I’m not really going away.  I’m just going away from training for a little while.

Last week I finally submitted to an MRI, and I got the results yesterday.  As it turns out, the cartilage on the back of my knee caps is wearing down and causing the mysterious pain I’ve been experiencing for the past 11 weeks.  I also have an agitated plica hovering around, providing further annoyance.  (If, like me, you have never before heard of a plica, check out the Wikipedia article here.)  The only cure is to rest my knees, so no running, no real cycling, and no real swimming.  I can spin easy with very little resistance and I can swim with a pull buoy.  With any luck, by the end of May the cartilage will have improved and I can introduce more activity.

The cause of all this is my increase in training over the winter.  I never felt like I was doing a lot, but I suppose I was, or at least a lot more than I was doing before.  In just a couple years to jump from running for 45 minutes to an hour each day to training for 3 hours a day might be considered a leap.  However, in all the time I have been running this is the first time I’ve had knee trouble, so that in itself is promising.  In  the future, I have to be mindful of my overall volume.  In the spring I started to take 1 day off every 10 or so days, and in the future I’ll probably drop that down to 1 day off every week and be really diligent about that, as I tend to get carried away and forget.

All in all, it’s a relief to finally know what is going on.  11 weeks is a long time to be in the dark, training half-heartedly hoping it disappears on its own.   I’m thankful that Matt Schneider at Boulder Center for Sports Medicine, the same PA that worked with Jordan on his knee last summer, took the time to get to the root of the problem and provide a reasonable healing plan.  He gave me the “OK” to race Escape from Alcatraz this weekend, saying that it’s my “going away party” and the rest period begins as soon as I’m across the finish line.

My plan for Alcatraz is to go all in on the swim and bike, and not save an ounce for the run.  If I’m having a good race I’ll be giddy enough to get through it fine, and if not I’ll be enjoying the view of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay.  It’s going to be fun and it’ll be an awesome experience, no matter what.  By way of this injury my swimming and cycling have improved a lot since Mazatlan, and even my worst days in the pool and on the bike aren’t flat-out awful anymore.  For the run, I’ll keep my race in Austin in the front of my mind and give it whatever I have because those are the last strides I’ll take for at least a month and I don’t want to save anything up.

Who knows when the “welcome back party” will be, hopefully in July sometime!  This definitely changes my plans for the season, but fortunately I haven’t registered for any races or arranged any travel beyond this weekend and I’m perfectly content to just roll with it and see what happens.

Now the real question…best pizza in San Francisco??

In mid-February I was starting to feel a little smug about the injury-free streak I had going.  In college I spent a lot of time injured with silly ailments that would come and go.  Since I’ve switched to triathlon I haven’t had a single overuse injury, it was almost a two-year streak!

Then at the end of a 10 mile run about 8 weeks ago my right knee shot with pain and the streak ended.  Womp womp.  I took a couple weeks completely off of running and then tested it out with a few of 10-20 minute test runs:  One bad, two decent.  It held up for the race in Mazatlan (and though it would be convenient, I cannot blame my pedestrian run split on my knee).   I ran a couple more times, and hopped on the treadmill for a tempo last week.  It was my best tempo ever!  Lower heart rate, slightly slower pace for the first 4 miles to be conservative, and my knee felt fine!

And while I haven’t been able to run pain-free since that tempo, it made me so thankful that I am a triathlete.  If I were still training for just running the last 7.5 weeks would have been torture.  I would’ve done something painfully stupid like pool run and I would have lost a ton of fitness.  Instead, I got it together in the pool with some solid swim weeks and picked things up on the bike.  I miss running, but by getting that one tempo in I’m not too worried about losing all of the fitness I built up over the winter….it’s there and it’s staying there thanks to swimming and cycling.

Group run at Vista.

I saw one doctor a few days before Mazatlan who didn’t help at all, and I’m planning on seeing a different one soon so I can figure out what the deal is.  …I’ve been putting it off in hopes that it will disappear suddenly, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, so I guess it’s time!

Anyway, the real point of this post was to share some of my tips for training through an injury, knowing when to stop and when to push through…just from my personal experience!

Stop:

- when you can feel it with every step/stride/stroke

- it’s a super sharp pain that radiates to another part of your body

- you notice other parts of your body getting sore/tight/achy because they are compensating for the weakness of the injured area

- it hurts a lot when you’re not training and slows down your day-to-day life (never worth messing up)

- it’s been bugging you steadily for a few weeks and isn’t getting better

Go:

- occasional pain

- it starts hurting mid-workout, but goes away after a minute

…in general I play it pretty cautious, since I want to give Sister Madonna Buder’s records a run someday

In my experience, it also helps to be realistic about what I should be doing.  If I’m hurt or feel a tweak that could turn into something gnarly, the last thing I do is drastically change my routine or start doing really intense workouts to compensate for lack of volume.  For example, with my knees I know I can’t do a kick set in the pool, so I avoid it and sub-in something else (such a pity…).  The runs I am able to do are easy and usually on soft surfaces.  The only hard run I did was a tempo (:45-1:15/mile slower than sea level 1/2 marathon race pace). It seems all too often triathletes get suckered into doing intense track workouts over short distances, which are a catalyst for breakdown and totally unnecessary unless you’re ready to bust out a sub-32 10k.  (sorry…I get fired up over track workouts…)

So there you have it, my take on training through injuries and a re-cap of the last few weeks that I have been putting off for some time…kind of like that doctor’s visit, and for similar reasons.

Today one of my favorite training partners EVER paid a visit to good old Golden.  Erica and I both ran the 800m at BU.  It’s a lonely distance, we weren’t sprinters and we weren’t distance runners.  Most 800 runners come down from the mile or up from the 400, but we just ran the 8.  Erica is super speedy and she would crank out our 200 repeats, and I was more into the 400 and up repeats, so it worked perfectly.  Until I got mono, then she got mono, then I got injured, and she graduated.  Still though, when we were both “on” it was a beautiful thing, though those days were few and far between (much to the chagrin of our coach…whose patience I can now appreciate.  ..I once argued that it was silly for me to run more than 5 miles in training.  hahahaha!)

Erica, me (+ Marisa!) cheering on Jordan - Marathon Monday 2005. Yes, our shirts read "Jordan is my homeboy"

Erica and her boyfriend, Stephen, started Brooklyn Brew Shop last July and have had a lot of success in selling their compact brewing kits online and at markets in NYC.  They came out to Colorado on a business trip to tour around all of the state’s breweries. It was great to talk with them about the frustrations and triumphs of starting a new company and growing from the ground up.  Who would have thought selling skis and brewing kits could share so many similarities?  I had so much fun showing them our operation and swapping small business secrets and stories, it was sad to see them go and made me realize how much I miss running in an endless amount of 200m loops with her on BU’s indoor track.

It’s also looking like I’ll have a different former teammate from BU joining me in Colorado by mid-summer.  I won’t mention names until it’s official, but I will mention that she is one of the nastiest runners I know and though she doesn’t know it now, she’ll be joining me on Sunday long runs every week.  ;-)

The mystery runner logging some miles with me at Waterton Canyon last year.

In prep for the XC race next week I decided that yesterday would be a good day to do a little workout.  It was cold, raining, and by the time I got home it was getting dark.  It was perfect.  As luck would have it, I was able to recover my training log from my junior year of college.  I had it on Blogger and now have conveniently imported it into this blog, so if you’re ever so inclined you can read all about my deep, dark, past (like..my summer 2005 swim training - honestly didn’t remember swimming even this much, accounts from my second trip to CO to visit Jordan,  my first multisport race, and much much more!  sadly I wasn’t too into providing any details or anecdotes, so it’s pretty much just my training with little fluff.  the log ends abruptly, because I quite obviously get injured…this happens several times.)

I knew I wanted to do the boil, simmer, boil workout, but I couldn’t remember how it went.  Thankfully, I found it here.  You can’t have a bad day running when you’re boil, simmer, boiling.  It’s impossible.  There’s no distance to worry about.  Just boil for X amount of minutes, simmer for X amount, and boil again.  Boils are at race pace, and simmers are around tempo - not hard, not easy.

Last night I headed to my favorite trail and boiled for 5, simmered for 4, and boiled for 5 again.  After running easy for 4 minutes I did it again.  It’s a little different than the original BSB workout, but variations are definitely allowed.  The workout went very well and I’m surprised with how good running feels.  Next week the “race” is totally just for fun but it’s exciting to be preparing for something different…even if preparing consists all of 8-10 runs haha

As you can probably tell, I’ve been very nostalgic for XC lately, which is funny b/c I was never too fond of it.  I really liked the concept of it, but never ran well during the fall.  It was firmly implanted in my head that I couldn’t run any distance beyond the 800.  Now that I’ve run 2 decent marathons I know that isn’t true, but still fall into that mindset all the time…like every time I have to run a 10k after biking and swimming.  Someday I’ll get back into the whole running thing, but that’s a ways off.  I’m enjoying the little bit I’m able to do now, because come October 1st I’ll be drenched in the most chlorinated water you can imagine for many hours a day.  I’ve got some big plans.  …but for now, I’m going to keep on simmering.

Next time you’re racking your brain for a running workout to change up the routine, try out the boil simmer boil, and the best part: you don’t have to adjust your times for altitude!  Cooking joke! AaaYO!!!!

Last week I was summoned back to the pool by Sean.  The first day of swimming wasn’t so bad, but each day thereafter got worse and worse.  I’m not ready to be submerged for 2 hours everyday, and really haven’t been too into the whole exercising thing for the past few weeks, let alone training several hours a day for a race season that is months and months away.  So yesterday I skipped swim practice, worked later, and then drove up Lookout Mountain for a run that turned into more of a hike….

I’m not sure if it’s the time of year, getting out in the fresh air, or reading my former teammate, Mollie’s running blog, but for the first time in awhile I feel like running again.  When I’m training for triathlon, running is my least favorite of the 3: it can’t take me far away like cycling can, and I don’t see the improvement I see with swimming.  Running always gets the backburner while I develop in the other two, and hopefully someday I’ll be able to come back and focus more on running.  I thought I might be able to do that this winter, focus on running for a month or 6 weeks, and go run some indoor races at BU (I admittedly have ulterior motives…).  After I got crushed on the swim in Tuscaloosa, it’s obvious that plan was not a sound one: I have to spend my winter in the pool.

…but it’s not winter yet, it’s cross-country season!*  I’m taking the next month or so to find as many XC races as I can.  It’s a little hard to do as an adult.  I could probably pass as a home-schooled high schooler, but I stumbled across this little gem and now I don’t have to: a Euro-style cross-country race in Addenbrooke Park!  Water jumps!  Mud!  Grassy field!

It’s less than 2 weeks away, but I’ve run twice in the past 3.5 weeks (both this week), so I’m ready to go.  I did actually get off my lazy rump and start training today though: 62 minutes from the new office, up into White Ranch — awesome!!!  Not sure if I mentioned how great our new office is?

*Clearly this does not mean I don’t have to swim…I just am not subjecting myself to 4-5000 yards/day right now, just a few shorter workouts per week so I’m not starting from scratch later on.