The aftermath of FANS

It’s been three weeks since the FANS 24-Hour Race.  Going into that race, I had two concerns.  My first concern was my lower back, which has been bothering me since last November.  The other was a sore spot at the top of my left leg, where my hamstring connects to my pelvis.

I’ll talk about my back first.  For the first 16 hours of the race, it wasn’t an issue.  After midnight, I wasn’t doing as much running, so I had to put more effort into my power walking to keep my overall pace from slowing down too much.  I was able to do it, but I started to notice fatigue all the way across my lower back.  If I only had discomfort on one side, I would’ve been more concerned.  Instead, I attributed what I was feeling to tired muscles.  I wasn’t used to power walking for so many hours.  I didn’t really train for that.  Before FANS, my longest walk of the year was only nine miles.

In the last few hours of the race, I was beginning to slow down, so I put much more effort into my walking.  That’s when I started to notice discomfort on the right side of my lower back.  That was a bigger concern than the fatigue I felt earlier, but I was committed to getting to 100 miles, so I ignored the discomfort and just plowed through it.

Late in the race, I started leaning to my right.  Here’s a picture that was taken in the last 20 minutes of the race.

I didn’t have any idea I was leaning until my friend Mary said something after the race.  I later learned that I already looked like this at 3:30 AM.  I was leaning to my right for at least four and a half hours.

Immediately after the race, my lower back was so painful I could barely move.  It didn’t help that I also had delayed onset soreness in my quads.  Earlier in the year I strained a muscle on the right side of my lower back.  I was worried I might have done the same thing again.

Here’s the good news.  I took it easy for the next week, and my back felt a little better each day.  A week after the race, my back felt about the same as it did before the race.  After two more weeks of recovery, my back feels better than it’s felt at any time since November.  While it’s still not 100%, it doesn’t seem as though the race did any lasting damage.  What I felt right after the race was just the soreness you can get after running 100 miles.

If my back was the good news, my left hamstring was the bad news.  During the race, I barely noticed it.  I occasionally felt some minor soreness, but only on the laps where I was walking fastest.  It didn’t bother me while I was running, and it didn’t bother me when I walked at a more moderate pace.

I waited several days after the race before starting to run again.  When I resumed running, I initially ran at a relaxed pace.  My hamstring didn’t bother me.  It was only when I started to pick up the pace of my training runs, that it started to feel sore.  After a couple runs at my marathon race pace, I realized it was quickly getting worse.  Since then, I’ve had to emphasize rest.

In the last 10 days, I’ve only run twice.  The other days I get exercise by doing lots of walking, but all at a casual pace.  I’ve noticed improvement, but I still feel it when I run.  I also feel it walking, if I’m putting in extra effort at the beginning of a hill.

Over the July 4th weekend, I’m going to be running the Firecracker Triple: three marathons in three days.  When I’ve done this series in the past, I’ve competed for the overall win.  I won the triple in 2011 and again in 2014.  I’m probably not in good enough shape to compete for the win this year, but I would’ve given it my best shot if I was healthy.  Instead, I’ll probably take it easy and just run to finish.

There’s one other piece of good news.  Before FANS, I was carrying some extra weight.  I wanted to lose at least six pounds before trying to bring my marathon times down.  The day after the race, I weighed myself, and I was down almost three pounds.

I initially took that with a grain of salt.  I probably burned off a pound of fat during the race, but I was skeptical about losing more than that.  The rest could be water loss.  Indeed, for the next two days, I seemed to be gaining the weight back.  Then something amazing happened.  I started losing weight again.

Since FANS, my activity level has been fairly light, but my weight has been going doing a little bit each day.  This morning, I weighed in almost five pounds lighter than I was before FANS.

I noticed something similar the first time I did a 24-hour race.  My metabolism was elevated for the next week or two.  It’s pretty cool to be able to lose five pounds without any significant change in diet and without increasing my activity level.  I know from past experience that my metabolism will gradually get back to normal, but I’ve already lost most of the weight I wanted to lose.

Cross-Training and Two a Day Workouts

Like most people, for the last two months, I’ve mostly been staying at home.  Like most people, I’ve been eating more than usual, and I’ve been gaining weight.

Some of it may be “stress eating.”  Some of it may be “boredom eating.”  Mostly, though, it’s too much temptation.  I’m always home, and there’s too much good food in the house.

In early March, Deb and I made sure we had enough food at home that we wouldn’t run out of anything if we had to go for two weeks without leaving the house.  We were able to get enough of the foods we usually eat, although finding bread was difficult.

I think lots of people had difficulty buying bread.  It seemed like everyone I know was baking bread and posting recipes.  Soon, Deb and I were seeing friends posting all kinds of interesting recipes.  I had to try some of them.  One was a recipe for brown bread.  Another was for strawberry shortcake cookies.

We also made some of our old favorites.  Deb made rice pudding.  I made my mom’s banana bread recipe and two large deep dish pizzas.  On the weekend of the Boston Marathon, we had pot roast and Indian pudding, which are two foods I use to eat whenever I visited Boston.  Most of these recipes make enough that we had leftovers for the next few days.

Since the middle of March, restaurants in our area have been takeout only.  Many restaurants are struggling to stay in business.  We could easily fix all of our meals at home, but we’ve been getting takeout orders from a few of our favorite restaurants to help them survive.  Naturally, these meals always leave us with more leftovers.

Do you see the problem?  When you rarely leave the house, and you’re surrounded by good food, it’s hard to resist eating more than you really need.  Before I knew it, I had gained five pounds.

Last summer, I worked hard to lose 15 pounds, so I could bring my marathon times down.  You can’t do that through diet alone.  I ramped up my running until I was averaging 10 miles a day.  That’s not an option right now.  Since December, I’ve been recovering from a minor case of Achilles tendonitis at the insertion point in my left heel.  It’s improved enough that I can regularly run eight or nine miles without any discomfort, but I sometimes feels tight afterwards.  If I try to ramp my mileage too quickly, it’ll flare up again.

I used to do lots of cross-training.  There was a limit to how much I could run without getting injured, so I would supplement my running with aerobic cross-training.  I’d get up early, so I could do 30 minutes on the stationary bike before going to work.  That’s like an extra three miles of running, but without the same injury risk.  I could do that before work, and still go running after work.

I also used to do lots of weight training.  When I was in my 20s, I dedicated as much time to weight training as I did to running.  As my priorities changed, I cut back on the weight training, so I could have more running days.  It’s hard to do both on the same day.  By my late 30s, I was no longer trying to build strength.  Now I was just doing maintenance workouts.

All of my cross-training fell by the wayside three years ago.  When I was recovering from back surgery, I was only allowed to walk.  Eventually, I was able to add running back into the mix, but it was more than a year before I was doing more running than walking.  Until recently, I never got back into cycling or weight training.  I had a home gym, but the only equipment I used was my treadmill.

One of my friends recently created a private Facebook group, where he and his friends could post photos from their workouts.  It was a vehicle for encouraging each other as we were each trying to stay in shape while sheltering at home.  I posted photos from some of my runs, but as I saw others posting about all their workouts, it inspired me to begin cross-training again.

I started by dusting off my stationary bike (literally) and adding short cycling workouts in the morning.  I usually ran in the afternoon, so these were “extra” workouts.

My stationary bike has 15 resistance levels.  I used to use levels 2 and 3 for warming up and cooling down.  I’d do most of my workout using resistance level 4.  Occasionally, I’d go higher, but I’ve never been above level 7.  I can’t imagine what level 15 feels like.

Since I’m not currently used to cycling, I had to start out doing just 20 minutes.  At first, I was doing the whole workout at level 2, and it still felt like my legs were going to fall off.  Now, I’m started to use level 3, and I’m stretching the length of these workouts.  I still find cycling to be more tiring than running, but it’ll get easier with time.

One of the first running books I read was called the New Competitive Runner’s Handbook.  The authors of that book used the terms, “running equivalent” or “RE miles.”  The concept was that if you did an aerobic cross-training workout, you could consider it to be the training equivalent of running whatever distance you would’ve covered if you ran with the same effort for the same amount of time.  That’s all well and good, but it can sometimes be difficult to compare the effort of different activities.  I can run for more than an hour and have it feel effortless.  If I spend half that much time on a stationary bike, I’m already fatigued.  Does that mean my cycling workouts are more intense?  No, I’m just not used to cycling yet.  To convert my cycling miles to RE miles, I divide by three.  That’s a rule of thumb I’ve heard from triathletes.

A week after I started doing cycling workouts, I started doing weight training again.  Twice a week, I’m doing six exercises that work most of the large muscle groups.  I’m using far less weight than I used to, but it’s a start.  I’ve lost a lot of strength in the last three years.  It’ll take time to regain it.

I like to keep a spreadsheet that summarizes all my training for the week.  I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years.  I convert everything to “RE miles,” and add it up.  It’s hard to compare intense anaerobic workouts like weight training to running, but I do my best.  It’s imprecise, but I want to be able to summarize my total training volume.

For the past two weeks, I’ve done at least two workouts every day.  Usually, it’s cycling and running.  Sometimes, it’s cycling and weight training or running and weight training.  In addition, I sometimes go for short walks with Deb.

Here’s a graph that shows my weekly “RE mileage” since the beginning of the year.  Until recently, it was mostly just running mileage.  Occasionally, I did a little bit of walking, but it wasn’t a significant proportion of my total training.  In the last three weeks, the graph looks different.  I’m still doing the same amount of running, but I’ve added both cycling and weight training.  As a result, my weekly “RE mileage” has roughly doubled, compared to three weeks ago.

The legend may be too small to read, but blue is running, light blue is walking, green is cycling, and red is weight training.

These cross-training workouts serve more than one purpose.  In the short term, they’re helping giving me a new source of motivation, now that I no longer have any races on the horizon.  In the long term, they’ll hopefully help me control my weight.  In the last two weeks, my weight has leveled off.  I’m not losing weight yet, but I’m no longer gaining weight.  That’s a start.

Everything is coming together at just the right time.

Last night I slept for nine hours.  I almost got up early when I woke early and couldn’t get back to sleep.  Then I looked at the clock.  It was still 4:30.  I told myself I needed to try to go back to sleep.  I eventually got back to sleep … three more times.  I really needed it.

Today is Wednesday, so I weighed myself.  I haven’t had a Weigh-in Wednesday post for five weeks, but I still weigh myself.  I weighed 121 pounds.  While that’s a few pounds above my ideal racing weight, it was still a pleasant surprise.  My weight has remained roughly the same for the last five weeks, despite a drastically reduced activity level.

I had one more piece of good news.  I didn’t have a sore throat last night.

Let me back up.  Six weeks ago, I had a groin injury.  Since then, I’ve done very little running.  The obvious exception was the Comrades Marathon.  After doing that race while still injured, I was worried that I wouldn’t be fully healed in time for my race this weekend.  As recently as Saturday, I still didn’t feel any better than I did before Comrades.

A week ago, I started to come down with a cold.  At first it was just post-nasal drip and a sore throat.  Then the post-nasal drip went away, but I had some congestion.  It never got any worse than that, but it also never seemed to go away.  Eventually, I only had symptoms at night.  During the day, the sore throat and congestion would both go away.  I kept thinking the cold was finally gone.  The next morning, I’d be stuffed up and the sore throat would be back.  This went on for a few more days.  Finally, last night, the sore throat and congestion didn’t come back.

This cold was, at most, only annoying, but my race this weekend is in the mountains.  At times, I’ll be above 9,000 feet, where the air is thin.  Running at that elevation is tiring when you’re healthy.  With a cold, it would be much more tiring.

To keep my eating under control, I usually keep track of everything I eat.  A few weeks ago, I stopped doing that.  Being injured, I couldn’t get as much exercise as usual.  I was worried I’d gain weight, but I didn’t want to obsess about it.  I needed to just take a break from worrying about what I ate.  There would be time to lose weight after I got healthy.

For the most part, I was still eating healthy foods, and I wasn’t eating too much.  The one notable exception was eating a bowl (or two) of ice cream in the evening.  I started doing that to soothe my sore throat, and it became a nighttime ritual.

I managed to get through the last five weeks without any weight gain.  I’m over my cold.  I also feel like I’m real close to being recovered from my groin strain.  The Bighorn Mountain 100 is two days away, and I got some extra sleep.  Everything is coming together at just the right time.

Every other day, I’ve been doing exercises for physical therapy.  In the long term, they’ll strengthen the injured muscles, as well as my hips, glutes and hamstrings.  In the short term, they had me always feeling sore – especially in the hips.  Today I’m going to skip my exercises.  Today and tomorrow are rest days.  I don’t want to have any sore muscles when I start the race.

A week ago, this race terrified me.  Now I’m getting excited about it.  It’s more difficult than any race I’ve finished.  It’s 100 miles.  Parts are at high elevation.  It has long climbs and long descents.  It’s mostly single track trail.  It will be hot during the day.  It will be freezing during the night.  I’ll probably have to run through a thunderstorm in the dark.  I’m ready to take on those challenges.  I just want two things.  I want to get to the starting line healthy, and I want to get to this finish line still healthy.

Weigh-in Wednesday: 5-13-15

What a difference a week makes.

Last Wednesday, I was surprised to discover that I had lost a pound, even though I was out of town for a week.  As I looked ahead to this week, I was optimistic.  I didn’t have a race.  That means I would have more quality training days and fewer restaurant meals.  Right?  Well, it didn’t work out that way.

Let’s start with the restaurant meals.

On Thursday, I went out to lunch with a few coworkers and several former coworkers, who have either retired or moved to other jobs.  One was celebrating a new job.  It was a great chance to catch up with several old friends at once.

Saturday morning, Deb reminded me that I said she could have a do-over of her birthday dinner.  When we went out two weeks earlier, she wasn’t feeling well.  We went back to Cossetta’s, an Italian restaurant in St. Paul with good food and large portions.  Nobody leaves Cossetta’s hungry.  Just to make sure, we had gelato for dessert.

Sunday was Mother’s Day.  Deb’s mom passed way last year.  My mom passed away the year before.  This was the first year that neither of us could celebrate with our moms.  We did the next best thing, taking Deb’s dad out for lunch.  We went to Buca di Beppo, another Italian restaurant with good food and large portions.  Naturally we had dessert again.

OK, so I ate just as much as if I had traveled for a race.  At least I had lots of quality training.  Right?  Well, no.  I haven’t run since Friday.  If you’ve read my last few posts, you know that I’ve been sidelined with a groin injury.

So how bad was the damage?  Surprisingly, it wasn’t as bad as I thought.  I weighed in at 121.2.  That’s up slightly less than a pound from last week.  All things considered, I’ll take it.

I’m hoping I can start running soon, but it’ll be short easy runs at first.  For the next week or two, I’ll only be doing a fraction of my normal training volume.  I’m focusing on the long term.  If I can be healthy in time for the Comrades Marathon, I’ll breathe a sigh of relief.

Weigh-in Wednesday: 5-6-15

Last week, I wasn’t able to weigh myself on Wednesday because I was traveling.  Instead, I weighed myself on Tuesday before leaving for the Independence Series.  I weighed 121.4 pounds.  That was my “before” weight.  This morning, I weighed 120.4 pounds.  That’s my “after” weight.  I actually lost a pound while on the road for a week.

I almost always gain weight while I’m traveling.  Even when I run two, three or four marathon, I expect to come home a pound heavier.  Running marathons on five consecutive days seems to be the tipping point.

Losing weight while racing every day isn’t a good thing.  It means I wasn’t replacing the calories I was burning.  That, in turn, means I probably wasn’t replacing the glycogen stores in my muscles.  It may also mean that some of the protein I was eating was meeting metabolic needs instead of supplying the building blocks for repairing damaged tissue.

When you race on consecutive days, getting enough of the right foods is an important part of post-race recovery.  I apparently wasn’t doing it.  I blamed my deterioration on days three, four and five primary on lack of sleep.  Running a bit too fast in the first two races may also have been a contributing factor.  Now I have to wonder how big a factor nutrition was.

I’m a light-weight runner, so I don’t need as many calories as most runners.  I’ve estimated that I only burn 1,500 calories on a rest day.  I burn an additional 80 calories for each mile I run.  On days that I run marathons, I need about 3,600 calories.

Apparently, I didn’t even eat that much.  It’s not as easy as it sounds.  Before a race, I don’t eat a full breakfast.  At most, I eat about 300 calories.  During the race, I’m drinking Gatorade, but I don’t eat solid food until after the race.  In a longer race, where I’m taking walking breaks, I’ll eat solid food.  In a marathon, where I’m running continuously, I’m more comfortable just drinking.

After the race, I ate post-race snacks, but it was less than a full meal.  I didn’t usually eat lunch until after traveling to the next state.  By then it was mid-afternoon, so I had one meal in place of both lunch and dinner.  Sometimes I had another light meal later.  Sometimes I didn’t.

When I’ve done a series of races before, I've paid more attention to nutrition.  I usually go grocery shopping the day I arrive, so I have food for breakfasts and post-race refueling.  This time, I neglected to do that.  I’ll have to pay more attention to nutrition in the future.