Appointment with the Podiatrist

I made an appointment last week with my podiatrist to get his blessing to do the 13k run in October. However other than walking over the weekend I also did a short stint of skipping. And I hurt my foot. Not my problem foot, but the other foot. Apparently because of the walking and skipping (mainly the skipping) I overworked my foot and strained my tendon and pinched a nerve.

So the original intention to go to the podiatrist close to pain-free (except after runs) ended up with me hobbling down with a tingling big toe and an arch that ached. We discussed how I was constantly hurting myself doing ridiculous things like skipping when I hadn't skipped in years and the nagging ankle ache when I did my runs now.

He was also shocked that I slipped my feet into my running shoes without undoing the laces. Yeah, so it seems the laces on my runners were tied too loosely so my feet were just moving all over the place in the shoes and the orthotics were rendered useless because of all that movement. So boys and girls, tighten them laces because apparently it makes a big deal.

We checked my hips, my back, the length of my legs so on and so forth. He also gave me a heel raise on one of my orthotics and sent me off with a warning to not do anything this week that would put too much weight on the front of the foot. I could run my sad little 3k runs and continue with my walks for the week and next week, we reassess and if it's still lousy, we start adding on ankle straps/taping to get the ankle movement sorted. If that doesn't work, then it might possibly be some problem with my back and then I'll be packed off to a chiropractor or osteopath. Joy. And all I wanted was his blessing for a 13k!

Monitor Lizards, Monkeys and a Squirrel

After my snake experience last week, I was on hyper-alert mode throughout my walk yesterday. I guess it didn't help that I had gone for lunch with my (so-called) friends who decided to tell me about flying snakes which freaked me out immensely. Then of course every other mammal, reptile and rodent in the wilderness decided to surface and all the sudden movements of these little creatures darting here and there made me uber jumpy. I've never seen a monitor lizard in all the time I've done my walks, but this time I saw two massive ones and heard another scuttling away. Then a monkey decided to drop something from the trees and another decided to zip across the path. And when my nerves were worn thin, I spotted a squirrel at the end of my walk...which did nothing, but by then I was so paranoid that I half expected it to jump on my head and attack me. It really felt as if the whole forest had come together and conspired to drive me nuts. Which incidentally is something squirrels like.

Needless to say I did the walk pretty quickly. I only managed to run for 2 minutes tops, but somehow still managed to complete the whole thing a good 5 minutes faster than last week when I ran for a longer stretch. I suppose it's partly the fact that I did this after a full meal in the afternoon (the full meal also gave me a stitch running, hence the lack of running).

Last week I did the trail in the morning, with nothing in my belly and just water to tide me through. Gina and I used to talk about this whole eating vs not eating before a run and she's of the 'cannot eat before running' category, whereas I need something inside me otherwise I get all grumpy and run out of steam really quickly. Which is why I prefer running in the evenings and walking in the afternoons. I generally get up in the morning feeling dehydrated (and mostly sleepy) and within 15 minutes I get hungry. I'm not the kind of person that can ride out hunger. Hell, I'm not the kind of person that can ride out anything. I can't ride out pain, I can't ride out hunger, I can't ride out fatigue....etc etc etc.

Bottom line is, I don't think my optimum performance is in the morning. I am trying to train myself to work well in the mornings though, since it gets so hot in Singapore by 9am that most races start stupidly early which means I either do a crappy race or I just stop doing any of them races here. Not entirely sure if there is any point in trying to condition my body - you know, the adage of trying to teach an old dog new tricks.

Running? What Running?

I'm starting to have a very bad feeling about my 8k race coming up. For one last night I did 3k and wound up with a stitch. Again. The good part is I ran through it. The bad part is I was very aware that 3k was probably the only distance I'd be willing to run through whilst nursing a stitch. Ideally it'd be less. No hang on, ideally I wouldn't even have a stitch!

I've also been wondering which distance to sign up for for the North Face 100k (obviously I'm NOT doing the 100k or even the 50k!) and at first I was all eager to go for the 26k, but now I'm wondering if I can even make 13k. So runners out there, I need your advice. Realistically I'm going to aim to do 13k if I'm doing this. The race is on 5th October and currently I'm running a painful 3k (and had to ice my foot AGAIN yesterday). Is there really any point doing this at all?

Never a Dull Moment

Aside from last weekend when I went to Hong Kong, I've been trying to make it for a trail walk (and a run on the flat patches) at least once every weekend. It seems a shame not to when the whole central catchment area is essentially in my playground and you get such a good workout in under 2 hours.

My favourite part about hitting the trails though is that nothing is ever the same! I generally go out and back and this is what happened yesterday:

As I was heading back, I saw a twig move in the distance. On getting closer I realised that said twig was actually a snake. A nice, long, green, yellow and black snake. Now I'm of the 'if I don't bother it , it won't bother me' school of thought, so I didn't think the snake would actually start slithering over to me. If it did though, I figured I could maybe out run it. Then I thought, should I run and jump over it or wait for it to cross over to the other side? I went with the waiting. I didn't really fancy the snake turning back and snapping its fangs into my ankle as I jumped over and as unlikely as that scenario was I didn't really want to put it to the test. So I waited patiently for the snake to make its slow slither over to the other side of the path and continued trotting on before I realised that when I was scrambling down the Nature Reserve a tree had somehow fallen and was now blocking my path.

I didn't really want to wander back to snake land since my aim was to get as far from it as possible and the tree was way to big to even attempt to jump over. So the plan would have to involve stepping into the undergrowth and skirting round the tree. Now I'd have been a wee bit squeamish but fine had I not see the snake before. But now that I had seen the snake, I wasn't dying to put my unprotected ankle into a huge area of tall-ish grass. Laziness trumped in the end. I could smell the end of the trail and I had no intention of back-tracking (to where the real snake was) and then taking the long route by road back. So I removed my ear phones and strained my ears to hear for any hint of a hiss, and ran (with high steps) through the undergrowth whilst yelping 'no snake, no snake, no snake'. I'm sure I looked like a complete fool, but there wasn't anyone else around to judge.

You'll all be pleased to know I made it back in one piece and even had the chance to regale you with my adventures yesterday. Will I go back again next week, snake and all? Hell yeah!

Silenced the Blerch, Awakened the Stitch

And boy do I like the Blerch more than the Stitch. Got 3k of running in before dinner yesterday and got hit with a stitch about 1km in. I tried breathing differently, I tried pressing in on the bit that hurt, and I tried running a little slower. Nothing helped. I'm not entirely sure how I can swim through a stitch but have so much trouble (and pain!) running through a side stitch. So essentially I started off the run with a good running posture and ended up half running half hobbling in the middle and dashing through the last bit to just get the run over and done with. I guess this is all part of the whole starting running from scratch again, but I did not at any point experience the whole 'peace out' thing in my run last night. Instead I got a lot of pain (see the common theme here?) and a lot of 'I hate myself for signing up for that stupid 8k run when I've done zero training'. Maybe it'll all start getting better once I break 5k...or maybe it'll get worse....but hopefully I'll become one with the pain and reach some level of nirvana where I start embracing all the crap that comes with running.

Meanwhile, how the heck does one get over a side stitch?

A comic that best explains why I run

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/running

A very good friend sent me this link saying she saw it and thought of me. I read it and thought of me. That said, I don't do marathons, much less ultra-marathons...but I do run to eat. And I am well acquainted with the Blerch (you'll see...). If you don't run, this is hilarious anyway! Enjoy!

My first 3K swim and other weekend updates

1. I swam my first 3k! Granted I did it all in sets, but the sense of achievement. Phew! Plus even if it isn't super accurate, Daily Mile calculated that I burned off 621 calories, so I had a completely guilt free curry dinner.

2. I started swimming when it was still bright out and finished off after the sun set. It felt like I was just swimming for ages and ages!

3. I don't like parents who can't manage their kids. Sure it's easy enough for me to say all this since I don't have kids, but aargh. It's a shared pool. As it was I was hugging the wall to get my laps in so it's not as if I were swimming in the middle disrupting the kids. They had 90% of the pool to play in so why couldn't they just stick to the bulk of the pool and leave me my little corner. And their parents were sitting there thinking their precious little devils were oh so cute for cutting me off constantly.

4. A group of older folk jumped in after the kids got out (finally) and they stood around in the pool in a group chatting. Again while there was oh so much space, somehow any swimmer in a pool just draws groups of people towards them. I hit some dude whilst doing back stroke. I think they moved then.

5. Perfume. Someone in that group of older folk must have showered in perfume because every time I got up to breathe when the group was near I was hit with a huge whiff of some overly strong scent. I always assume that people who slather on perfume are just dirty people who don't shower that often and smell a bit so they need something to mask their odor. So that made me think one of the group was a dirty person....in the same pool as me....urgh, don't want to get there.

6. Swimming vs Running. As of Saturday I now actually swim further than I run. Kind of sad, huh. Thing is though, I didn't even need any music when I was swimming. It took me about 1 hour 40 minutes to finish off, but the entire time I wasn't bored or needed some Beyonce to keep me going. I run 10 minutes and my brain is screaming for something to take away from the pounding and the pain. Not entirely sure what that means other than the fact that perhaps I like swimming more than running.

7. In other news I did the same route that Rich and I did last week and powered through all the way back home instead of stopping like the last time. I also strapped on my foot pod. It seems we grossly overestimated how far we walked last week. We thought it was 10k, it really was 5.7k. I ran certain parts of the route this time and landed weirdly on a rock at some stage which means the ball of my foot aches again. Still at least I completed the whole route in less time than we took to do a shorter distance last week. Yay me!

8. I am a big wuss. I filled up a basin with cold water and emptied all my ice trays and chucked in a few cold packs. I stuck both my aching feet into it and I almost died. It was so cold! And so painful! First it was just cold and a bit prickly. Then the ache that comes after. I stuck it out for a minute before yelping in pain and lifting my foot off. That pretty much meant that when I stuck my foot back it I was back to stage one - cold and prickly and then the ache after. It stops hurting so much after a while, but the initial ache from the cold is just indescribable. I pretty much double over and clench my fist through the "ache" stage and hate that I have to ice anything.

9. I've a couple of blisters from where a little stone found it's way between my big toe and my second toe and lodged itself there about 1/2 the walk and another where the top of my shoe rubbed against the side of my ankle and took off a nice little piece of skin. That and my legs ache and my feet hurt. When did I become this old achy person?!?

The Slow Long Claw Back to Fitness

It's been tough trying to get back to a 'fighting fit' stage. Currently I'm anything but. Because all my 'runs' previously were transferred to the elliptical and because I found the elliptical dead boring, I had pretty much reduced mileage to under 5k (but really mostly only 2k) and that didn't even translate to running on the road. In the heat. And it's been so hot. I come back from a run nowadays - and by that I mean the only 2 runs I've done this year - dripping with sweat and terribly disappointed in how slow all this is taking.

Yesterday Rich and I did our first trail walk again in ages. It almost didn't happen because it was pissing down at 7am. The rain stopped eventually and we mucked around. Before long it was 10 and getting too late to do anything. We made alternative plans - maybe we could walk to breakfast and walk back - before we decided to just bite the bullet and do the damn trail walk we'd planned to do in the first place. So after a quick breakfast, we headed out at close to noon.

My ankle and foot ached after our 2 hour trot and I ended up having to cut the walk short because it hurt too much. I don't think I had a huge pain tolerance in the first place (my motto has always been NOT to run through the pain) but it seems what little I had has now been shot and I spend half the time now icing something or the other. That said, aches and pains aside, the walk was good.

We took the trail behind my house and walked to the nature reserve, did half of it and ended up back on Rifle Range where I threw in the towel and insisted we get a taxi back. It was nice to be among all the green again and in spite of my sore ankle, I really do love trail, even with the bugs, mozzies and all them creepy crawlies. Hopefully fingers crossed I can get down to attempting a run on trail again without killing myself by tripping over a root or something equally idiotic.

Incidentally, I've been using the Daily Mile to log my training. I started using it because the Masters Swimming Club had a swim challenge they issued to all of us and I had to sign up to join the challenge. It's pretty amazing though and it can never hurt to know how many donuts you've burnt off or how many tvs you've powered. If any of my friends are using it, add me as your friend! It'll be fun to train together virtually! There's never any harm having more training buddies!