyone hiking without me.

 

[garneska]

OMG look at the PUPPY!!! Love Love Love.

 

[avondale]

Schedule....that's life.

The big meet on the day before your race: use it as a way to NOT worry about the race because you'll be too busy. Just make sure that every minute you are not at the meet, you are sleeping or otherwise off your feet. (Yes, easier said than done.) You will be spending every minute at that big meet focusing on a big goal for your kids. Seems like they could understand that YOU have a big goal the next day with your race, so they could turn around and help with that by being extra-helpful on the packing and trip preparation. Maybe the family can try to get a lot of the trip preparation done before the big meet and your race?

I agree with @nancipants that camping and hiking will be good active recovery. Just take it nice and slow. Honestly, the hard part to me would be the 6 hours sitting in the car - I would be very stiff. Wear compression sleeves, etc. Baby yourself - you will deserve it.

 

[Herding_Cats]

Schedule....that's life.

The big meet on the day before your race: use it as a way to NOT worry about the race because you'll be too busy. Just make sure that every minute you are not at the meet, you are sleeping or otherwise off your feet. (Yes, easier said than done.) You will be spending every minute at that big meet focusing on a big goal for your kids. Seems like they could understand that YOU have a big goal the next day with your race, so they could turn around and help with that by being extra-helpful on the packing and trip preparation.

Yeah I'm planning on either NOT volunteering for a job (the coaches will understand and we volunteer for literally every single other meet) or signing up for something like "stock the chocolate milk and applesauce pouch table" so I can spend most of my time sitting down.

Maybe the family can try to get a lot of the trip preparation done before the big meet and your race?

Yes. That would definitely be the plan, although DH and I had also talked about getting a campsite near the race start (its about a 45min drive) so we could just crash there after the meet and I wouldn't have to get up *quite* so early, and also he would have a place to hang out until midday when he (or someone else if I find a more enthusiastic volunteer) jumps in to "pace" me for the last 10-11 miles.

I agree with @nancipants that camping and hiking will be good active recovery. Just take it nice and slow. Honestly, the hard part to me would be the 6 hours sitting in the car - I would be very stiff. Wear compression sleeves, etc. Baby yourself - you will deserve it.

I will likely be very stiff as well. On the plus side, there is a lake where we will be camping that won't be very warm that I can just go sit in

 

[Herding_Cats]

Last week went.....OK? Not perfectly, which is unsurprising due to the number of extra things we had going on, but I still mostly got things done.

Circling back to last Sunday (which I mentioned briefly last week) I did 4.5mi on the trail that I've been running nearby while we camped at the adjacent state-owned campground. My brain shut off on this run, and it went quickly. All of the sites are rustic (there are hand pumps for drinking water, outhouses, and no hook-ups for the campers) and it got cold enough at night that we had to run the furnace. And then replace the 12 year old battery since it was going dead in the middle of the night and then the camper would get down into the 50s. No bueno.

Monday: off/rest day

Tuesday: 3mi easy. I'm making a concentrated effort to run the "hilly" route when I'm at home, and this particular section has 207ft of ascent (67ft/mile), which is about the flattest I should be doing on a "feet per mile" average to adequately prepare for August.

Wednesday: 3.25mi. This was supposed to be 2mi easy, 4 hill repeats (30sec hard uphill with 90 sec recovery), 2mi easy, but my stomach get upset with me after the hill repeats and I had DH come pick me up about a mile and a half from home. Lesson learned: don't do hill repeats after dinner.

Thursday: off (switching with Friday's scheduled off day so I wasn't missing 2 days in a row)

Friday: 6mi easy. Supposed to be on trails, but didn't have time to drive all the way over there and back and still fit everything else into the schedule, so I just ran it at home. I've switched to 20/30 intervals for my long runs and trail runs because it keeps my HR in a lot better place, and I'm as fast, if not faster than with the 30/30 on the trails (where I also walk all of the uphills.) I included "the big hill" in my run, and averaged 64ft/mile of ascent on average. Hiking up the hills isn't crushing me quite as hard as it was a month ago. Don't get me wrong, they're still brutal, but I'm not gasping and questioning my life choices as quickly.

Saturday: Track State Finals Meet. This means riding for 4 hours in the car to watch DS2 run for just over 2min. Wheeeeee! We figured it would take an 8:17 for their 4x800m relay team to make All-State (top 8) and we were spot on with that. However, their team did not run that fast. Ranked 16th (I think?) coming into the meet, they finished 12th with a time of 8:24, which was also a season's-best for them. My legs, particularly my hamstrings were really letting me know they weren't happy with me, and my thought of at least going for a walk in the evening was gone by the time we got back home (we also had 2 graduation parties to stop at on the drive back.)

Sunday: DH continues to be supportive, and asked how long my run would be and did I need to go over to the trail to run it. I was scheduled for 4mi, but since I had missed one run, shortened another, and wasn't getting in the back-to-back runs because of track, I decided to go for 5mi. And also, that's the 2 loops on the trail, plus a small other section of one of the inner loops. So it's easy to do without repeating anything. I texted a friend to see if they wanted to join in, but they were downstate and I was on my own. I did see a garter snake at the beginning of my run, nearly fell twice, and passed another runner 2x who was running in the opposite direction. But this was the easiest this trail has felt since I've started running it. I did stop about 1.5mi in to stretch because I felt like my soleus was going to lock up completely. And then found another root to get my toes-up-and-heels-down on as soon as my run finished. I also stashed a gatorade behind my car tire in the parking lot to stop and get a quick drink out of between the hilly loop and the campground perimeter loop.

This run really reinforced to me that if I can just keep being consistent and get the miles in, I should be OK by the time August gets here. However, as I mentioned elsewhere, I did the math on this month's mileage and it's like 140mi. The biggest month I've ever had was like 101mi, and I believe that was a November before Dopey. So I'm trying not to freak out, and remind myself that I can walk miles of the long runs and it's OK. Sooooo yeah. Totally not nervous about that at all.

 

[avondale]

Sounds like you're making good progress!

 

[Herding_Cats]

I usually wait until Sunday or Monday, but I wanna get this down before I can't remember how the run went. Because that's happening a lot lately.

I ended up up taking both Monday and Tuesday off (will just shift my days back by 1, which will suit our weekend plans better anyway) so Wednesday was supposed to be 4mi. Just a regular 4mi, but I decided I was going to attempt a magic mile, just to see where things are from that standpoint. I feel like I'm going to *need* to be about a minute per mile faster than I am right now by race day, and this is a quick snapshot of where I'm at 2.5 months out.

I put on my "fast" shoes (which are the only road shoes I have now that aren't dead) and did just over a mile warmup and then decided that I would just run 1/2mi loops where the road is mostly flat, and avoid the gravel road since it had rained all night. I switched my interval timer from 30/30 to 75/25 (this was a mistake) and put on my faster playlist. My body did not know what to do. The first 75sec went OK, but it was sooooo long. Did I mention that I haven't run more than 40sec for a run interval in like a year? Yeah. Anyway, I did a half mile and called it because it just wasn't going well. My legs were just like "why are we going so fast? This is wrong." So maybe years of "easy only" runs isn't the best plan. I averaged 10:04 pace, which is way off of what I was thinking I could pull off.

But imagine my surprise when I got home and saw a post on fb about how bad the air quality is in our area. Oh. Yeah. That's right. All that wildfire smoke. So maybe it wasn't all my lack of fitness? It probably is, but let's pretend I could have run 9:30 with good air.


On the plus side, I PR'ed my hill segment and wasn't dying at the end, so I know things *are* improving. It was 4:06, and 15:13 pace for 102ft of ascent over 0.25mi. I'm totally good with that. My arbitrarily chosen goal number for that hill is 3:30 for the segment. But it's more important that I don't feel like my cardio-vascular system is going burst out of my chest at the end.


And then I got a mammogram, 4 new chicks, and a pair of novablast 5s that I'm going to try out today. They feel like they have a lot of potential.

 

[jmasgat]

But imagine my surprise when I got home and saw a post on fb about how bad the air quality is in our area. Oh. Yeah. That's right. All that wildfire smoke. So maybe it wasn't all my lack of fitness? It probably is, but let's pretend I could have run 9:30 with good air.

My Tuesday run sucked, but I can't blame it on the AQI. My butt was just dead. I went out today and had a good run. Just looked now and our AQI is 158/Red.

I suppose I better start checking this more. Airnow.gov is useful for this.

 

[Herding_Cats]

HELP! I just picked up a slew of summer basketball referee dates and need to adjust my schedule. I've shuffled things a little bit already to make space for things we have going on (mainly shifting my B2B long runs to Sunday/Monday instead of Saturday/Sunday) but I'm concerned specifically with 18th-23rd and what to do there. The peach highlighted cells are supposed to be trail runs, yellow are obviously referee dates. The red is a long run I'm not sure what to do with.

The 12th should only be a few hours, and is also girls basketball (usually means a little less running as the flow of the game tends to be a little bit slower than boys.) I was supposed to do 10mi on the 14th, and 6mi on the 15th, but I'm just straight swapping out the 16th's run for the SEVEN HOURS of basketball. At the least that's going to be the equivalent of a 3.5hr long-run. So I'm wondering if I should dial back the 10mi even more as that will likely take me 2.5 hours to complete.

DD finishes school next week, so Saturday/Sunday will definitely be the easier days to do the long runs starting the weekend of the 14th/15th so I'm not crazy about the idea of pushing the 12/6 on the 21st and 22nd back a day. Do make the 20th a rest day?

 

[WillRunForPizza]

It seemed like reffing made for pretty good cross-training for Dopey, right? So I definitely think it makes sense to swap out the runs on those days. Could you maybe do 8-10 miles on the 14th to give yourself an extra rest day on the 15th before two big referee days? Or is it better to run the day before a referee day?

For the post-referee days, I would probably take Thursday off rather than Friday, or at least modify Thursday so you're doing fewer reps. (Or you could do Friday's run on Thursday if that works better.) If you're tired, better to stick with easy running than to try to do a workout. And I would imagine (but you can tell me if I'm wrong) that reffing has some fast "intervals" in it already, so you'd have that part covered, even if they're not actually a full minute most of the time.

If you can keep the 12-mile pickup as close to as written as possible, I would say that's probably the key workout of the week, and adjust around it. If that means you need to take Friday off, cool. If that means you swap Saturday and Sunday for this week to give yourself an extra day to recover, also cool.

And hey, training on tired legs is good practice for an ultra!

 

[Herding_Cats]

It seemed like reffing made for pretty good cross-training for Dopey, right?

If by "good cross-training" you mean the only thing I did outside of about 30mi in December when basketball was on holiday break, then yes.

So I definitely think it makes sense to swap out the runs on those days. Could you maybe do 8-10 miles on the 14th to give yourself an extra rest day on the 15th before two big referee days? Or is it better to run the day before a referee day?

That long run is mostly about timing. I *could* do the run while we are camping, but it's also for Fathers Day weekend and I would essentially be dipping out on helping keep an eye on our extremely social 5yo for 3 hours to go for this run. We come home on Sunday morning, and I could go run at my usual spot (with known elevation, distances, bathrooms, etc) after we got home and unpacked the camper. But I feel like if I'm going to ref for 7 hours on Monday and 6 hours on Tuesday that it definitely makes more sense to try to accomplish the long run on Saturday before basketball.

For the post-referee days, I would probably take Thursday off rather than Friday, or at least modify Thursday so you're doing fewer reps. (Or you could do Friday's run on Thursday if that works better.) If you're tired, better to stick with easy running than to try to do a workout. And I would imagine (but you can tell me if I'm wrong) that reffing has some fast "intervals" in it already, so you'd have that part covered, even if they're not actually a full minute most of the time.

That makes sense. And dialing things back to easy has always been my fallback (probably to the detriment of improving or even maintaining any sort of "speed") so that's a good thing to keep in mind.

If you can keep the 12-mile pickup as close to as written as possible, I would say that's probably the key workout of the week, and adjust around it. If that means you need to take Friday off, cool. If that means you swap Saturday and Sunday for this week to give yourself an extra day to recover, also cool.

I don't wanna be cool! I wanna be prepared! But also not injured. Because injuries suck.

And hey, training on tired legs is good practice for an ultra!

I've already informed DH that I will likely be a gelatinous mass on Tuesday night. Gonna feel like post-Dopey legs on not-nearly-enough training.

 

[WillRunForPizza]

If by "good cross-training" you mean the only thing I did outside of about 30mi in December when basketball was on holiday break, then yes.

And you finished and didn't die! So that seems like a win.

That long run is mostly about timing. I *could* do the run while we are camping, but it's also for Fathers Day weekend and I would essentially be dipping out on helping keep an eye on our extremely social 5yo for 3 hours to go for this run.

As not-a-parent, I have absolutely no comment on parenting necessities and you should do whatever you have to do in that regard!

I don't wanna be cool! I wanna be prepared! But also not injured. Because injuries suck.

I mean, I wouldn't move everything around and change things every week if you can avoid it. But one week will not hurt you. And the 7-hour ref day could be a good opportunity to practice your fueling for the race, too, so it's just a different type of training.