January 2015

Martini Fridays: Affairs of the Heart (Rate)

I’m desperately trying to embrace the new training regime.

You may be asking yourself: what new training regime? To which I say: don’t you follow my every utterance on this very website? I mean. Really.

I kid.

To make a long story short: I decided to work with a coach — Sara Dimmick, in case you wondered — for the first few months of 2015 just to see if she can help me run the fastest Pittsburgh Half in May that I possibly can. After that race, I’ll revaluate.

For now, however, I’ve given myself over to letting someone who knows what they are doing plan what I do, running-wise. I’m also interested in hiring someone more qualified than I am to take over dressing me for work every day, by the way. Just putting it out there.

Sara D. has been posting my workouts on Training Peaks for two weeks so far. While I like having direction, what I’m struggling with is what we’re focussing on until the end of the month: base building and strength training.

Laps around the local high school aren’t terribly scenic but at least it has been plowed

It makes total sense, mind you, to back off a little on the intense running work in order to give all of my over-worked bits and pieces time to heal. It also makes total sense to build up my much neglected upper body and core by lifting heavy things in order to put them down again. I get it. I’m on board, intellectually.

The problem is that I find the lifting and the crunches so blessedly boring. It’s not even that Zen-type of boredom where you can find bliss in the monotony. Strength training requires just enough of my attention that I can’t completely check out and that makes for a long hour at the gym.

I am running, mind, but Sara has made me strap on a heart rate monitor — and it’s my first experience running with one. For the record, I’m not a fan. It’s one more bit of gear to keep track of and to obsessively check Herr Garmin for. Plus, I can’t find a way to get the buckle-y part to not dig into my right underboob. First world problems, I know.

And then there’s what the whole heart rate monitoring tango has done to my pace. Runs have been all about a pace that keeps my HR in zone 2, with the occasional hedonistic leap into zone 3. For me, zone 2 is about a 14-minute mile, which feels so much more glacial than my already pokey 12-minute miles. While I know I shouldn’t compare my pace to other’s and listen to my own body and yadda yadda yadda. Turns out, these HR specific runs make it hard for me to keep my eyes on my own mat.

What also isn’t helping is the weather. The extreme cold has forced me to do these slow runs on the treadmill, the place where time stops moving. My husband and I have a long running joke about Ohio, a state we’ve often driven through diagonally to get to points South. You never feel like you’re making any progress when you’re driving through Ohio. The treadmill is my Ohio — and I can’t even run fast so that I can just get it over with already.

Yeah, I know my attitude could be better. For what it’s worth, I did manage to get through Sunday’s six-mile long run with relative grace.

My relatively sanguine attitude came more from finding a window between the bitter cold front and an oncoming snow storm to actually run outside. Twenty degrees feels downright tropical when you are used to single digits. The sky stayed low and gray for the entire 90 minutes but didn’t really bring me down. There’s a lot to be said for how simply being outside, even if one is merely running around the local high school, can boost one’s mood.

Plus I get to see this same Dumpster again. And again. And again….

By the time I made it home after my run, I noticed two things. Thing number one is that an iPhone-sized chunk of my upper left thigh was cold enough to store meat on because I hadn’t noticed my water bottle leaking through my jacket and soaking that part of my pants.

Thing number two is that these long, slow runs make me kinda sad. My goal is to run faster so it feels all kinds of wrong to focus on running slower. I get the thinking behind it but its just emotionally fraught. I feel like a loser because my heart won’t do what I want it to do, which reminds me of all of the worst parts of junior high, when I had a huge crush on a boy who would never, ever crush back.

Which makes me want to know: who else has trained using their heart rate as a guide? How did it make you feel?

Tales From Another Mother Runner Thursday: Jenny Everett

Welcome to round two of Tales From Another Mother Runner Thursday, where we preview one of the 22 essays and authors in our forthcoming book. While our names are on the cover, the book is a truly celebration of this amazing, badass community: not only does it contain 22 essays from a range of talented writers and mother runners, it has miles of insight, advice, stories, and humor from hundreds of you.

Up today: Jenny Everett, a mother runner who lives in Charleston, SC; she’s the mom to the super stylish Sam, 18-months-old, and Pritchard, who Jenny describes as, “a self-centered boykin spaniel and our 6-year-old first born.”

My running history: I started running in college as a way to counterbalance my consumption of Black Label (a.k.a. cheapest, most disgusting beer ever). Post-grad, I got a job at Men’s Health magazine, where many of the editors ran at lunch. I caught the bug there and have been running since. Mostly, I stick to 5Ks and 10Ks, but I did complete the Miami Half-Marathon a few years ago. I absolutely loved it — and I have absolutely zero desire to run a full marathon. 13.1 is my —and my IT band’s—max.

And my writing history: I’ve been writing for magazines for 15 years. I started out at Men’s Health before becoming an editor at Popular Science magazine, where I covered health and new gadgets. (Nerdy highlights included test-driving the Segway and a self-parking car.) Later, I was the Fitness Editor at Women’s Health, a health blogger for SELF, and a freelance editor at ESPN. My husband and I moved to Charleston, SC from NYC in 2008, so I’m officially a full-time freelance writer and editor now.

My essay, “Baby Bump and Run”: is a distillation of my first run post-baby, and how running had sustained me—and helped me keep faith in my body—through five years of fertility treatments. It’s easily the most emotional, personal piece I’ve ever written.

In your essay, you write about eating the core of a pineapple to help with egg implantation. What does it taste like? (And where did you get that information?): According to some of the bazillion blogs and message boards I stalked while trying to conceive, the core of a pineapple contains a significant amount of an enzyme called bromelain, which may aid in implantation of an embryo. I cut the core into five portions and ate one wedge every day for five days post-ovulation. (Surely, my husband thought I had officially lost my mind.) The flavor wasn’t bad, but the texture was really off-putting: like chewing on a pineapple-flavored square of jute rug.

Do you regularly run with Sam? Why or why not? No, so far, I don’t. Ideally, I like to run alone I just really enjoy the solitude of solo miles. That said, there are times when it would be convenient to bring Sam along and I think he’s at an age where he’d enjoy it. If anyone has jogging stroller suggestions, I’m all ears.

Favorite place to run: This is easy. Downtown Charleston has to be one of the most gorgeous places to run in America. You zig-zag down historic alleys, enjoy the sea breeze as you cruise along the waterfront, inhale the scent of Carolina jasmine, and admire the pretty-as-a-picture pastel-colored stucco homes. It’s truly dreamy.

How do you handle the Charleston heat + humidity in the summer? My body has adjusted the heat compared to when we first moved down in 2008. But I’m not going to lie, August can be brutal. I stalk my weather app to figure out the least humid days; the heat isn’t as much of an issue as the humidity! I also make sure to stick to shady roads and trails, or routes that take me along the water so I’ll have some breeze. And, of course, I’m super diligent about H2O.

Next up on your running calendar: I’m trying to do a local 5K every month, and am going to sign up for the 10K Cooper River Bridge Run.

#143: Tales from Another Mother Runner Essayist Nicole Blades

New Year, new book: Dimity and Sarah are eagerly awaiting the debut of their third book, Tales from Another Mother Runner, on March 3. To get you in on the excitement, every month on the podcast, they’re hosting one of the 20 contributors to the essay-filled book. Kicking off the party is Nicole Blades, a journalist, novelist, and mother runner of one in Connecticut. After a sharing her background as a runner, Nicole reads a make-you-laugh excerpt from her essay (listen closely and you might hear Sarah chortling in the background!). Then the ladies waste no time diving into TMI topics, including tactful phrases for pooping and tales of gas being passed. Learn that Nicole found her former running partner on Craigslist (!), and what three words describe her running.

First up, though, find out why Dimity’s thumbs got a workout on Christmas and why Sarah’s house is filled with twittering songs these days.

*If you’re digging our podcasts, we’d be super-grateful if you’d take a minute (because we *know* you have so many to spare!) to write a review on iTunes. Many thanks.

**Also, the quickest way to get our podcasts is to subscribe to the show via iTunes. Clicking this link will automatically download the shows to your iTunes account. It doesn’t get any simpler than that!

In Her Shoes: Breaking Single Digits on a Run

One section Tales From Another Mother Runner is called In Her Shoes, which is first-person accounts of different running situations and tales. We love running stories as much as—or maybe more than?—running itself, but we had a surplus of In Her Shoes stories…if we put them all in the book, it would’ve been bigger than a dictionary. So we’re going to run these every other Friday for a while.

Kicking us off is Tina, who bit it big time on a training run and cracked her pinky. (Stupid sidewalk lips!)

After running with a friend for three or four miles, I had three or four more to cover solo. I was training for the Hatfield McCoy Half Marathon, and the weekend before, I’d done really well in a 10K. I had that I-got-this feeling: totally strong and confident.

Maybe 20 minutes later, I’m lying on the pavement after tripping on an uneven sidewalk near a Subway restaurant. I’ve run on that sidewalk a million times.

Of course, the first thing I did was look around to see if anybody saw me.

Then I noticed my knee was bloody. I thought, ‘OK. I can deal with this. I’m good to go.’ I took a couple of steps and noticed blood on the back of my hand. When I turned my hand over, my finger was totally not where it was supposed to be; my pinky had snapped at the bottom where it attaches to my hand.

I panicked. I didn’t have my phone with me so I ran to my friend’s house, about a mile and a half away.

All I could think about on the way to her house was, ‘I don’t want anyone to see me.’ Besides my pinky, which didn’t really hurt, I had the bloody knee and I knew something had happened to my lip or my tooth. I even stopped by a parked car to look in the side mirror to check it out. Everything looked fine, but about a week later, when I (finally) went to the dentist to get my tooth buffed out, the dentist removed a small chunk of pavement from my tooth.

My friend said I was really calm when she answered the door. I said, ‘I’ve wiped out.’ She thought I meant I’m wiped out, as in, I’m tired. ‘Come on in and sit down,” she said, to which I replied, ‘No! Look at my hand!’ She wanted to go directly to the emergency room, but I had other ideas. ‘No, I’m not going. I’ve got to go pick my daughter up from dance class.’

I called my husband, who agreed with my friend, saying I had to go to the ER stat. My pinky would still be broken later, so I came home and took a shower because I was nasty. Then we went to the ER.

I figured the doctors would just pop my pinky back into place but as soon as they X-rayed it, they told me I’d have to have surgery. Finally, the pain and the magnitude of the injury really started to set in. This was not just a week or two to recover; it would require several surgeries. Eventually, a hand surgeon put two pins in. I ran a little bit with the big wrap of gauze around my hand, but it seriously curtailed my training for the half-marathon.

Less than a week after my surgery to remove the pins, I stood at the starting line with an awesome playlist and a resolve to not give up. Because my training hadn’t been the best since the accident, my race wasn’t pretty. As I approached the finish line, I cried.

That race is my benchmark for tolerance and tenaciousness. As one of my daughters put it: “Mom, if you can do that, you can do anything.”

—Tina (Her favorite running buddy now never fails to point out that uneven chunk of sidewalk every single time they run past it.)

Your turn: Have you ever broken a bone—or otherwise really hurt yourself—on a run? Spill all the details in the comments below!

Tales From Another Mother Runner Thursday: Terzah Becker

In “If You Don’t Run, You Can’t Win,” Terzah Becker writes about her three-year-long quest to qualify for the Boston Marathon.

In less than 2 months, our third book, Tales From Another Mother Runner will be released…and the seams on our capris are popping, we’re so dang excited. The book is a truly celebration of this amazing, badass community: not only does it contain 22 essays from a range of talented writers and mother runners, it has miles of insight, advice, stories, and humor from hundreds of you. As we prepare to launch, we’re going to profile an essayist on Thursdays.

First up is Terzah Becker, a Boulder-based runner and mother of 8-year-old boy/girl twins.

Running history: I’ve been a runner on and off since I was 12 years old, starting then because I didn’t like the adolescent chub I suddenly put on. In my pre-kids life, I completed three marathons and enough shorter races that I lost count of those. I wasn’t allowed to run during my pregnancy, so when I re-started about three months after the twins’ birth in 2006, it was like I had never run before in my life. I didn’t have time to get “serious” about running again until the fall of 2010, when my attempt to finish a half-marathon in under two hours failed. My disappointment was such that I knew this really meant something to me. I needed a lofty goal, a training overhaul and some discipline. Therein lies the source of my Boston Marathon quest. I completed my ninth marathon at the Indianapolis Monumental in November.

And writing history: After college, I worked for eight years as a newspaper reporter and editor, with most of that time at the Wall Street Journal. The grind of daily newspaper work and its incompatibility with being around enough for the family I wanted to have led me to seek another career as a librarian. I’ve now worked as a reference librarian for nine years, all the while keeping a foot in the writing world through personal writing projects, occasional freelance editing work—and opportunities like my essay in TFAMR.

“If You Don’t Run, You Can’t Win”—my essay— in one sentence: It’s the distillation of three years of mistakes, recoveries, good and bad choices—and ultimately success—on the road to achieving what for me was (and still is!) the very tough goal of qualifying for the Boston Marathon without a lot of natural talent.

More difficult: qualifying for Boston or writing about qualifying for Boston? Qualifying for Boston. I had to re-qualify in November 2014 (after TFAMR went to print) because the qualifier I wrote about in my essay fell short of the cut-off for Boston 2015 by 8 seconds. (Due to demand, not all people who qualify get in any more.) It remains to be seen whether my new qualifying time from Indianapolis will be good enough for Boston 2016. It was a better squeaker, but still a squeaker.

Recent memorable run: I’m obsessed with golf course running…the springy turf, the rolling hills, the artfully-placed trees….but for most of the year I can’t run on golf courses because the pesky golfers are using them—and some of those golfers get up as early as we morning runners.

But in winter, it’s a different story. A few days before Christmas, before the snow hit, I woke up early and ran from my house to the nearby golf course. It was cold, empty. I climbed over the fence and did two blissful laps, a light frost on the grass crunching under my shoes. During my time out there, the sun rose, coloring the sky and the mountains to the west pink and orange. It’s the title of a novel that has nothing to do with running, but the phrase “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” kept replaying itself in my high-on-fresh-air head.

Recent horrible run: The Saturday before Christmas I went out with my group for a tempo-interval run. Due to poor sleep and (especially) poor eating the week before—too many cookies!—I could not keep up with the runners I usually go with. The whole thing, from warm-up to cool-down, was one big bonk. It reminded me of the importance of eating well, something I easily and frequently let slide.

Next up on my running calendar: The Rock the Parkway Half-Marathon in Kansas City, MO, on April 11, 2015, but I’m hoping to add some shorter races before that. I also do the Bolder Boulder 10K on Memorial Day every year.