Oops

I left my iPod at home today. I was halfway down the block with Buddy when I realized I didn't have it - I knew I'd been travelling light this morning but not that light - if I hadn't had him I would have turned around and gotten it. So today was my first track workout ever without my tunes.

I was a little nervous about it since track workouts always require some extra oomph and music is the easiest way to get that. But I figured this would be good practice for the race on Sunday (Share Your Soles 10K) and just good practice in general. Also, it was a fairly easy workout as far as track workouts go, 6x400m.

And you know what? I think it worked out for the best! Right from the start I focused closely on my breathing, my form, and how my legs felt. I was trying for as consistent a feel as I could get, checking my time halfway through each repeat to confirm my pace and then adjust as need be. I used my breathing to slow me down when I suspected I might be going too fast, and then changed my breathing pattern at the very end when I wanted that last extra oomph and didn't know where I was going to get it from. And my repeats were the most consistent they've ever been, all at 2:13 with maybe a second's variance in either direction once I got through the first one.

Of course, it's one thing to focus this intensely when I'm only doing 400m at a time. After next week, when I start my marathon training in earnest, my track workouts are all mile repeats and that's a long time to focus so closely, especially given how slow I run. I will really want my music then. But I might try turning off the iPod for some of those repeats... you know, just to see how it feels.

Tracking My Obsession - Part 2 - Off to the Races!

Once I moved to Chicago, in 2000, the running scene was hugely different. Chicago is a city full of runners and great running places. I mean, you can't go anywhere without seeing runners, and if you're anywhere close to the lake you can barely keep from tripping on them. I had taken a break from regular running during my last months in Massachusetts as I become more and more involved in martial arts study, but now I started again, and even signed up for another marathon training program that did not involve fundraising.

Part of this training program involved my first road race, the 2001 Chicago Distance Classic. It was not love at first race. It was brutal. It was hot, of course, August on the lakefront, and a distance I had not covered before (20K, or about 12.5 miles). Nor was I in any way prepared for it. I finished - I even managed not to finish last - but I had no fun, and stopped my training program shortly thereafter.

Over the next four years I started and stopped and started running again. I stopped because of injury, or because my life got complicated - I started because there was nothing that made me feel as good as running did.

I had just started running more regularly again when I met The Dude, in 2005. There is nothing like being involved with another runner to affirm your own love for it. The Dude did not think I was crazy for heading out in all kinds of weather. The Dude understood how I felt after a good run, and that even a bad one was better than no run at all. And The Dude inspired me with his stories of marathons and half-marathons and running with his mom and their tradition of running the Ohio River Road Runners Turkey Trot together every year. That year I ran the Turkey Trot for the first time with him. There were old guys in sweatshirts and young women in tights, middle school kids, lots of middle-aged folk just like me, dogs barking furiously from the sidelines. It was hard, it was cold and windy and rainy, and it was AWESOME.

Chicago is a city where you seriously could run a race every single weekend of the year and not leave city limits. Add in the surrounding suburbs and you could make it every Saturday and Sunday. After that first one, if I'd had more money and time I would have run another race every month, I loved it that much. Instead I got married and worked weekends, ran a couple more a year later, then got pregnant. I kept thinking about races, though, kept planning, kept hoping. Kept having dreams of running a marathon.

So to start running again last year, to improve so much through better training, to be consistent in my training, to find ways to safely continue through injury, to build on the work of last year instead of starting all over again yet again, and to be in a place where I can realistically train for that long-awaited, 14-years-in-the-making marathon... why this is heaven indeed.

Marathon Running With Girls On The Run

So I'm training for the Chicago Marathon, raising funds for the organization Girls On The Run (GOTR).

I think what excites me most about their organization is the non-competitive nature of it. That all girls, regardless of their ability, can take part in the training and the fun and the accomplishment of finishing a 5K.

It's also important to me that the advantages attributed to exercise for girls - better self-esteem, making healthy choices, improved body image - are made explicit through the GOTR lessons. It's done in a fun, playful way for the elementary school girls, more seriously for the middle schoolers.

I loved being active as a kid. I was always taking some class - ballet, gymnastics, jazz dance, horse-back riding, even rhythm gymnastics. I went hiking and cross-country skiing with my parents, swam by myself and with my dad, and biked everywhere.

And then, you know, as a girl things can just change for you in high school. At least they did for me.

I had always been aware that I was heavier than other girls (no surprise, as I started sneaking food starting at age 8), and was unhappy with my body. With puberty this unhappiness just exploded. All my physical activity became focused on losing weight. I still biked and hiked and skiied, but the fun in it dwindled as I obsessed about the calories I was or was not burning, and made plans to stop eating that I couldn't ever fulfill. I read the teen magazines and did the exercises promising to get you a bikini body by summer - I didn't. And then I got to college and gave up, and my weight and my health paid the price.

It took a while to get back to enjoying physical activity just for the fun of it. I've written recently about how I got started running after college and fell in love with it; I also started studying martial arts at that time and got introduced to the spiritual aspect of sport. And I had always remained a walker, covering long distances, both out of necessity since I didn't drive, and out of satisfaction in being able to get everywhere on my own feet. But I needed to work out some of the crap I'd accumulated in my head about my body and food and fitness and health before I could truly let go of my compulsive eating and thereby truly enjoy moving just for its own sake. I'm grateful to say it's been a good number of years that this has been true.

My hope for the girls taking part in Girls On The Run is that by taking part in the training, in the lessons and by being part of a team, that they may never lose their love of movement for its own sake. It is a blessing, every day, to be able to run, to have a healthy body that is for your own use, not someone else's. Girls On The Run shows these girls that blessing, and so I am grateful to be able to train with them and for them as a member of their SoleMates team.*

*Even if it is a cheesy, cheesy name.

Just An Ordinary Run

Good day for a run today. Somewhat cool but not cold, air comfortably damp, no noticeable wind. I went out for 5 miles on my favorite run-before-work route, which takes me from Buddy's daycare up a smooth gradual hill, through a pretty residential neighborhood with lots of flowering trees, then some not so interesting bits until I hit the park that I love, from which I then go back into nice neighborhoods until I get home.

On my easy runs I am working on keeping a slower steady pace. It's very easy and very tempting to start off quick, but then I fight through the last two miles. If I manage to avoid this initial temptation I then struggle with the urge, once I'm warmed up, to deliberately pick up the pace, thereby turning it into a tempo run. But I need to remember that at the end of the summer I will be attempting to run 26.2 miles, and the only way to do that is to learn how to temper my pace. I have enough other opportunities for speedwork, so I tell myself, "Anne, sometimes an easy run gets to stay an easy run."

Lots of birds today, skimming across the fields, lots of May flowers, good music on my shuffle. Just an ordinary day, and what a blessing.

Tracking My Obsession - Part 1 - Telephone Poles and Trails

I realize that to many of my friends, my obsession with running may have come as a surprise. And even looking over the first few entries from last spring, I see that I show no sign of the single-mindedness that was about to spring forth.

But I have been running for 14 years now, since 1996, and fell in love with it immediately.

I don’t know why I started, though it was probably to lose weight and because I didn’t have easy access to a gym nor money for a bike. I started by running to one telephone pole, then walking to the next, then running again, and so on, until I could string a decent number of telephone poles together. And then there was no stopping me, especially once I realized that I could possibly run forever if I ran slowly enough.

I had two favorite routes, one on the road heading out of town where I could run on the broad shoulder with little fear of traffic, passing farmland. I loved to run this at night and in the winter, with the moon and stars above me, watching my breath in the dark.

In the day, and when the trails weren't made treacherous by ice, I ran into the woods and along old train tracks, passing the backs of farms with a view of the nearby hills, golden in the sun.

Most of my running was completely solitary, with no one around, and never any other runners. I didn't think of myself as part of the running community, being too slow and too fat, and not interested in road races. But even then, I dreamed of running long distances, of being a "real runner," of doing marathons and maybe even an ultra someday.

After a year or so of this I moved to my old college town where I had access to the track and cross-country trails at my alma mater. More rolling hills through farmland, more tree-shaded paths. Glorious. And now too, more runners - sometimes from the college, sometimes from the town - and even occasionally a local cross-country race, with wiry old men in singlets and young women in shorts and middle school kids all mixed in together, dogs barking furiously from the sidelines.

I still didn't think of myself as a runner, though I seriously considered training for a marathon through the Team in Training program. I even went to an information session for it, but in the end the fundraising involved scared me too much, as did the prospect of hours spent slogging around the track. No, my racing days were still to come.

Wrigley Start Early 10K 2010 Race Report

Good grief, this has taken entirely too long to write.

It did take me about a week to be nice to myself when I thought about it. In the end I realized that most of my difficulties were in my head, not my feet.

Here's what went well:

1. It was a beautiful day.
2. And a scenic course.
3. I ran it with good friends! Thanks, Allison! Thanks, Kim!
4. It was for a good cause, child abuse prevention.
5. And it was good practice - both in what do I need to do differently in races from now on, and in handling disappointment.
6. I met my first goal (sub-10:00 miles) - a final result of 1:01:21, an average pace of 9:54 per mile.

Here's what I want to do differently in the future.

1. Be honest about my goals to myself.
   
2. Then know beforehand what mile splits I need to hit to reach those goals.
3. And know where the mile markers are!
   
4. Find ways to focus myself and be present when things get hard, for my legs or for my head.
   

In the end my actual accomplishment was all I could have asked for. Yes, I went out too fast at the beginning, but I was able to stay steady for most of the rest of the way, to gut it out when it got really hard, and to kick it up a wee little bit at the end.

Thanks to good training, I've gotten better. I've gotten faster. So now I want to see that better and faster in my races. But that means pushing myself in new ways, and that means I need to make friends with discomfort. Because it isn't comfortable to run fast for long periods of time. But it would have been a LOT easier this past Saturday if I hadn't been going through all my unnecessary mental gymnastics at the same time.*

And now it's gotten especially important for me to learn this since I've gone ahead and signed up to do the Chicago Marathon on October 10. And of course, being me, I'd like to do more than "just finish."

But this has also confirmed something important for me to know - in the face of disappointment and frustration, my first instinct was to figure out what I could do better, and then look for the opportunity to put that into practice.

(I'll practice first on another 10K at the end of May, though, not on the marathon. I'm not that foolhardy.)

And now I am finally done with this race report. I can go back to writing about the important things in life, such as the newfound realization that the skin around my knees has seriously lost its elasticity - I think it's time to embrace running capris.

*Such as, uncertainty around where the mile markers were and how fast I was going, frustration when I knew for certain I had gone out too fast and for too long, and disappointment when I thought I had really missed my mark. Which really impaired my ability to enjoy the race for what it was - a glorious spring day on which I was running faster, for longer, than I ever have before.

Here We Go!

Wrigley Start Early 10K today. My training has been going well - better than expected in fact - but the last two weeks have been rough personally and I'm feeling a bit depleted. So my first goal for today is to keep a 10:05 pace - while my "cross-the-fingers" goal is to finish in under an hour.

I'll have to write more later - right now I need to feed myself and the kid and get myself dressed and ready to go in under an hour. Oh yes, and teach Buddy how to make his singing horse sing on his own so I don't have to keep doing it.

Keep your fingers crossed!