Week 3 Day 1

Wasn't sure about this one, folks.  I had shoveled 17" of snow in the last 20 hours, I didn't sleep that good, and the little nap I attempted was a disaster.  But, when Tami asked if I wanted dinner I told her I needed to do my workout first.  So, I saddled up, put on the thinnest cotton t-shirt in history, and prepared for battle.  This week's routine calls for a brisk warmup walk of 5 minutes, a 90 second jog, a 90 second walk, a 3 minute jog, a 3 minute walk, a 90 second jog, a 90 second walk, a 3 minute jog, and finally a cooldown walk of five minutes.

I utterly crushed this workout!!  In the last workout, I could feel my lower legs acclimate to the stresses.  But, in this workout, they didn't complain in the least:

Mind / Body

Ankles? -  "Ready to go, chief"

Shins? - "No worries, boss"

Breathing? - "Um, let's talk later, k?"

The incline was 1% throughout,  I wiggled at 3.3 mph and jiggled at 5.1 mph (the first short jog was 5.2 mph).  I was thinking the whole time, and I think I improved my arm swing.  Turns out I was "sawing" - keeping the forearms parallel to the floor, instead of maintaining a 90 degree bend.  I did a good job of hitting just behind the outer ball of the foot (behind the 4th and 5th toes).  And I kept the cadence high enough so that my foot landed under my body.  The last minute of the last run was a little tough in terms of breathing.  I breathed like a race horse, with occasional bits of H2O flying out in front of the treadmill like tracer fire.  I did all the stretches, and everything feels very awesome.  See the photo below?  That's attitude, folks - something that athletes are prone to exhibit.

I told Elaine (my seven year old) that I had run nine minutes (I neglected to mention the walking in between).  She looked up from her computer game and said "Big deal, I bet I can do twenty minutes."  So, tomorrow I'm going to put her on the treadmill at 7.5 mph and see how long it takes her to go off the back!!  (Yep, that's a joke - no need to call Child Protective Services.)

The dinner I put off was so worth the wait.  I've told you guys before that my wife is a wonderful cook, but you have no idea: look at the feast below - imagine the coconut milk and curry, the snow peas magically between crunchy and soft, the shrimp and noodles saying 'yum' all the way down!

Thai Coconut Curry Shrimp with Snow Peas

A Snow Storm for the Ages

I shoveled 9" of snow this morning (on top of the 8" from last night), and the first plow arrived up the hill only to get stuck.  The intensity of the snow picked up around eleven and we are now easily beyond the 20" mark.  We may end up with 24" to 30".  The kids played in the snow, and Max got caught in a snow bank so badly, he couldn't move and was calling for help.  It wasn't funny, but I pretty much had to laugh anyway.  Tami was up to her hip wrenching him out of there.

Update: Okay, we ended up with 24 inches of snow stemming from approximately 1.7 inches of precipitation.  Alaskans, aside from having foreign policy experience due to their proximity to Russia, know a lot about snow.  And they also know how to do webpages, so I was able to find a forumla to relate snowfall to pounds per square foot:

This ends up being 5.2 times SWE (Snow Weight Equivalent - which is inches worth of water), which was about 1.7" for us.  This amounts to 8.84 pounds per square foot.  My driveway is at least 800 square feet, so this works out to 7,072 pounds of snow to shovel.  So far, I have shoveled 17" of 24", or 5009 pounds.  Yep, feels like it. :/

Nine inches (plus 8 last night), for a total of 17 at 9AM Saturday.

This poor guy spent at least an hour digging out.

Yours truly, shoveling like a mad man in my wife's big straw hat.

The backyard, where the fort has been given up for dead.

This snow bank, from shoveling, is as high as my shoulders.

Getting Blizzarific

Today, despite the opening rounds of the epic snow storm I went to the Woodbridge location of VA RUNNER.  I was greeted by a nice young man at the door - they weren't doing much business.  I told him that perhaps my Nike Airs weren't the best shoe for me.  The heel is two or three inches tall, and it complicates my ambitions of doing fore-foot strikes, or at least messes up my form.  The nice young man, evidently unaware of millions of years of primate evolution, told me that natural running was a fad and that humans were designed to run with a heel-strike.  He said they didn't carry footwear such as Vibram's FiveFingers and that they were unlikely to do so.  He explained that the store's owner had a great deal of education in stride mechanics, was a phenomenal runner, had coached high-profile running teams and stood by the properness of the heel-strike.  Well, good for them.  At least 25% of runners run fore-foot or mid-foot, so if they want to retard their sales figures, that's fine with me.  (Sarah - please look closely at the previous sentence - I did not use the word retard as a slur.) I left the pimply-faced boy holding a one-pound, over-engineered, foot coffin and headed back into the snow.  Right now, I truly want to hop on the treadmill in my socks and bust out one of my lengendary, three-minute jogs.  But, I'm trying to be good by not running on off days.  Besides, in about an hour I will begin shoveling snow under the street lamp whilst singing Maniac from the 1983 smash hit Flashdance.

~ A Few Hours Later ~

You know, that primal urge to sing 80s hits didn't last very long.  I attacked 8" worth of snow across about perhaps 800 square feet of driveway.  I think I won, but I'm not completely sure.

Level Two

~ Athletic Character Statistics ~

Age: 44

Weight: 203.0

Cholesterol: Yes

Pulse: 160-180 after jogs

Gear: Newbie+

As a level two athletic character, I am once again entitled to more bling.  The problem is that I haven't fully digested the bling from last week, the Chi Running book.  I will be classifying ideas from that book into "Yes, I should try that", "No way will I try that", and "Undecided".  I have been doing a lot of research on the mechanics of running, and so far I have found the ideas swirling around bare or minimalist shoes to be attractive.  If I happen across a store that sells Vibram FiveFingers, I will most likely buy them.  Even if I only wear them around the house or to the occasional meeting at work, they are just that cool.  I am definitely going to concentrate on fore-foot running as my fitness level improves.

Check out the video below.  Is that poetry or what?

Week 2 Day 3

Ker-Pow!  Week 2 is in the books, folks.  As you can see, I went down the stairs as a nose-breather and came back as a mouth-breather.  For today's exercise, the same across Week 2, I wiggled at 3.3 mph and jiggled at 5.1 or 5.2 mph.  My heart rate was 140s after walks and 160s after the first five jogs.  (I was at 120 after the warm-up walk.) For the last run I took the incline to zero and slowed it down to 5.0 mph. Just as the music changed and the podcast dude was saying congratulations for finishing, I ripped the headphones out of the ipod and kept jogging.  My last jog was three minutes.

Why would I do three minutes at the end?  What I have noticed in the C25K forums is that a lot of people get anxious, dare I say melodramatic, at the imposing requirements of a following week's exercise regimen.  Given my melodramatic tendencies, I told myself if I felt good at the end, that I'd keep going to prove I could do three minutes.  I like to think that I took some gloves and whacked them across the face of Week 3.  :)

In terms of stride, I started the first two jogs with heel-striking.  When that felt sufficiently jarring and uncomfortable, I switched to fore-foot striking.  For jogs 3-6, I did exclusively fore-foot striking and I tried to get my heel down before my center of mass was already in front of the foot.  I wasn't overly lucky in that category.  Clearly, to avoid the heel, I'm coming in at a steeper angle than would otherwise be necessary.

There was something fascinating about this exercise.  I could feel my lower legs accommodate their conditions.  At first, I thought things might not end up too comfortable - the ankles and shins were saying "Oh crap, here he goes again."  Then, they leveled off and I didn't hear a peep out of them.

Afterwards, I stretched the gastroc, soleus, piriformis, hamstrings, and quads like a proper soldier.  All muscles are happy and accounted for.  I checked my shin bones before the run, and everything was in order, but now I can feel that Tanya Harding had 'em whacked again when I wasn't looking.  Given my weight, and the fact that each leg gets 2-3 times my body weight per stride, it's only natural that they will flex a bit and search for calcium in the off days.

I also did some of my favorite cross-training today: snow shoveling 4.25 +/- 0.25 inches of snow.  Here's a picture of the kids playing while Daddy was at work.  Currently, they are forecasting 12-24 inches of snow for Friday and Saturday.  Lots of cross-training in my future!  Is it just me, or is that rusty Dodge depressing property values?

Run Naturally? - Rant #1

I have had advice from several people - several athletes - that I should run naturally.  They say that in response to my musings about mechanics and the experimentations I have done on the treadmill.  And, I'm going to have a little rant on that subject.

First, after 44 years of living in the fad-loving, infomercial that is modern culture, the odds that I would have instinctively retained a clue as to what is natural seems farfetched.  Thus, the advice amounts to "run in your habitual manner".  In the last 25 years, I've only run a few times to catch a door before it closes.  So, I don't even have much of a habit to lean on.  What I do remember is two runs - one in middle school, where I did 1.5 miles in 12 minutes with a combination of rear-foot and fore-foot; and one in high school where I did 3.0 miles on a whim (with zero preparation) and my shins just below the knees were x-ray-to-make-sure bad.

Second, evidentally experimentation is natural for me.  And just as I'm experimenting physically on the treadmill, I'm exercising my brain by reading and evaluating research on running.  A recent paper in the journal Nature claims that a barefoot fore-foot striker on concrete experiences less force on the musculoskeletal bits than a shod runner on concrete heel-striking in the modern, thick-soled running shoe.

There is a very loud minority out there that refer to shoes as foot coffins, insisting that shoes turn the feet - each with its 26 bones, 33 joints, 20 muscles, and hundreds of sensory receptors, tendons and ligaments - into insensate, injury-prone, flippers.  This sounds at least plausible to me, so I will keep investigating.  Mechanically, the arch, achilles, and calf muscles function as a spring.  And a spring that has been tailored across millions of years of primate evolution.  I'm inclined to trust that heritage more than a piece of rubber provided by Nike under heel.  Though I must admit, my Nikes look super cool.

On the other hand, look how super cool these babies are:

Week 2 Day 2

Today's routine was the same as W2D1.  I wiggled at 3.3 mph and jiggled at 5.1 mph, except the last jog where I did 6.0.  The incline was always 1%, and at the end of runs my heart rate was always between 160 and 172.  Both ankles got a little fatigued, but thankfully both shins felt pretty good.  I haven't had a complaint from the quads in a while now, so I will score that as progress.  I had a lot of thoughts running through my head about form.  I experimented with lean; concentrated on raising ankles rather than lifting knees; letting my hips go back with my legs so I wouldn't be such a robot; etc.

I'm doing some stretching after runs now.  I need to get a protractor on this one, but my guess is that's a 45-degree angle.  I don't know if that's good or bad, but it was more stretchy than I thought it would be.  I don't have any soreness in any muscle.  The only place I can find soreness is in the center of my shin bones - right on the bone itself, as if Tanya Harding had them whacked a week or two ago in an effort to keep me out of the winter olympics.
                                                                               

This is my piriformis stretch, which twists my leg around so that the foot is higher than the knee.  I don't know exactly what a piriformis is, but I think I stretched it.
                                                        

I shouldn't have done any "stride work" yesterday on my rest day, but a keen-eyed observer thought that maybe my shoes were contributing to my shin and ankle woes.  So, here is a close up of my shoe.  That's about two inches of heel, folks.  It sticks out a little on the back and curves up very slightly.  One theory is that if I do a heel strike, the shoe propels the front of my foot down so violently, that my shin muscles try to dorsiflex to save the day and get upset in the process.  What do you think?