First Blogiversary of "Strides"!

   "Strides" just celebrated its first anniversary!!
   It's now been one year since I began to describe in writing my little running "adventure". Of course, it seems as though I just started it yesterday!
   At the time, I thought I was engaged in a pretty solitary pursuit--who really knew that anybody other than me might be running and then writing about?

   Well, one day it occurred to me to hop on Google and find out if anybody was doing something like that. What I then discovered was that tons of runners were blogging. Or was it that tons of bloggers were running? Not sure on that one but the fact of the matter was there were a lot of us!
   As running bloggers, we come in all ages, sizes, body shapes and skill levels. Our blogging styles go from folksy to technical. We talk about what motivates us and what presents roadblocks (including, of course, actual roadblocks).
   As bad luck would have it, many of my posts this past year have dealt with either injury or other assorted reasons why I couldn't actually run.
   I went through a long stretch when I was recovering from plantar fasciitis. I was able to run for awhile after that but then found myself undergoing a treatment course for sun damage on my face. It has only been within the last day or two that I've been able to get back out there.


WAY too much opportunity to talk about THIS!

   What I found while I was off from running was that I blogged about medical stuff. I blogged about PF treatments and whether they seemed to be working or not. I blogged about my visits to the SoleScience centre at Western where I underwent a gait analysis and walked away with orthotics. And they even paid sixty bucks for my old, worn-out running shoes! I read other running blogs voraciously, looking for anything which might provide a topic for my own, seeing as how I wasn't actually running.
   More than anything, this past year has connected me with a whole bunch of other bloggers. Some of their stories and reasons for running mirror my own and some are vastly different. As a whole, though, they are very engaging and quick to offer advice or moral support. They also offer an audience and nothing's much more important to a blogger than to know that someone out there is actually paying attention!
   Hopefully, Year Two of "Strides" will find me doing more posts on how the running is going (not stopping) and more race updates as well. I know that the past year of running has left me in much better shape and the hope is that this trend continues. We also now have a gym membership (sadly unused lately) and this should also help, just need to actually go!
   At this point, I just wanted to thank you, the reader, for showing up here as often as you have! As I just stated, it's really not a lot of fun blogging if nobody's reading (although I would blog regardless) and the odd comment from y'all certainly makes it worth the time and effort! Cheers and good health to you all!
      

Back On The Pavement Again!

   Yesterday, for the first time in about six weeks and only the second time in the last two months or so, I got out and ran.
   Although the residual healing still has a way to go, the Efudex face treatments I'd been undergoing have come to a conclusion and so now I am able to return to running as well as the gym. If you actually want to see what the treatment and healing process looked like you can make a quick trip to my other blog, "Neanderings", and take a boo at the "Man On Fire" postings--there's a bunch of them!
   I had no real goal or plan with the running I did yesterday, other than for the fact that I knew there would likely be a fair amount of walking involved and I had given myself permission to do this.
  

What my legs actually look like...

The running was difficult.
   More than anything, I quickly developed this pain in my chest I wasn't used to. This began less than a kilometer into the run and briefly gave me cause for concern. You always want to pay attention to chest pains and I made a pretty constant assessment of it as I ran. After awhile I put it down to more of a lung issue than anything. I attributed the discomfort I was having to the fact that I'd lost a lot of the meagre supply of cardio I'd previously built up and that I was also now running in the cold, rather than the superheated temps I'd experienced over the summer. I remember having an issue in this area last fall when the weather turned cold and this felt very much the same.
   I also seemed to be having unfamiliar stride issues---my feet felt as though they were pounding down on the sidewalk. This then would shake the whole rest of my body. Nothing felt really comfortable yesterday! And to top it off, there was this niggling little pain on the inside of my left knee that I'd never felt before.
   Eventually the chest pain and the striding issues and the knee pain seemed to more or less resolve themselves and the running became a little more comfortable. I still decided to curtail the running sooner than I'd planned--I'd set out on a 5k route in my neighbourhood but decided to take the short way home, changing it into a 3 and a half k run.

Is this in my future?

   All in all, though, it was good to get out again and work up a sweat. It had been awhile! Really not sure what my running plans are for the foreseeable future, there are no races on the horizon. I have a 2014 goal of running a 10k somewhere so I know that I'm soon going to have to start upping the mileage. It also feels as if I'm starting from scratch but that's okay! Just good to be out and running again!

Putting the "13" Back Into 2013?

   It's been a strange kind of year, this 2013.
   From a running standpoint, it started out fine. The winter weather here in Canada never got to the point where running was impossible, although there were a handful of nasty days.
   I was loving it and started piling on the mileage. Well, I piled on the mileage a little too soon. And I ran in shoes that were already worn out. No sooner said than done and I had basically started 2013 with plantar fasciitis.

Particularly bad if you've placed
all your eggs in the same basket!

   If you've had PF you understand how pernicious it can be. It was very much a trial-and-error kind of thing, attempting to heal it up. Just when you think you're good to go, you find out you're not. Then, when you actually are good to go, you feel as though it may only be fleeting. So I briefly got back to running when suddenly I was dealing with biopsy  stitches and sun damage.
   So I sat on my butt while letting stitches heal and undergoing face treatment. This was strange, because I was all set to run--I was rested and the legs felt good. But I couldn't, for this reason and that reason. At the same time, there were time limits on all my limitations and I knew when they would be up.
   They were up this weekend. As luck would have it, though, while sitting on my bed Thursday morning, pulling on my socks, I strained my back badly. The scary part is I'm not really sure how I did it--I wasn't lifting anything heavy and had not gotten myself into an injurious position. It must have been the "perfect storm" of back injuries--the right amount of pressure at just the right angle with just the right amount of ill-preparedness. So, in rather freaky fashion, I am "on the shelf" yet one more time, though I suspect only briefly.

   As is my habit, I move from one setback to the next rather effortlessly. Not a lot of hand-wringing or teeth-gnashing going on here. But when I look back at the year, there does seem to more than the usual bad luck going on.
   I'm not really the superstitious sort and the fact that I've had this run of bad luck (did I mention I need a hearing aid?) during a year which ends with "13" hasn't really even fizzed on me. My "bad luck" I think has been nothing much more than things catching up to me all at the same time.
   At the same time, I am glad the year is almost over...
  

Biding My Time...Barely

   Last year, dead in the middle of a Canadian winter, I became a runner.
   I had taken my first tenuous strides toward this in the summer, at the beginning of August. Doralyn had registered us for a ten week Learn To Run course at the local Running Room and I spent August and September learning to do just that---run.
   I was pretty sure when I began that I would make it through this course and then just stop running. Really, I had never run before, found it kind of boring and could not see myself becoming a runner. Then a funny kind of thing happened when the course ended. I didn't stop!
   I kept on running, partly because I was starting to feel the health benefits and partly because I was amazing myself.
   Along the way, I began to ask myself the same question all of us runners have asked ourselves at one point or another. Am I a real runner?
   This question was answered for me in the middle of the aforesaid Canadian winter.
   I was running at the tail end of blizzards. I was running

One of my run days last winter...

through sleet storms. I was running through fog and rain. I was running on slush which turned to ice which turned to slush again, all in the same run. I was running in snow above my ankles. I was running in temps cold enough to bring tears to my eyes.
   This, then, was when I knew I was a runner.
   No casual jogger would have done what I did. They would have taken one look out the window and found something else to do.
   I actually put on the bulk of my miles over the winter. This is also when I lost the most weight. At some point, it occurred to me that running was something I was always going to be doing and I desperately began to look forward to Spring. Because now I was a runner.
   Unfortunately, Spring and PF arrived almost simultaneously. There were bare roads and sidewalks to run on but I couldn't. Gradually, the PF healed and I was able to more or less get back to where I was but then, all of then sudden, I've got biopsy stitches that need to heal and then, right after that, a three-week face treatment which also requires me to be on the sidelines. And I am still in the middle of that...
   I am anticipating that sometime in the not-too-distant future I will be running once again, unimpeded by outside forces. And when that time comes...it will be Winter again!

Half-Marasprinters!

   A few weeks ago, after I'd finished running in the 5k event at the Springbank Road Races, I hung around and watched the finish of much of the half marathon.
   There was a reasonably steady stream of runners crossing the finish line and, for the most part, by the time they got there they were single runners, with occasionally two of them running fairly close together.
   A couple of times, however, runners found themselves more or less shoulder-to-shoulder in the last two to three hundred meters and a strange thing happened. They began to race each other! In a full-out sprint!
   So, I know you're thinking well, it was a race wasn't it?
   Of course it was a race and that was part of the fun of it, being timed and photographed and maybe getting some swag and perhaps collecting points but the very few times I've raced I've clearly still considered it a very individual kind of thing, comparing my race results more with what my own expectations might have been rather than how I fared running against other people.

A little bit of confusion going on?

   Now, I have no idea whether these half-marathoners-turned-sprinters knew each other or perhaps had had some earlier interaction during the race or whether it was just a little bit of competitive overdrive going on as they bolted down the stretch but it raised some interesting questions, at least in my mind.

   Was it appropriate? What I mean by this is was there any intent on the part of either of the runners to "show up" the other runner and pass him in front of the bulk of spectators? Or did one runner simply maintain his race pace, which then took him past the lead runner, who then felt compelled to respond? Was it just good-natured competition...?
   Should you pay any attention the runners around you? In my short-lived racing experience, I have yet to feel comfortable passing people. I know that it's inevitable that you will both pass and be passed during the course of a race but I still feel way too apologetic in my head whenever I'm the one doing the passing. Not that it happens all that often...
   If you have enough energy left at the end of a race to go into a full-out sprint, then have you been rationing it properly? Perhaps if either of those runners had used that extra energy a little earlier in the race, then there wouldn't have been that head-to-head finish at the end. I know for a fact that I could have sprinted at the end of my 5k but I chose not to because I was...well...tired. But the energy was there so why didn't I expend it during the race, or any of my training runs, for that matter?
   Was testosterone a factor? In both instances, it was guys sprinting at the end, which did not surprise me. But is this behaviour totally a "guy thing" or would you be just as likely to see two women battling it out at the end like that?

   I have always had a bit of a fantasy about coming to the last three or four hundred meters of a race, having maybe four or five runners ahead of me and then passing them, one by one, as I head into the finish line. I'm not exactly sure what fuels that particular fantasy (perhaps it's the drama) as I am not overly competitive by nature. So far, I've never been in that situation either--the finishes I've been involved in have all been where, as I got close to the finish line, the runners ahead of me were way ahead of me and basically out of reach. What I also find is that my fuel for fantasy has been all used up just getting to the damn finish line!


Have you ever found yourself involved in an all-out sprint against a fellow runner at the end of a distance race?