2010 Year In Review

I've been putting this off because my thoughts on the past year have been all over the place, but let's see how it goes. Kind of a long post so here's the tl;dr 2010 pretty much sucked because of an injury but I'm working on the comeback.

2010 was a bit of a roller coaster; there were some high points but, unfortunately, there were mostly lows.  Coming off of a fantastic year in 2009 I was really looking forward to taking my running to the next level and concentrating on achieving some of the goals I have.  After so much racing in 2009 I planned on cutting back and focusing on being more selective in which races I entered.  Naturally, I was also convinced that 2010 was going to be the year I qualified for Boston; I knew I could, I just needed to stay healthy and it would happen.

So how did it go?  Not so well.  Around early April I began to feel a pain in my left foot, enough to be a concern but certainly not enough to slow me down.  I had been experimenting with barefoot running and I can attribute the injury to doing too much too fast, a lesson I never seem to learn.  The James Joyce Ramble was a huge success for me and I was feeling great about the results until two days later while I was out for an easy run, something in my foot popped.  Yes, popped, and it did not feel pleasant. I knew that this was bad, I could barely put any weight on it at all and running was out of the question.  But the 13 Relay was in two days and as the captain I couldn't abandon my team.  So I soldiered on and ran my legs.  It was the single most painful experience of my life and I hope to never do that again.  The closest I can get to explaining it is this: at the start of the run it felt as if someone was repeatedly stabbing my foot with a knife, after about a mile or so this would start to subside and it would be a dull, but still painful, ache.  Once I stopped running though it was as if red hot ants were burrowing their way through my foot.  I know, pleasant.

The hopes of a big year of racing were over.  I spent the rest of the summer in hiking boots wondering when the foot would get better.  Time dragged on, no running and what seemed to be the slowest healing process in history.  The highpoint of my summer came when I did the GNRC mile time trial with Mel C which marked my entire mileage for the season. Yes, one mile in three months.  I was starting to go a bit crazy so I did what any rehabbing runner would do, I started looking for a bike. Anything to get out at this point would be a big step forward and my old mountain bike just wasn't cutting it anymore.  Eventually I ended up getting a Felt B16, but that's a whole different part of the story.

August came, I was running again, trying to put all of the pieces together.  I kept running and was slowly getting back in shape, although my first attempt at a race wasn't all that encouraging, but at least it was a race!  BayState was looming large on my calendar now and I was still unsure that I would be ready for it.  By now I had become hypersensitive to any pain or twinge from the foot and I was determined not to re-injure it which meant taking it slow.

Five months had been lost to injury, an injury that I am still feeling the effects of today.  My entire rhythm and training schedule had been upended and with it, my confidence.  Even when I was back out running I found that I was doing it alone, I think I got out with the club once.  I was no longer the runner that I once was and I hated that.  I hated that  I couldn't count on myself to do what I wanted to do.  In effect, my body had failed me and by doing so had really rattled me.  I'll admit that I still haven't progressed much past this, I just don't know what the new year will bring and whether I should be making plans and reaching for goals.

Looking back, 2010 was not a good year running-wise.  But as I said in the start of this post, there were some high points.  I ended up running the BayState marathon and I was really glad that I did.  It may have been my slowest to date but it felt great and it was definitely a psychological boost.  It was coming back, too slowly, but I'm still working on it.  Unfortunately I was beset by yet another injury that has marred the end of the year, but what do you expect from a year mostly lost to a bad foot.  As I look to 2011 I have a cautious optimism that everything will fall back into place.  2010 may have been a down year but it wasn't entirely bad, there were some bright spots.

Stymied again

It's happened again.  I signed up for the Hyannis Marathon and am all excited to get training for it but there is just one issue; my foot has been giving me a problem for a couple of weeks.  The middle toe and ball of the foot under it have been experiencing pain, almost as if I had jammed it or stepped on something hard.  I have no idea why it is doing this but running definitely makes it worse.  So I took off three days over Christmas but that didn't fix it.  I have now taken another four days off but it still feels off.  I was supposed to do ten miles last Saturday and another 12 this weekend but my schedule is all thrown off now.  I haven't even done ten miles total in the past week!

The plan now is to wait until Saturday or Sunday to start running again and see how it feels.  A week should be plenty of rest time to for it to get better.  At least that's what I keep telling my foot.  Unfortunately it seems to have its own ideas.  Happy freakin' New Year.

What to Do

What to do...

The eternal question.  I look out at the blogosphere and am greeted by throngs of people posting their year plans full of which races they will be running culminating in the big year-end challenge.  Seriously, how the hell do you plan so far out?  I can barely keep track of what day it is let alone schedule what I will be doing in October.  It's enough right now that I have a vague notion that there are some sorts of races happening between now and then but I honestly have no idea what they would be.

So in other words, it's time to get my act together and make a plan.

Alright, with that said I think I will take the first step for 2011.  I am going to sign up for the Hyannis marathon in February and I am going to run the hell out of it.  Well, maybe, I may actually just run the purgatory out of it but you get the idea.  Why not start with a marathon?  All the fun of a 10K with 20 extra miles added on!

I keep getting asked if I am going to run Derry and once again I find myself torn.  It sounds like a race I would like and I find myself gravitating towards it, but again I am wavering about it and seem to need a reason to do it. Part of my problem is that I have really scaled back the racing I plan on doing and just never put it on my radar.  Hmm, time is running out so I will have to think on this one.  Meanwhile, the waffling will continue unabated.

600

Disappointment

Saturday was the GNRC HOHOHO 5K and I had every intention of getting out there and lighting up the course with my new found speed.  Unfortunately, Life had other plans; Jen came down with a cold and a fever on Friday and by Saturday morning it wasn't much better.  I couldn't just abandon her so I let her sleep in and watched the kids instead of going to the race.  That sucked especially hard because it was going to be my last race of the year and I wanted to go out of 2010 with our own club race.  Sometimes these things just don't work out.  At least it was just a race, it wasn't like we had to miss our one big night out in town for the year at the gala charity ball where we would be spending the evening away from the kids having adult fun.  Oh yeah, we had to cancel that too.

Suck it Life.

Good Times

Vacation comes to a close.  Time to head back home and return to normal life.  As far as my training load goes it would not be a stretch to call it a heavy week.  Totals on the week are as follows: Sunday-Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; running: just shy of 30 miles. Biking 105 miles.  No injuries, no pain, no problems at all.  Good times I tell you.  I came down here expecting to bang out some good numbers and I didn't disappoint myself.

Today was our last full day here in LI and I awoke to a grey and cloudy day which was surprisingly a bit warm.  For the last day here I decided to mix it up a bit and do something I haven't done before: a brick.  So as a light rain began to fall I jumped on my bike and began to peddle my way to a 20 mile ride.  I felt bad getting her wet and sandy but she didn't let me down.

I arrived back at the house, stowed the bike and ran upstairs to get changed into my running shoes where I found my daughter had once again molested my computer and ripped off the last remaining ctrl key.  So please excuse the lack of copying and pasting.  Also, the shift key is now wonky so ignoring any capitilization mistakes. After a stern talking to aimed at her I was back on the road.  And my quads were tired.  But I soldiered on and soon the legs were warmed up and rearin' to go.  Mile after mile ticked off as I enjoyed my tour around historic Riverhead (ie; marveled at all of the closed store fronts) and back to the house.  It was a solid run with the last 1.5 miles run at a brisk pace, just because.  My first brick was a fun one, but short.  Total mileage was 21 miles on the bike, 8 running.  A good way to end a hard chargin' week.

1st AG

Sometimes things work out and there is no rhyme or reason to it.  Today I ran the Mattituck-Cutchogue 5th Annual Turkey Trot 5K here on Long Island.  Jen and I decided to do this 5K just to get out and have some fun.    It was a cool day, but great running weather so I knew I could do well.  I was looking to do a sub-20 minute but wasn't sure if I could; after-all, I haven't really been training for speed.  The race began and I found that I was able to keep up with most of the lead pack which was encouraging.  I began to pass more and more people and before I knew it there was only a quarter mile left to go.  This is when I got a bit confused, I was able to break into a near sprint up the last hill and down the finish straight to pass a couple of runners.  My pace throughout the race had been quick so I wasn't sure why I had all of this energy left at the end.  I hadn't been looking at my watch for the last two miles so I was shocked when I read the clock at the finish, 19:06.  Where the hell had that come from?  That time was good enough for 13th place overall and a 1st in my age group.


Being able to put out that kind of run doesn't really make sense when looking at what I have been doing this week.  Sunday to Tuesday I logged 18 miles of running and 85 miles of biking.  Wednesday I took a day off but still, I haven't exactly been taking it easy this week. Going into the race I fully expected my legs to be tired given the miles I have been putting in, but they weren't.  At no point during the race did any of my muscles show signs of tiredness.  In fact, the whole race felt good.  How can it be that I have been pushing my limits all week and still am able to pull out a performance like this?  Conventional wisdom dictates that my legs should be tired or sore and that should have effected my performance and yet there I was cruising along and somewhat upset that I hadn't pushed myself further.


I guess there are just some times that we can't predict how we will do.  Maybe I was psychologically ready for a big race, maybe all the miles I did this week set me up for increased performance, maybe it's just that sometimes things just click in the right way.  I have no idea.  All I know is that I'm thankful this Thanksgiving that I could go out there and run better than I could have imagined.  That I could take home an AG win.  That I got to share the race with my wife.  And mostly, that I have the ability and talent to just get out there and run.


Happy Thanksgiving.