Conflicting advice

One of the many perks of working at Google is the onsite massage. Every year on your birthday, you get a free one hour table massage to use when ever you like and last week I decided it was time to use my coupon. Among the many talented and experienced massage therapists, who specialize in everything from Swedish massage to prenatal massage, there is a sports therapist and it was with him I made my appointment. Let me tell you, this guy is a magician. I booked a chair massage with him a couple of years ago and though he brought tears to my eyes with pain, I left the room with a refurbished set of shoulders that shouldn't have been possible in just 15 minutes. I was really looking forward to seeing what he could do for my newly aching knees.

The appointment was pretty much what I expected. It wasn't long before he located the most painful spot on my quad and IT band, just beside my knee, and dug his fingers into the muscle, causing me to lose my breathe with the sudden pain. He taught me a bunch of new stretches and then, along with all the other advice, admonished me to, "Stay away from ice." This was a big surprise. Every book I've read so far, and the TNT coaches, have all agreed that icing your legs, especially your knees, after you run is a great idea. It reduces swelling, so they say, and the lactic-acid-filled blood that retreats from the cold is replaced with fresh oxygenated blood when you warm up. It is supposed to reduce pain and quicken healing. But, my sports therapist disagrees. He said that in Europe, where he was trained, no one ices their muscles and it's considered quite the faux pas.

Mostly I was surprised by this because among all the other advice that I've read online and in books, and heard from my trainer in the gym and the TNT coaches, icing is one of the only things they all agree upon. It seems that when it comes to running, there are a lot of differing opinions, about pretty much anything its possible to have an opinion about. Take the marathon plan for a beginner for example. The TNT training plan has us running just 3 times a week. It contains the least amount of running. But even with that, sometimes on a Thursday, track day, we don't run. We spend the time doing drills along one of the long sides of the track. And yet on the long runs, they increase the mileage faster than any other plan I've seen. Every second week we add on 2 miles. Much more than the 10% a week, at most, I've read about in other plans. These other plans advocate 4 and 5 days of running a week, with 3, 4 and 5 miles on the short runs and shorter increases in the long runs. Yet other plans focus entirely on the time you're running and make it clear that measuring the miles is a bad idea for a beginner. You should simply focus on time on your feet.

There are other disagreements too. When to stretch, what and when to eat, how to massage, how best to spend the critical 30 minute post-long-run time. And everyone who has an opinion, tells it like they're 100% sure that this is the only way to do it. Listening to them, you'd be entirely convinced. Until you ask someone else the same question. As a beginner it's hard to know who to trust and which of all the conflicting advice to take. I assume the sports therapist knows what he's talking about, but then shouldn't the running coach, someone who has coached lots of people to run marathons, also be trustworthy?

In the end, I choose some sort of mismash of all the advice. Trying a little bit of this and a little bit of that until I end up with something that works for me. With that, I ran 12 miles last weekend. So I guess I can't be going too far wrong.

Small Pleasures - Hot Showers and Cheese Sandwiches

Have you ever noticed that when you're tired, your sensitivity levels increase? Most of the time, this isn't a good thing. For me, sometimes it means that I become a mite irritable, "What do you mean I look tired? Of course I look tired. I'm bloody exhausted. But that's no reason to tell me that I look tired. You should tell me I look great when I look tired." Hmm. Not exactly logical.

But sometimes it can work in my favor. I also feel good things more intensely. So, for example, this weekend, following my ten mile run (double digits, baby, yeah!) my knees were a little sore so I came home and iced them for while. Then I rolled around on the foam roller for a while and stretched (the list of things you should do within 30 minutes of the end of your long run would take about 2 hours) and a little while later I was pretty cold and wiped out. I got into a hot shower. Oh Man, did it feel good. I just stood there letting the hot water run over my face. Heavenly.

Long hot showers were always a point of contention in my house growing up. Des Bishop* does a great stand up routine (NSFW) about how precious hot water is in Ireland. My Dad would stand outside the bathroom door, 5 minutes after I got into the shower shouting, "Get out of that shower. I don't own the ESB, I just work there." Daddy, I know you'll cringe when I tell you my shower this weekend was all of thirty-glorious-wrinkle-inducing minutes.

The other pleasure in my life right now is eating. I have to tell you, all the effort and self flagellation, all the head games I have to play to get myself to put on my running shoes and get out there, AGAIN, are worth the sheer joy I am taking in eating food at the moment. This weekend I had the most fabulous cheese sandwich. "Just a cheese sandwich?' I hear you ask incredulously. But that's the joy. My increased appetite and general fatigue make the greatest sauce. A couple of slices from the Italian Batard loaf from Acme Bread spread with the greatest butter on earth, KerryGold, and some lovely sharp white cheddar cheese and I savored each and every bite. It was truly delicious.

So, in truth, while the initial motivation and enthusiasm finally disappeared this past week, and I found it much more difficult to motivate myself to get out and run, I'm working on focusing on these small pleasures to get me through at the moment. One step, one shower, one mouthful at a time.

There are 95 days to the marathon. Yikes!




* If you're not familiar with Des Bishop I highly recommend a search for his stand up on YouTube. He's an American comic who moved to Ireland as a teenager. His material focuses on making fun of standard Irish living from the point of view of an outsider. He has an incredible knack of picking up on what feels that a simple part of life and pointing out how ridiculous it seems to a non Irish person. I find it particularly funny because I hear the jokes with the ears of my American friends and wonder if that is what they would see if I brought them home. Caveat: Most of it is not safe for work.

Cupcakes for St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day was this week. I get especially homesick at this time of year. In my home town, there is a parade every year for the local community. My nephew walked in it this year as part of his Hurling team with the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). All the kids' sports teams walk, as well as the marching band, the local businesses, the fire brigade, the gardai and even the bin collectors. It's a chance for everyone to celebrate community and celebrate being Irish. Sure, then there's usually a party in someone's house, but it's not just about getting drunk to the exclusion of everything else.
I decided to take a little time to focus on my fundraising and bring a little sugary Irish cheer to my office at the same time. I made 60 cupcakes to sell in a bake sale. There were two kinds.

These ones are Spiced Guinness cupcakes with Green Vanilla Icing.

These ones are Brown Sugar Pound cake cupcakes with Bailey's Irish Cream Icing.

In total I raised $550 in donations as a result of the cupcakes. I asked for $5 a cupcake but obviously some people were a little more generous than that. What a great team I work with!

Positive Attitude

Right at the beginning of this book, in the introduction, the author firmly recommends not setting a goal time for finishing your first marathon. "If this is your first marathon," he writes, "you should have only one goal and that should be to complete it. One of the biggest mistakes you could make at this point would be to set a target time in which you want to finish."... "Let's say you set a four-hour goal," and "finish some time after the four-hour time and then feel that you have failed! Can you imagine? You have just gone 26.2 miles for the first time in your life and you feel you have failed. Now that WOULD be a waste."

He makes a good point.

This past week I have been discouraged at my lack of progress in increasing my pace. It has always been something I'm a little ashamed of. I want so badly to run faster. On my Tuesday buddy runs, we run about 4 miles and I have been treating it as a Tempo run. That is, I push my pace so that I'm running fast enough so that it's difficult to carry a conversation. This is supposed to train your body to know what it feels like to run faster over a shorter distance so that you increase your lactic acid threshold. I also tried to concentrate on breathing in a 2:2 pattern as recommended by the Team in Training coach. That is, breathe in for 2 strides and out for 2 strides. It was tough. That's much faster than I usually breathe and I didn't feel like I could inhale fast enough in 2 strides to get enough oxygen into my lungs before I breathed out again. I can imagine that my poor fellow runners thought I was ready to pass out. What with the lack of conversation and the slightly desperate inhaling and exhaling that was going on.

Unfortunately despite the dedication to this new breathing rhythm, starting mid way through mile 3 I got a really bad side stitch. I tried hard to slow down my pace and jog through it, but eventually I had to stop. The pain was stopping me breathing hardly at all. After walking for a little bit we started up again, but the stitch came right back. I tried to dissuade my frustration by telling myself that the stitch meant that I was pushing my boundaries. This was my body's way of saying, "You're at the edge of your ability right now and I'm going to stop you there before you push to a place that you might get injured." I should be proud that I was obviously pushing my limits. That's the way I would improve. This was my attempt at positive thinking. Not bad, right?

Unfortunately when I got back to base and looked over my times for the 4 miles, instead of seeing a new PB I was really disappointed to see that I actually ran slower than the same distance 3 weeks ago, without any side stitch. What's going on? In the last 3 weeks I've run lots of times. I should be improving not getting worse. All my attempts at a positive attitude took a nose dive and when I got home, I fumed and moaned to Sean. The next day I spent time researching how to deal with a stitch and decided it was probably related to the new breathing technique. I resolved to try a 3:3 breathing pattern and continue to work on my cardio fitness, adding different cross training into the weekly plan. Perhaps some swimming?

And then this morning, a friend of mine sent me an email telling me her story. She trained for the Dublin marathon and finished it. Hurray! While training for her second marathon, though, she became frustrated with her pace and pushed really hard to keep up with a faster girl in front of her. In the process, she managed to fracture her pelvis (!) and 3 years later is still recovering. The injury prevents her from running now.

The lesson? Well its obviously better to get the chance to finish the marathon than prevent yourself from even getting to the start line. And as referenced in the first paragraph, I really don't want to run 26.2 miles and be disappointed. No matter what time I finish it in. So, the race is off. My goal is simply to finish. I don't care how long it takes me. I'm going to focus on my ability to get to the finish line, to run twenty six point two miles. Because, really, that would be something to be positive about.

Locus of Control

I bought another book about running a marathon. This one is written by two professors who taught a class in university on how to run a marathon for beginner runners. They taught the class over 16 weeks and in the last week all the students participated in an official Marathon. In an interesting twist one professor is from the phys. ed. department and the other is from the psych. department. In addition to running 4 times a week, they held 2 lectures a week, one on the physical requirements for running a marathon and one on the psychological requirements. I'm hooked already.

They break the book into 17 chapters, one for each of 16 weeks leading up to the marathon and one for the weeks following. In each chapter they talk about what physical training you should be doing and what psychological training. Honestly, this book was written for me. Since I completed the Emotional Intelligence training here at Google a couple of years ago, I've been really interested in self awareness and self control.

In the first chapter, they bring up the topic of locus of control. Wikipedia defines it as "a person's belief about what causes the good or bad results in his life... Individuals with a high internal locus of control believe that events result primarily from their own behavior and actions. Those with a high external locus of control believe that powerful others, fate, or chance primarily determine events." The book makes the point that in order to get through the ridiculous amount of running, which is new for most of their students, you need to cultivate an internal locus of control. You need to have the ability to say, "It's raining out and I'm really busy in work. But the choice of whether I will run is in my control and I will go anyway," rather than, "It's raining out and I'm really busy in work. I won't have a good / successful run in those conditions. It sucks that the world is conspiring against me and I can't run." There's something really terrifying about describing this as a point of view. The intimidated girl inside who's still not sure she'll be able for this has just had all her excuses stripped away. There's really no reason good enough to give up. I'm the only one who can stop me from making it to the end and I have to take responsibility for that. Yikes!

Although, in reality, this is less scary today than it would have been several years ago. Working at Google has taught me that I'm responsible for any and all success in my life. There is no hand holding here. The lack of structure / increased freedom (depending on how you look at it) cultivates an environment where each engineer is expected to find their own place and shine on their own. It was really hard on me at first, and when I started at Google I spent the first few months asking my manager, "No, but what do you WANT me to do?" After a while I realized that I had to own the choices I was going to make. I couldn't rely on external forces of control to make anything happen for me. It has really changed my outlook on life in general. Reading the description on Wikipedia I believe that I have slowly grown into an internal locus of control viewpoint. And now I'm hoping that will get me to the finish line in Seattle.

Revelation

This past Friday I woke up with a terrible head cold. By 8am my nose was already red from blowing and I felt like I had been hit in the head with a hammer. Normally I would have been sad about this state of affairs but at the moment it is even more critical because I'm on such a strict training regimen. The next day was to be my next 'Long' run. The day when you push yourself to run further than you ever have before. (This happens once a week.) It was time to run 8 miles.

I spent Friday dosing myself with vitamin C, burning eucalyptus oil, rubbing vicks vaporub on my skin, eating olbas throat lozenges and sleeping. Oh, and blowing my nose, coughing, wiping my tearing eyes and trying to clear my blocked ears. Yuck. I wondered what I should do about my run. Over and over again, people have warned me about over training, but strangely this only serves to emphasize how hard I have to train. If people are so prone to working too hard, surely I can't get by with a lackadaisical attitude. (Yes I know that is skewed logic.)

When Saturday morning rolled around, at the urging of a runner-friend Susie, my Nana (channeled through my Uncle Tom) and one of the many running books I have bought, I dragged myself out of bed. My symptoms were all above the neck and so I resolved to get to the running spot and at least to run one mile. I couldn't face the idea that the effort I have put in to date would be wasted. So armed with 10 tissues and a liter bottle of water, I headed to Almaden Lake park.

I got a little turned around on the way there and arrived late so I missed the introduction to the route. I didn't know where the water stop was. We start in waves according to our pace and my group was about to leave so I joined in at the back and decided to take it really easy and just see how I felt. I got stuck in behind two girls that were meandering along, chatting away with ease. I decided to keep with their pace.

And here comes the revelation. I felt great! I wasn't pushing my pace for once and I found that I could jog along with relative comfort at a consistent pace for a long time. The 1 and 2 mile markers came and went and I was still happy. I kept on the heels of my pace makers ( I think they thought I was stalking them) and I made it to the water stop at the 3 mile marker with relative ease. Amazing! I've found every long run before this frustrating and exhausting. Unhappy with my slow pace I push myself to go faster and end up with a heart rate of 178 for an extended length of time. I don't actually go that much faster on average because I have to slow down to recover from going too fast. And I do this despite being told differently. The long runs should be run at a slower pace than other training. You should be able to talk to your neighbor. But I am usually just so frustrated that I have to run SO slowly in order to be able to talk that after about 10 seconds I speed up. This time, I allowed myself the luxury of going slow ( I was sick after all) and lo and behold I discovered what it means to run long distance.

I did turn around at the 3 mile marker instead of running all 8 miles. I figured that was pushing it enough given the circumstances. 6 miles was quite an achievement I think, considering I had gotten out of bed intending to just run one. Now I just need to remember on my next long run, slow and steady. Check out my run here