Summer Night 5K Race Recap

   This past Friday, I ran in the Summer Night 5K, one in the London Honda Road Race series. 

Just before the start of the race. One of the
course marshals said I had the best t-shirt!

   It does not get any more "summer night" than it was that evening---temp was about 26C and I'm pretty sure the humidity was at 100 per cent. It was one of those nights you could reach out and touch the air, if you know what I mean.
   I had not trained for this race. In fact, I had run only three times in the last three months. As previously explained, the last little while has been taken up with playing ball hockey a couple of nights a week and this left little room for extra running, at least for the most part. By the end of the season I was beginning to feel as if my legs might actually accommodate both kinds of running, so good for me!
   One of the cool things about the race was that my Sweetie, Doralyn, and two of my three stepsons, Callum and Quin, were there to cheer me on. They saw me off at the start line and were there waiting for me at the soggy and gasping end! The other cool thing is that this race has much more of a party atmosphere than any of the others and starts off from a bar downtown, The Barking Frog!

Me, with a bemused look and
Callum, my stepson. Don't think either
of us knew our pics were being taken...

   I basically had no plan or strategy around this race. I knew I'd be unable to run the whole thing and therefore was quite willing to incorporate walking breaks. On the last training run I'd done, I'd tried to do 10 and 1's but that had broken down after the first 10 and 1! So last night I figured I'd start with a 10 and 1 and then use shorter run and walk breaks.
   Well, this broke down as well. Essentially, I ended up running until I got tired and then I walked until I felt like I could run again. This meant a lot of walking.

A last-minute "I love You!" for Doralyn,
just before the start of the race.

   As with most races, pretty soon you end up running in a pack with runners who are relatively at the same experience or fitness level. About half a kilometer into the thing, a woman all of the sudden was running beside me as if she were attached to my left elbow. She didn't appear interested in talking or even running at a different pace, she never ran ahead and never fell behind. It occurred to me at one point that maybe she found me running at a comfortable pace for her and was happy just to use me as a pace bunny (giggle). This was more than fine with me, though. She was (and still is, I presume) a very short and compact lady and I assumed that eventually I would just pull away from her and finish ahead. As the race went on and my pace wavered from faster to slower and then back again, she would then end up either slightly behind or ahead of me. In the final kilometer, however, she was joined by a couple of non-racers who then ran with her on to the finish. At this point, she slowly pulled away and finished pretty far ahead of me. I'm thinking this was a woman who'd come to this race with a plan and some support and it had all worked out wonderfully for her. I caught up to after the race and congratulated her on a job well done!

One of the race organizers is just to my right
in this pic. We had just exchanged a sweaty
high five at the end of the race and I think he's
wondering if he needs to call medical staff...lol

   As for myself and my own performance, I will blame the heat and humidity and I will blame the lack of training and I will also (at least a little) blame ball hockey. 
   Now, though, there are no extra sports to sap my energy and I can get down to the business of really training. My time for this race (I am sad and embarrassed to say) was 41:26. I now have 41:26 to beat the next time I am out on a run. My plan will be to continue with trying to implement timed walking and running intervals and then slowly change the length of them until I get back to the point of being able to run a whole 5K all at once. Which I was able to do not all that long ago! Wish me luck!

Back at it again!

      Okay, I'm back again! Who knows for how long I'll be back but I do promise to try and do a better job of this run-blogging thing from here on in!
   By my calculations, I've run once in the last three months! As explained in earlier blog posts, I hooked up with a ball hockey team at the end of Spring and have had my hands full with doing that kind of running, as opposed to any other kind. The ball hockey season (at least for my team boo-hoo) ended a couple of nights ago so now I have the opportunity to re-focus just a touch. 
   Which is good because I have a race in six days!
   A race I obviously haven't trained for!
   Thank goodness it's only a 5K race here in London and thank goodness I've at least been doing some kind of running, in the interim.

That's me in the red shirt on the left, bending
over to take away a pass. There was WAY too much of this lol!

   My team played a couple of nights a week and the kind of running I did there likely mostly equates to speed work or hill repeats for all you regular runners out there. It will be interesting to see the kind of effect this might have had on my ability to run a 5K race. I do plan on getting out today for a run and then hopefully a couple times more before next Friday's Summer Night race.
   This race is one of my favourites on the London Honda Road Race series. It is the only evening race in the series and is an out and back kind of affair which starts of from the Barking Frog bar here in London, wends its way down near the Thames River and then back again. The race has more of a party feel to it and is one of the races where we're also not all bundled up so it's quite enjoyable. There is a slight forecast of rain so fingers crossed but then again running in a warm rain ain't all that bad either!
   So I'm headed out shortly and we'll see where my legs take me. And how fast they take me there! Let you know later on!

Hellacious Hills

   In my last post, I sort of described why I hadn't been either doing much running or blogging about it. Due to the sudden insertion of ball hockey into my life, the legs lately just haven't had the oomph required to get me out there.

Entrance to Warbler Woods

   This does not mean, though, that I have been at home simply sitting on my butt. A couple of times lately I have headed out for long walks through nearby Warbler Woods, in an effort to keep the legs moving and, perhaps even more importantly, enjoy the arrival of Spring! Yay! We're now at the point where things have actually dried up enough to make a walk through the woods an enjoyable experience. This time of year, as well, the leaves haven't blossomed yet and you can see deep into the forest, which is kind of cool.
   On these trips, I began by following the same path I take when I'm on a run. I leave my house and am at the woods in about a kilometer. There's a two kilometer stretch through the woods, I come out on the other side and then another two kilometers on pavement to get back to my place.
   I changed things up a bit though the last two times by foregoing the the final 2K on pavement and simply darting back into the woods after I popped out of them and taking a different route back through.

SNAKE! (upper right-hand corner...)

 
   Okay, this different route back through is hellacious. Warbler Woods is somewhat bowl-shaped insofar as you go down into them and climb back up out of them. My normal route has me encountering one really nasty hill but then I end up running around the upper rim of the bowl without descending into its depths. Going down into the depths brings you face-to-face with at least six hellacious hills, all of which are even more hellacious than the one hellacious hill I was already (kinda) used to.
   I was exhausted several times and, mind you, I was just walking. I can't imagine running these things. They were all pretty well straight up with bendy curves in them and it wasn't even all that easy going down the backsides of them, due to their steepness.
   

A fine example of a Carolinian forest!!

These woods are quite popular with hikers and casual walkers but I couldn't help but think that there should be some sort of disclaimer posted at the entrance, indicating the degree of difficulty. Or maybe it's just me...
    I remember thinking a couple of times at the summit of the latest hill that I was just as winded as if I'd been running. At the time, I thought of this as a good thing, figured I was at least out there getting exercise if I wasn't actually running.
   Also, the first time I did this new route, I stopped several times to rest. The second time, I vowed I would just plow on through, which is what I did.

Part of the trail

   Toward the end of my second walk, things started to catch up to me. At one point, I snagged my toe on a root as I was descending one of these hills. Nothing major that wouldn't normally have been handled by a bit of a hop and a skip but I discovered my legs would not do that hop and a skip for me. It seemed like the legs would not bend at the knee and all of the sudden it felt like I was walking on stilts instead of legs and I envisioned tumbling head first onto the trail and just rolling and rolling and...but I caught myself, thank goodness. It was then that I started to realize the toll all this ball hockey and walking had taken on my legs! I managed to get out of the forest the second time and was left with about a kilometer on

Bit of a boardwalk through
the boggier portions.

pavement to get me back home. Walking on flat pavement was not an issue, it seemed. Back at home, though, I was faced with the four steps of my wooden porch. Normally, I can spring up them. Not the other day. I pretty well needed to crawl up them and afterwards, sitting on the newly-conquered porch, I resolved to give my legs a couple of days off. No running, no ball hockey, no walking. I compromised a little by doing some yardwork the following day but even that was not pretty.
   In the midst of all this, I was ironically invited to do a squat challenge, by Crystal, intrepid leader of the Canuck Running Bloggers. Ha ha ha, I can't even really sit on the toilet or get dressed properly, let alone do a squat challenge!! Did I mention that I think I might have overdone it??
   I am pretty sure that I will return to these Hellacious Hills, however. It occurred to me as I was walking them that they would be perfect for hill repeats. They're evenly spaced enough that recovery time would be accommodated and they're different from each other, so you wouldn't get bored either! If you survived... 

What I've Been Up To!

   Okay, my stats are WAY, way down and my blog is rife with referrer spam so I guess this means I haven't been posting regularly...??
   Well, I haven't been posting because I haven't been running. And I haven't been running because...well...I've been running. My ass off, to be more specific!
   I finally managed to land myself on a ball hockey team for the first time in the last two and a half years. This means I've been spending the last two weeks chasing twenty- and thirty-somethings (did I mention that I'm sixty-two?) around a rink, twisting and turning, stopping and starting, diving, kneeling, blocking shots and, generally, running into people. And my legs are paying for it!
   Before, when I wasn't playing, it was quite easy to schedule my running and run as much as I wanted, when I wanted. Not so anymore. 

Yes, I play for the Outlaws. Cuz I'm badass.

   Right at the moment, I am on someone else's schedule and I run whenever I have to, not whenever I want to. This means that the kind of running I generally blog about has taken quite the hit, so much so that I can't even really remember the last time I did run any kind of distance.
   There have been days when I thought I maybe should have been out there on a run but my legs were so sore that I simply couldn't imagine doing so. And so I didn't. By the time maybe a couple of days had passed and my legs were feeling better then the next ball hockey game rolled around. So I didn't run. Again.
   I'm hoping and believing that eventually the running and the ball hockey will sort themselves out, once my body becomes more accustomed to the new routine. It would actually be interesting to try and compute just how many kilometers I might actually be running when I play ball hockey. Who knows, maybe I actually run farther!
   

My Non-Forrest Moment and a Strange Click in My Hip!

   Yesterday afternoon, I played my first game of ball hockey in about two and a half years. Because it's been so long, there was a fair amount of trepidation on my part as to how I would perform and how my body might react.
   I was pleasantly surprised!
   In my last blog post, I described my concern that, at full speed in the midst of a game, my body might disintegrate. I've been doing lots of running over the last couple of years but none of it has been at full speed and I was worried that parts of me might actually fall off, a la Forrest Gump's leg braces, if I ever actually got up to full speed.
   Well, there were a handful of times yesterday that I at least almost obtained full speed and nothing really bad happened, it pretty well felt like any other time in my life when I've run hard. My other concern was that perhaps my hand/eye coordination might be off as well but even it didn't seem too bad.

Well...it was to HIM anyway!

   I'm on a team called the Outlaws and it seems to be a whole bunch of guys who've never played together before. And they're almost all young, so young in fact that a few of them could technically be my grandchildren (though perhaps not realistically).
   This is not a new situation for me, I'm the oldest player in the league and pretty well always have been. You can look like and be the oldest player in the league but the trick is to not play like you are. I kind of think I held my own today, not sure what the other guys were thinking.
   So I felt okay yesterday and I felt okay last night but I'm kinda feeling it this morning. One thing I did learn yesterday is that a lot of distance running is not necessarily going to prepare you for the stopping and starting, twisting and turning, and bumping into guys at high speed you experience playing ball hockey.
   On top of it all, my hip now clicks.
   I got home and showered after the game and then sat and watched T.V. for a bit. The first time I stood up and walked across the room after that, my left hip was clicking. It didn't hurt and but I could feel it and it was loud enough that Doralyn could hear it as well (and it kind of grossed her out!)
I immediately went to Google, typed in my symptoms, and it appears as though my IT band is snapping across my hip bone, to dumb it down a little bit. At least the description of this exactly matched what I've been feeling and hearing. I will let this go for a little bit (my usual way of dealing with physical ailments) but if it continues for too long I may seek medical advice, or at least check in with Zeinin, my chiropractor.
   This was obviously my first time playing with this team but I have pretty good feelings about it. The talent level seems to be there but what I appreciated even more than that was they seem like good guys. This is always more important to me than how much talent there might be. I've played on some extremely talented teams in my day that were awful to play on simply because of nasty personalities and over-inflated egos but, so far, this doesn't seem to be the case with this team. The next game is tomorrow and I hope things have loosened up by then---I can't imagine having to play again today! So we'll see how it goes and I'll let you know!
   

My Possible Forrest Gump Moment

   I'm a little worried that I might have a "Forrest Gump" kind of moment this Sunday afternoon.
   I've managed to land myself on a ball hockey team for the summer, after about two and a half years of non-playing (but gazing longingly from the sidelines). We have our first exhibition game this Sunday and here's what I'm worried about.
   I haven't run hard in that same two and a half years.
   I've done a hell of a lot of running but I haven't run hard, as in all-out-like-you-were-being-chased-by-a-mountain-lion hard. So I don't know what might happen on Sunday the first time I need to turn it up a notch (or ten).

Will this happen to me?

   Remember that scene from "Forrest Gump", when a young Forrest, with all his leg braces, starts to run as hard as he can from all those bullies? And, in the midst of doing that, the braces begin to shatter and break and fall off ?
   Well, that's kinda my fear for Sunday, that I'm going to be running as hard as I possibly can and things will simply start to fall off. Or seize up. Or tear. Or disintegrate.
   We shall see.

My Downtown 5K Race Recap

   As had been my plan, I went for a 5K training run this morning.
   I normally run a variety of routes in my neighbourhood but this time I decided to mix things up and head downtown. I also normally run by myself but this time I'd arranged to get together with a few other people. There were about 250 of them and we all wore paper thingies with numbers on them. 

Me, while I was still looking
forward to what was about to transpire!

   Yep I ran a race.
   This morning I ran in the second installment of the London Honda Road Race series---the Downtown 5K. Most of the races in this series have a 10K component but not this one. This meant a larger field than normal as a lot of the people who might otherwise have opted for the 10K did not have that option. Lots of race energy going on!
   It was a beautiful morning, the sun was shining, the snow was all gone and the temps ended up being in the low teens. Pretty well perfect for running.
   I started the morning off with a toasted PB and banana sandwich, a cup of coffee with honey and a fistful of ENERGYbits. I've used ENERGYbits about four times at this point and the jury is still out, unfortunately.
   

ENERGYbits---ten down, twenty to go.

It was a beautiful drive downtown to Victoria Park and I passed by scores of people out running, there was just this kind of vibe going on today. About a third of the way there, I realized I'd forgotten my Garmin. Unfortunately, I'd timed things out to the last minute more or less and had no time to go back and get it. This kind of screwed up my "strategy" for the race, which had been to 10 to 1 run/walk ratio. I know, seems kinda

My Injinji socks--great for running!

extreme for a 5K race but lately, in training, it's been doing the trick. The last thing I wanted to do was to be checking my phone for time or, God forbid, set a timer so I just decided that I would give myself walk breaks at something close to the 2K and 4K intervals.

The Boer War monument in Victoria
Park. Pretty impressive, actually.

   I got there in enough time to pick up my bib and still be able to stretch. While I was stretching, this young lady walked up to me and introduced herself as a Western (the local university) journalism student. She'd been there interviewing racers as part of a project and asked if I had the time to answer a few questions.. Didn't have a problem with this so she started asking me questions about how regularly I raced and what motivates me to run, those kinds of things. A very pleasant young lady.
   Then, unfortunately, the race started.

The crowd at the starting line.
I'm ALREADY behind...

   About half a kilometer in, I knew this was not going to be a fun race. I felt tired, fat and slow. I had no real plan for the race and it showed. I basically ran til I felt tired and then walked til I didn't. People were passing me left and right and suddenly I had the real fear that I might finish last. My emergency "strategy" had gone right out the window. I found myself thinking I must be an idiot for signing up for the series of races if this was what I was going to have to go through every time.
   Realistically of course, I was fully aware of why I was having difficulties. Because of the winter, the training opportunities were way down and when you couple that with all the over-indulging of the holiday season and it being my birthday this past month then it was kind of a recipe for disaster. I just need to train and eat like I should and everything'll be fine!
   Later on, they posted the chip times and I came in 243 out of 254 and dead last in my age group. The good news was I didn't need to stick around to see if I won anything!

Some of the post-race aftermath.

   Oh, there was one bright moment. With about forty yards to go, a young lady tried to "chick" me. Now, I have no idea whether she even knew or cared what "chicking" someone meant and for all I know she was just running  her race and trying to get a better time. I have, however, been passed by a young person in the last few yards of a race before and I vowed back then that I wouldn't let that happen again so as the young lady passed me I turned on the jets, beating her by a second. It was actually kind of funny because when the race announcer realized what was happening, he got all excited and declared, "That's right, it's not a run, it's a race!"
   Although, for me, like I said, it was just a run...