Lady Doc: An OB/GYN Gives Advice for Active Moms
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Sarah and Dimity talk with Dr. Amanda Hurtubise, an OB/GYN in Port Huron, Michigan, who they found through her informed, insightful comments on their Facebook page. This mom of three and beginning-again runner quickly dubs this show about “the fallout of running,” addressing TMI topics like vaginal prolapse, urinary incontinence, and risk of infection from hanging out in sweaty workout wear. The good doctor also talks about running during pregnancy. The show’s highlight, though, is Dimity oversharing about her shaving habits. Talk about TMI!
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Tell Me Tuesday: Adding a Tune-up Race to Your Training Schedule
While we recommend a tune-up race, we don’t recommend a tuning fork in a tuna fish (or vintagage REO Speedwagon albums)
As I detailed last week, my training for the Boston Marathon is percolating nicely. And in two weeks, I’m going to sample that brew (to carry out the coffee analogy) by doing a local half-marathon. As anyone who has ever trained for a race knows: It’s one thing to cover a set training distance or nail a tempo pace for, oh, four miles, but it’s another thing entirely to taste success and pride on a race course. Enter: a tune-up race. That’s a race embedded into the build-up toward a goal race–such as a 10K as you train for a half-marathon, or a half-marathon in your journey toward a full one–that allows you to gauge how well your training is going. Unlike a goal race, a tune-up race isn’t something you train for; it’s something you add into your training. Personally, I’m doing a tune-up race because I feel I haven’t pushed myself hard in a half-marathon in more than a year, and I want to see if I can still turn it up to 11, so to speak.
Before I start telling you more about tune-up races, let me offer this disclaimer to any now-fretting newbies out there: There’s no need for a tune-up race for your first 5K, 10K, or even longer races; in fact, there’s no law that says anybody has to do one. They can just be a good idea if you’re looking to race faster than you have before, or if you are particularly nervous about covering a longer distance.
Since my tune-up race, Portland’s Heart Breaker Half, falls on a day when my training calls for the plan’s second (of three) 20-mile runs, I turned to the awesome coach who created the plan, Christine Hinton, for advice on how to tweak my training. (FYI: You’ll be reading a lot more about Christine in the coming weeks, as she’s the coach/mother runner/ultrarunner who designed eight of the nine training plans in Train Like a Mother: How to Get Across Any Finish Line – and Not Lose Your Family, Job, or Sanity
.) While I was at it, I asked her a bunch of tune-up questions, some solicited via Twitter, to enlighten you. Here goes:
Is there any circumstance during training when a runner should try to “make up” some distance on a race day? Like if she’s training for a half-marathon and “only” races a 5K on a day when her plan calls for a 12-mile run?
Yuppers! I am a big fan of the “supported long run.” One of my favorites is incorporating a 5k in to a long run: I’ll run the course once as a warmup, then race it, and finally again as a cooldown. Sounds daunting, but it’s actually a lot of fun, plus you don’t have to carry your own water. The shorter the race, the harder you can run it and include it in a long run. And the miles don’t have to be exact: running part of it hard can count for a mile or two.
Should you taper at all for a tune-up race, or just do regular plan then bust out the race?
When a race is used as training, I don’t typically incorporate a taper. Again, the length of the race plays a role here. If you are running a half hard, you may want to ease up on your training a few days beforehand. But nothing as long as if it were your goal race. For a half, you may want to skip your tempo run the week before, for example. Listening to, and knowing, your body is important. If you are an older or less-experienced runner, you may need to cushion your race a bit more with easy or rest days. The bottom line is you will not lose any fitness, or mess up your training, by adding a race in and decreasing your other runs to accommodate.
Me in a tune-up race when I nearly PR’d…but check out the questioning look in my eyes
If you’re looking to PR in your goal race, you should really race the tune-up one, right?
Yes. But realize that, in the midst of training for another event, you will probably not be in peak fitness. That doesn’t mean you won’t PR in the race, it just means you still have some improvement from future training to consider, which will show itself on goal race day. We just have to be careful of recovering from a really hard race effort. Better to take a few days easy, miss some of the planned workouts, recover, and pick back up where you are, than to stick to every workout, do or die, not recover, get hurt, and spiral down.
If your tune-up race time ends up being slower than you like and you’ve still got, say, two months before the race, should you try to get in another run a month before your target race, or no?
Another race? Hmm….Sometimes it can be good for the confidence, but in general I would say no, let it go. Racing is great but you don’t want to be doing too much of it in a training cycle. Analyze why it was slower than expected–weather, the race course, your health? Perhaps your expected time goals are too fast and need to be adjusted. Maybe your fueling/hydrating, needs to be reviewed. You can often learn more from a race that didn’t go as planned, than one that went perfectly: Use that info to do well in your goal race.
How close to the goal race can you go? If, say, Lisa is running a half in October, how late can she do a 10K?
Depends on the goal race and the race you are incorporating into training. Here’s a chart from TLAM to help you out (FYI: Our Finish It plans are about, um, finishing the race, whereas Own It plans are aimed more at setting a personal best.)
| Training plan | Suggested training races | Weeks before goal race | Strategy for the race |
| 5K Finish It | None |
| 5K Own It | 5K or shorter | 3-5 | Monitor fitness and training |
| 10K Finish It | 5K | 3-5 | Develop race toughness |
| 10K Own It | 5K or 8K | 3-6 | Practice negative splitting |
| Half marathon Finish It | 5K or 8K | 4-8 | Get used to the racing scene |
| Half marathon Own It | 5K, 8K, or 10K | 4-8 | Practice race morning routine |
| Marathon Finish It | 10K | 8-10 | Develop confidence |
| Marathon Own It | 10K or half marathon | 6-8 | Practice marathon race pace and fueling |
So, mother runners, tell us: Do you do tune-up races, or just keep your eyes on the grand prize, your goal race?
Fingernails, Fibroids and NPR: Oh My!
Marie over at Why She Runs tagged both of us to do the 11 Random Things + Questions. Since she thought Madonna’s half-time performance was awesome, as did I, and since I’ve never done the chain mail thing where you send a book or a recipe or good wishes, I figured it was time or I’d run out of chain mail karma. So here are 11 random things about me; I did not answer her questions–she said it was optional–because a) you know plenty enough about my running and b) it’s almost 9 p.m. and I want to go to bed. (So you’ll learn 12 things about me: I consider my early bedtime sacred.)
1. I’d name impatience as my biggest fault. When I want things to happen, I want them to happen now. Not in two hours or two days or two weeks. My immediate family bears the brunt of this, and I don’t want to pass this trait onto my kids, so I’m doing my best to practice my patience.
2. I am awful at shutting drawers and cupboards.
3. I consider The New Yorker to be the gold standard for writing. I love that I will read 12 pages about something random like bacteria or the harp that I had no previous interest in because the writer is so talented in reporting and telling a story. I also love the ads that run along the margins of the pages: who buys a $6,000 broach in the shape of a bee?
4. I can’t stand noises that I don’t create. Don’t whir that R2D2 thing at breakfast, Ben; don’t shake your pompoms in the car, Amelia; don’t cough anymore, Grant, even though you have a cold. The only noise I adore? The snore of my blind, old dog, Jessie. It’s just perfect. I want to record it so I can always listen to it.
5. My favorite dinner is a good veggie pizza (a variety of good veggies: not just green olives and canned mushrooms), a wheat beer with a lemon and a slice of carrot cake.
6. My left eye used to wander really ambitiously. I had two surgeries to correct it when I was in grade school, but they didn’t work. I let it go until I got to college, when I started to feel like the really tall girl with an eye that didn’t behave. So I had one more surgery–the techniques had improved considerably over the previous 15 years–and it’s perfectly straight now.
7. I listen to AM radio or NPR to fall asleep. I don’t care what they’re talking about as long as somebody is talking. I have to concentrate on something else besides my life to relax, otherwise my brain whirs and sleep doesn’t happen.
8. Ben was supposed to be a girl. Well, kind of. I had an ultrasound at 19 weeks (see #1: impatience), when their units aren’t fully formed. My mom was sure it was a boy, but I didn’t want to listen. So when this little man appeared, I spent the first 24 hours not knowing what to do with a boy. I have two sisters, and was mostly raised by my mom: I know feminine energy and rhythms. I do not know testosterone. Most days, I still don’t know what to do with a boy except try to understand Star Wars and not curse the bits of Legos that stab my bare feet.
9. I bite my fingernails. Not as badly as I used to–I was a bloody, torn-cuticled wreck all through grade school and college–and now, as I near 40, I’ve mellowed and they’ve grown. Some. But the only manicure I had was before my wedding, and I don’t anticipate ever getting–or needing–another.
10. I have fibroids. (Oh, you knew that.) I felt awful that I didn’t respond to the amazing comments and personal stories from that post; I just didn’t have it in me. I apologize; please know that I read them all and couldn’t believe all the good vibes coming my way. But here’s the update: I have opted to have uterine artery embolization, a minimally invasive procedure where they go in and cut off the blood supply to the ‘roids. I hope to get it done within the next two weeks so I’m feeling healthy and ready to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Kansas City Express. (If you’re in the KC area, we’d love to see you: I promise, I’ll be happy and healthy!)
11. If you read my posts regularly, you know I like tidy endings. So I’m going not going to disappoint now. I’ll be honest: now that I’m not feeling so wiped and out-of-it, I’m impatient with the whole medical situation. It took me nearly two weeks to get an MRI of my pelvis. I got it on Friday, freak blizzard and snow day on Friday be damned. I put that truck in 4WD and got tossed into a tube. So at least I’m on my way; what is most frustrating is knowing that I’m going to feel like crap once again and have to heal again. I just want to get it over and get on with it. After all, I’ve got things to do–and places to run.