wshaffer

I've had any number of things derail my workout plans over the years, but this was a new one. On Thursday afternoons, I usually go for a long walk along the pedestrian footpath that runs along Arastradero Road, near where I work. This week, I was actually thinking of trying out a nice easy jog along that route. But on Wednesday, a jogger was assaulted at gunpoint right on a section of the path that I regularly travel, and the suspect hasn't been apprehended. So, I'm feeling a bit weird about my lovely solitary walks and jogs.

I brought my running gear to work yesterday, and was just going to go run sprints by myself on the soccer field, but then I remembered that my personal trainer teaches a bootcamp class on Thursday afternoons. I figured I would give something new a try.

The class setup was really fun - in honor of Easter, my trainer had written a bunch of different exercises on slips of paper, placed them in plastic Easter eggs, and hidden the eggs around the area outside the gym. We were divided into teams - each team had to find 5 eggs. Then we had a set period of time to do the exercises from all the eggs, and then the teams swapped exercises. (So we ended up doing 3 or 4 rounds.)

In general, the experience reminded me of all the things I hate and all the things I love about group fitness classes.

The things I hate:
1. Gratuitous appeals to weight loss/aesthetic goals. My trainer is actually really good about not doing this, but that doesn't stop the other particpants from shouting out things like, "We're doing this for our beach bodies!"
2. Random and haphazard exercise selection. I'm used to training with specific goals and progression in mind, and bootcamp classes don't really do that. You'll get exercises that you don't know how to do properly (Hello, box jumps!), exercises that you don't want to do (Crunches, for real? In 2018? Haven't you all read Stuart McGill?), exercises that are too hard, and exercises that are too easy.
3. Lifting weights and running are both almost forms of meditation for me. When I finish a session, I don't just get the physical benefits, but I usually feel mentally refreshed, calmer, and more focused. Doing burpees like a lunatic with 20 other people doesn't really have the same effect.

Things I love:
1. I like the novelty. It's fun to try new things.
2. It does get your heart rate up like whoah.
3. The cameraderie. There was lots of encouragement, high-fiving, and lots of commiseration in the locker room afterwards about how much burpees suck. (Yes, I hate other people and I love other people. Did you expect me to be consistent?)

Also, I managed to teach one of my teammates how to do a kettlebell swing without referencing anything NSFW, which is an achievement since a kettlebell swing basically consists of humping the air while holding a cannonball on a handle.

Group fitness classes also offer an interesting opportunity to measure up your fitness levels against a bunch of other people. I used to be able to confidently assume that I would stand out as the least fit person in any group fitness class. (Which isn't so bad - if you don't let it hit your self-esteem, you can serve a socially useful function.) Now, not so much. I'm still a noticeably slow runner, although my endurance isn't bad. I'm terrible at burpees and other similar exercises that involve flinging yourself up and down a lot. I'm reasonably good at anything requiring core strength. I'm unsurprisingly pretty darn good at anything that requires leg strength.

I don't think I'll do the bootcamp class on a regular basis, but I might join it now and again for a change of pace.

So, I decided to have another go at trying to combine running regularly with lifting heavy things. I did a short run/walk yesterday. It went well. Today, my quads were a little sore, and my left hip was a little sore (gotta watch that), but otherwise, I feel great. (My knees always feel fantastic after I run. You're weird, knees, but you do you.)

I was a little worried that post-run soreness might interfere with today's weightlifting workout, but it didn't seem to. (Though in the future, if I'm smart, I'll run on Saturday morning, to give myself more recovery time before weightlifting.) I deadlifted 175lbs for 3 reps, which is a new record. My goal of deadlifting 200lbs looks like it may be in reach sooner than I ever expected. (Of course, the day after I lift 200lbs, I'll set a goal of lifting 250lbs.)

Tomorrow is definitely a rest day. After that, we'll see. Right now, I'm aiming to run just once a week, although I am hoping to increase that to twice a week in the, er, long run.

Waterlogged: The Serious Problem of Overhydration in Endurance Sports by Tim Noakes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


If you're an endurance athlete who has ever been told that you should drink before you're thirsty or that you should drink sports drinks with electrolytes to prevent your blood sodium levels from dropping too low, you should read this book. Noakes meticulously outlines the science that proves that a lot of the conventional advice given about hydration is at best useless, and at worst, potentially fatal.

It's also a fascinating look at how the combination of faulty assumptions and commercial interests can skew the interpretation of scientific research. It was actually a bit shocking to me how little we really know about the causes of heatstroke or exercise-induced cramping. Because these conditions are difficult to produce in controlled laboratory conditions, much of what we know has been based on anecdotes or on experiments with less than ideal design.

It's also a very readable book, despite the quantity of detailed scientific data that Noakes discusses. (It might help that I've got a background in chemistry, and went in knowing what "millimolar" means.) I did find that the book got a bit repetitive towards the end - Noakes rightly takes seriously his obligation as a scientist to address all alternative hypotheses and interpretations of the data, but if you're just someone who wants to know how much you should drink while running, you've probably absorbed everything you really need to know by halfway through the book.



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One of the more entertaining chapters in Alex Hutchinson's book, Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights? is his chapter on the effect of music on athletic performance. There actually is some evidence that listening to music while exercising can reduce the level of perceived exertion, and therefore help you go longer/lift heavier/whatever. What I found particularly interesting was that different types of music were better for different activities: for aerobic activities such as running or biking, a steady, fast beat was most beneficial to performance, whereas for weight lifting, "motivational lyrics" seemed to have the most effect.

I have a couple of playlists for running, and a playlist for weightlifting. I even have a kind of a playlist for climbing - you can't really use an iPod while climbing, but I often hear music in my head when I'm on a particularly tricky bit of wall. (Once in a while, Planet Granite obliges me by playing one of my climbing songs outside my head.) Climbing songs have a lot in common with weightlifting songs, except that they have a statistically significant lyrical focus on climbing, falling, or vertical movement, and are generally selected based on the Hollywood movie soundtrack principle that any death-defying move done to the accompaniment of a sufficiently badass guitar riff has to succeed.

So, I thought it would be fun to post a song from each of my playlists.
( Cut because I've already taken up enough of your flist with my blathering )

Do have a favorite workout song? Post a link in the comments.

On Saturday morning, I ran in the Willow Glen 5K, the first race I've really run since running the Willow Glen 5K a year ago. I wasn't expecting to do particularly well - for the past month or two, my running training has been interrupted both by travel and muscle soreness from lifting.

In addition, I had to contend with sore feet from climbing on Friday. Ah, the joys of being a multi-sport "athlete". ;)

So, I walked a couple of sections of the course, and ended up finishing a couple of minutes slower than my time from last year. But, I finished. And I had no hip pain! Take that, trochanteric bursitis!

Now I need to pick my next race to train for!

So, tonight I went up to the UCSF RunSafe clinic for a running evaluation. This involved a strength and flexibility assessment by a physical therapist, an evaluation of my feet and shoes by a podiatrist, a chat with a nutritionist, and an analysis of video of my running gait while running on a treadmill.

I'll probably do a longer post once they've sent me the full report on their analysis. I was, however, absurdly pleased to be informed by a podiatrist that I have perfect feet for running. Because, really, I've never had a perfect anything for anything, athletics-wise.

Also, my gluteus maximus is apparently "legit".

Gina Kolata has one of her characteristically delightfully skeptical articles on advice about running form in today's New York Times. My favorite bit:

When the researchers tried to figure out how to prevent the injuries, they learned that the only thing associated with running injuries was, in fact, running. The more people ran, the more likely it was that they would become injured.

Shoot. How could I have overlooked this foolproof method for preventing running injury?

However, Pete Larson of Runblogger has a good post pointing out that while the plural of anecdote is not data, scientific studies of running injuries have limitations, too: they're averaging over very diverse populations of runners, and not necessarily examining all the possible variables.

In terms of my own anecdotal injury experience, since reading that article on hip abductor pain that I linked to last Friday, I've been doing 2-3 sets of either lateral band walks (link to video here: http://youtu.be/ZdJ5l5Km3B8), fire hydrants (link to video here: http://youtu.be/1Cb8thnh2WU), or lateral leg raises (video here: http://youtu.be/LW_yy8KRi2s) each day. (Cranking Sir Mix-a-lot on your iPod while doing these is optional, but recommended.) It actually seems to be helping - I did a 2.5 mile run/walk on Sunday, and another today, and have experienced no hamstring pain and only slight soreness in the TFL. (Both gluteus medius muscles are sore, but in a "you worked us out" kind of way. Though I might switch to doing the exercises every other day just to make sure they get enough recovery time.)

5 days is not really enough time to build significant muscular strength, so what I'm observing is almost certainly due to either a) increased neuromuscular activation, b) the placebo effect, or c) stuff just getting better on its own. Still, it's motivation enough to keep going.

Trying to explain the World Fantasy Convention to my personal trainer, a man who by his own admission seldom reads books, was...interesting.

I should have been pleased that I managed to get in two decent strength training workouts while traveling last week (especially since I did one of them without access to a gym and using only resistance bands and bodyweight exercises), but I was quite frustrated because I was having a mild recurrence of the knee pain that I used to have before I started running. Said knee pain makes squatting to any reasonable depth painful; Squats are a key part of my strategy to improve my hip strength and mobility so that I can run without hip pain; running fixes my knee pain. You see the Catch-22 here?

I ended up substituting weighted step-ups for the squats, which seemed to help my knees a bit. Yesterday, I very cautiously went for a short run. Today I could squat to full depth without knee pain. My left hip feels...not sore, but a bit tight, as if everything there is not quite back at 100%. I'm hoping that for now I can get away with a short run once or twice a week to keep my knees in shape while my hip finishes healing. Or if that doesn't work, maybe I can do a few sessions of vigorous stair-climbing.

It is possible that if I strengthen my hip and thigh muscles sufficiently, I'll be able to have pain-free knees without giving them a good high-impact pounding regularly. For now, I'm pleased, but baffled, that a good high-impact pounding seems to work so quickly and reliably.

So, back in July or so, before I'd ever heard the words "trochanteric bursitis", I signed up to run two races in September: the Race to the End of Summer 10K, and the JP Morgan Corporate Challenge. And then I started getting pain in my left hip after running, and went to the sports medicine doctor and got a diagnosis of bursitis and instructions to lay off running for a "few weeks".

So, this morning was the Race to the End of Summer 10K. It has been a few weeks since my visit to the doctor, and I'm thinking that I will try to ease back into running soon, but it's hard to ease into anything during a race. Even though I'm not a particularly competitive runner, when you've got a timing chip on and everyone else is out there blazing away, you kinda want to give it some oomph.

On the other hand, the race registration is non-refundable and walking doesn't seem to hurt my hip. So I figured I'd turn up, walk the 6.2 miles, see if the race is something I want to think about doing seriously next year, and collect my T-shirt. I've done stupider things for a T-shirt.

So, I had a nice brisk walk along the Coyote Creek trail. For about the first half mile, I kept looking at the pack of runners pulling further and further away from me, and thinking, "If I run now, I could catch them!" And then thinking, "Yes, you could. Don't." Eventually I succeeded in convincing myself that I really was going to just walk this one. One of the advantages of walking is that you get to see more of the scenery. The course was nicely shaded for a few stretches and they had lots of water stations. I think I will try to run this one next year. I did run the last tenth of a mile, because walking across the finish line at a race just seems wrong, and I know I can do that much without injuring myself. (I regularly run about a quarter of a mile on the treadmill as part of my warmup before lifting weights, without causing myself any pain.)

I also have to say that this was one of the friendliest races I've ever done. Like most races, there was plenty of cheering from the sidelines from volunteers and spectators. But I really didn't expect to be cheered on by the half-marathon runners who passed me with shouts of "Good job!" or "Keep going!", nor the spontaneous chant of "5K! 10K! 5K! 10K!" that went up from the finish line volunteers as I finished. It was slightly embarrassing in a way, since honestly, I was not pushing the limits of my stamina, although I did work up a sweat and my calves and feet were a bit sore by the time I'd finished. But it did a lot to reassure that part of me that was afraid that I was just going to look silly walking a 10K. So, I'd definitely recommend this race to anyone who's a bit new at this, and maybe feeling a bit shy about the competitive aspect.

It is entirely possible that I actually finished dead last among all the 10K competitors. (Not many people walk the 10K distance - 5K is a lot more walker friendly.) Which would be kind of cool in a way. I guess we'll see when the results come out.

And my hip, so far, feels fine. The second race I'm signed up for is on Wednesday, and it's just 3.5 miles. I'm planning to walk it, but I might throw in a few cautious short jogging intervals. We'll see.

And then I'm not signing up for any more races until I'm well and truly sure that this injury is sorted out!