My Active Adventures

Ok, so it might sound crazy for me, a serious running addict, to say that an injury that will keep me from running for several weeks is a good thing. But, I believe that is actually true in this case. I’ve become so addicted to running that I have stopped almost all other workouts. Before yesterday I hadn’t done any weight training since Feb 11 th , my appearances at yoga have been few and far between, I seldom get on the bike anymore. Basically, if it wasn’t running it simply wasn’t worth my time, all I wanted was to run. Yet another example of me not following my own advice. I always remind people how important cross training is, but I’ve basically stopped doing it myself. That’s led to some pretty serious weight gain despite my ridiculous amount of running. Now I have a stress fracture in my foot and can’t run for at least a few weeks. So what now? Do I just mope around doing nothing at all like I did last week? That’s not good, my weight continues to go up and I continue to get mor...

Stress Fracture That’s right; it’s another milestone I didn’t want. This is the first broken bone of my 33 ½ year life. I’ll admit, I’ve been moping around feeling sorry for myself since this started. I’ve done very little exercise and I’ve been eating horribly. That ended yesterday. I’ll get to that in a minute, first the foot. I am not allowed to run for at least the next 2-3 weeks; possibly longer. In about 2 weeks they are sending me to an orthopedic doctor to either get a thumb up or thumb down to start working my way back into running. My doctor is still hopeful that I will not have to miss the Hospital Hill Half Marathon in 43 days, but I’m sure I won’t do well with almost no running between now and then. I also have this fancy new orthopedic shoe that I get to wear 24-7; yep, even when I’m sleeping I’m supposed to wear it. Awesome. Hopefully this heals quickly and I can be back at it in a couple weeks. Now there’s what to do in the mean-time. As I said above, I’ve been very lax...

Where to start? Well, I suppose this blog is useless if I sugar coat things rather than put down how I really feel. So here it goes. This morning was the first time I’ve ever dropped out of a race. I don’t know what hurt more, my foot or my pride. Here’s my full report. As you’ve been reading, I’ve been struggling for a few weeks now with a foot injury and thus a lack of consistent running. Yesterday afternoon and when I got up this morning my foot felt great; almost back to normal. As for the weather, it was not so great. It was 38 degrees (dropped to 37 degrees) with a 22 mph NNW wind and a 26 degree wind-chill. Ouch! I got to the start line at about 6:30 with a scheduled 7:00 start time. I found the 1:55 pacer that I hoped to manage staying with and we tried to stay warm. The race got started right at 7:00 as scheduled. Cold weather tends to make breathing tough for me, not quite asthma, but similar. So, it was cold (which I hate), it was windy (which I hate), I couldn’t breathe ...

Tomorrow is the Wickedly Fast Half Marathon. Right now I’d like to punch whoever named it that in the face. I think a name like that was just bad luck. And that bad luck has been plaguing me since I got home from Napa. This was one of the races I was most looking forward to this year. Sure, it’s just a half marathon and I have more full marathons and even an ultra or two left to go this year, not to mention the fact that this year has already seen my first full marathon. Still, even with all of that, this was one I was really looking forward to. Last year this race was my first 5k. This year one of my goals was a sub-2 hour half marathon. This was the target race for that. After I got home from Napa I decided that I would join the 1:45 pace group and I set up a great training plan to get me to that goal. Then the bad luck kicked in. I’ve gotten sick, I’ve had allergies, my dog’s had a stroke, I’ve injured my foot, etc. That figures. In fact, here are my weekly mileages since Napa: · ...

When they wrote a story about a young girl’s house being blown away by the wind and into the magical Land of Oz, there was a reason they had her living in Kansas. Today was that reason. I got up at 7:00 to go for my run and it was already 71 degrees and the wind was at 26 mph out of the SSW, with even stronger gusts. I just wasn’t ready for that kind of wind, especially considering how little and inconsistently I’ve been running for the last month. Today’s run was on the course of next weekend’s Wickedly Fast Half Marathon. The run did not go so well thanks to the insane wind, in fact, it was 29 minutes longer than what I ran in my only official half marathon last November. 13.53 miles in 2:34:49 . The course is as flat and fast as described, but the wind beat me down and got my allergies going. My foot felt good again, and I’m still confident that if the wind doesn’t blow like this next Saturday I’ll do well. I still am hopefully for sub-2 hours, but if the wind is like this I’ll take...

I woke up this morning at my normal 5:45 to find very dense fog. VERY dense fog. Given the fact that it was still dark at that time and the thick fog, I could barely see more than about a quarter of a block ahead of me. Gardner is a quite, small town anyway, but at 5:45 in the morning there are very few cars on the roads and few people out running, it feels like a ghost town. The first half of my run was very interesting. It was a unique, solitary feeling. The darkness, the fog and the general quietness of the town added together to a very surreal feeling. I often like to talk about how running is as much a mental and spiritual exercise as it is physical; today that was definitely the case, in a good way. I’ve had a somewhat stressful couple of weeks with some things going on at work, my dog’s stroke and a week off of running due to injury. This morning’s run allowed me to re-center myself. It felt more like a meditation than a run. My mind was at peace in the silent darkness. Many ...

I’ve thought about joining a running club for a while, but never really got around to it. I started thinking over the last few days that as I really work to get my miles up over the summer I will need some breaks from such “serious” running and do a little of the running just for fun. That led me to the decision to finally look into a club. The  Olathe Running Club has two weekly runs, one on Wednesday evening and one on Saturday morning, both of these are pretty close to my home. They also have a meeting the first Monday evening of each month at my favorite pizza place, Pizza Shoppe , which also happens to be right down the road from my house. I contacted the president of the club, Paul, and asked if I could join their Wednesday night run yesterday so I could meet some of them and get a feel for what it’s all about. I really enjoyed the run. They all seem to be very friendly, outgoing people and I feel like I can make some real friends there. Both my wife and I have decided to jo...

So far my recovery from this foot injury seems to be going quite well. I got in 3.1 miles yesterday after work and 5.3 miles this morning before work. I had no pain during either run and the foot's continued to feel good after the runs. That is definitely encouraging. I continue to follow doctor's orders. I'm icing it each morning and each evening no matter how it feels and I'm taking my medicine twice a day as well. Hopefully it will continue to improve and I can get back to hitting the miles that I want to, but I'm not going to rush it. Today's 5.3 miles got me to a couple milestones that I'm pretty excited about. First, it puts my YTD total miles running at 400.0!! Not too shabby given the fact that I skipped a week last week and ran very little for 2 weeks after Napa Valley! I'm currently on pace for 1,536.84 miles this year, but I no that I'll be well above that since I will be working towards a few ultras. Also, this run put me at 1,202.45 mile...

It’s been an interesting rollercoaster the last week. Lots of ups and lots of downs. As I’ve already discussed in my last couple posts, I had a foot injury occur last Sunday, that started the roller coaster; high = 14 mile run at a pace that would set a PR at my next half marathon, low = extreme foot pain immediately after. I spent all day Monday worried about a stress fracture. Luckily my wonderful doctor decided it was nothing more than an inflamed tendon in the top of my foot. She gave me some Naproxen to get the swelling down and directed me to not run or workout at all last week, along with icing my foot each morning and evening. She felt that this would keep me from missing my half marathon on 4/16. I followed directions, as hard as it was to put in zero miles; I had to keep the big picture in mind. These last couple days I’ve had no pain, and little stiffness, so I felt confident and ready as I got home from work today ready to get some miles. The plan was to use the treadmill s...