Progress Report: Week 6

WOO! Six weeks in to Operation Marathon, and a mighty 12% completed on my marathon training plan. My last update was a bit negative, but with Real World, running and roller derby I've not had much time for writing, sorry about that.

Happily, my accident a couple of weeks ago just left me a bit battered but not actually injured (skaters will understand the difference here). I'm still super-sensitive to getting injured again and Sunday was spent freaking out a bit about the whole thing but I went for a gentle jog around the park the next day and it seemed to be OK, and the pain pretty much disappeared over the next few days. Yay!

However, it has chipped a little bit more off my skating confidence. I'm really struggling with the derby head game at the moment. I dread scrimmages in case I or someone else gets hurt. I'm hesitating in situations that a year ago I wouldn't have thought twice about. Scrum derby strategies leave me feeling very uneasy and unhappy. I'd like to think that with every training I attend where nobody gets hurt my confidence will return, but at the moment it's hard. Really hard. We have a bout next weekend so watch this space I guess.

I guess another thing that's making derby hard is that while I grapple with it my running is coming on great. Every week brings new progress and I can feel it both physically and mentally. I can now comfortably run for well over an hour, intervals and speedwork are an enjoyable challenge rather than something to be feared, and I'm making personal best times on 5 and 10k runs almost every time I put sole to sidewalk. I'm losing the derby mental game but it feels like I'm winning the running game.

Today I faced my first milestone, a 10k race as part of the wildly popular Run Auckland series. I'd run a few of their 5k races a couple of years ago when I first dabbled in running, and the location of today's race was almost on my doorstop and the timing made a perfect checkpoint. I'd managed to comfortably run a few 10ks in the last couple of weeks so I definitely felt ready when I went to bed last night. The goals for today were:
1) Finish the race
2) Run the entire course
3) Complete in under 70 minutes
4) Average a speed of 9km/h

As I've said before, I'm not fast. I'm getting faster, but I've got a long way to go! The day before I'd run 5k at an average speed of 9.1km so I thought that goal 4 would be a good thing to aim for, even if I wasn't successful. I was confident of 1 and 2, 4 was an "it would be nice if..." but 3 was the one to work for. The fastest I'd run a 10k before was 74 minutes. Could I take 4 off that? I had a horrible stomach bug last weekend and as a result had missed a few training runs, I wasn't sure how I'd go.

This morning was COLD. Seriously cold. The race was a couple of k from my house so I decided to warm up for it by walking and there was thick frost on the ground at 8am (a very rare occurrence for Auckland). I hung on to my jacket until about 5 minutes before the race but my fingers and hands took about twenty minutes before I got any feeling into them and the air was so cold it made my lungs hurt.

The race was 4 laps around the park and I am damned if I'm doing another race where it's short laps like that. The first one I did fine, 9.1km/h and felt great. By lap 2 I was flagging a little but felt OK and passed the finish chute just as the men's winner completed the race (I expect to see me in the photos, cheering and clapping the guy). Lap 3, however, was a grind. I'd done it twice already, I knew the course now, and yet had to do it all over again. Twice. I was starting to feel tired, legs were starting to feel heavy. It became a head game. "Once I get to the top of this wee hilly bit, I only have to do it once more" "There's that woman with the weird run/walk stride, overtake her again" (we traded places about eight times, she beat me to the finish by about 30 seconds which is impressive given competitive walking looks about as unnatural a gait as it's possible for humans to have without going backwards on a pogo stick). I was a full minute behind my first lap time and felt I had a lot of work to do if I was make 70 minutes.

Recovery bath, those feets had worked hard

Happily, by then, the head games were being won. I was just under 9k done when I passed the 1 hour mark, and that was the spur I needed. It was hard going but I stopped my watch at 1:09:07. I'd beaten my goal time by a minute, and run an average speed of 8.7km/h. I was over the bloody moon and ran over that line like I'd won the damn thing (people should be happier crossing finish lines I think). My walk home was much slower than my walk out but much more satisfied.

I'll be honest, I find this running thing incredibly hard. I've lost a fair bit of fat since I started but I'm still an "Athena" class runner (they have a name for us, bigger guys are called "clydesdales". Draw your own conclusions) and it doesn't matter how charitable you're being, 81kg is still a lot to haul over 6 miles. True fact: When I use the runner's world shoe finder it makes picks based almost solely on my weight/BMI, regardless of my gait or mileage. I can run a 6 minute k but only one at this stage. However, I know I'm improving. I can feel my body changing as it copes with new demands placed on it. Where skating works the  quads really hard but neglects the hamstrings, running does the opposite and I can now feel muscles down the backs of my legs where they weren't before. The unevenness that comes from skating predominantly one direction is being rectified by hours on the road. My backside now has MUSCLE underneath the fat. My core is tightening. Even my skin is looking better as I spend hours outside (though my lips are now permanently chapped in this weather). I have to say, I like where this journey is taking me.

Next checkpoint race is at the end of August/start of September (either North Shore half marathon on the Whangamata Running Festival half). I'll be ready.

Digging in

I announced to the world that I had entered the Auckland Marathon two and a half weeks ago. There was lots of YAY and AWESOME and GO YOU to start with, and then I'd run out of people to tell and there's nothing left but me, training and the occasional stranger who gets within earshot. It's dark almost all the time I'm not in work, the rain is frequent and the mornings frosty. It comes down to a mental game now, the first challenge of whether I can stick to my training program once the novelty has worn off and I have to find time to put my runs into my everyday life. It's time to dig in.

I decided at the start of this that the best way to make this whole adventure happen was to have no excuses. If the planner says run, I run. So if it says I need to run on a day I'm skating, I get to the rink early and run as a warm up. If I've no time, I run after training. Monday saw me running at quarter to ten at night, grinding it up a bastard of a hill in the kind of drizzle that chills to the bone. Today I was up at 5-ish, flew the length of the north island for an all day meeting, flew back, did my grocery shopping, came home, and went straight out for a 20 minute "easy" run. Tomorrow I need to either get up before 6am to get my run in or squish it in after coaching somewhere.

Great documentary about a bunch of unfit types training for Boston. 

What I'm discovering though, is that this discipline is bringing benefits, even at this early stage. There was no doubt in my mind on my flight home today that I was going to run when I got home. By the time I got home from training on Monday I'd mapped out a route in my head that I was fairly confident would take me half an hour at my "long run" pace (I was on the money, too). I'm discovering interesting little side roads, back streets and shortcuts. I used to take music with me but recently discovered that I run better and more efficiently when I don't have headphones in. That short period between starting to run and feeling out of breath is gradually increasing, and even when I'm breathing heavily I feel more comfortable with it. I'm feeling progress happening.

According to my planner, I'm 4% of the way through. This is oddly comforting. I like knowing that if I feel this good at 4%, 40% is going to feel awesome, let alone 100%!