Here's to the Bottom Top-10!

Saturday's chilly, albeit sunny, weather was perfect for a 5 Peaks trail run. 

And that's how you start off a blog post when you have nothing outstanding to report about your finish. But I am blogging about it anyway, because, who wants to always read about the winners, right? Bottom top-tenners unite! So here's my story:

There were 21 women in my age category (40-49) at the first of the 5 Peaks (Southern Ontario) 2013 trail run series. The good news is, initially I was pretty sure I came in last, but I didn't! I came in fourth from last. Checked my stats online this morning, and noticed that my trail running pace is at least two minutes per km slower than my road running pace. I simply am too afraid to add speed on a forest path riddled with tree roots and stumps and the odd narrow foot bridge with broken wood planks. I instinctively slow right down.

This must be rectified. Although I must admit I did love the feeling of being in a big forest all by myself, which is pretty much what it felt like after about 8 out of the 12 kilometres. But I would like to learn how to conquer that fear and master running trails. I am told all it takes is practise.

An article in the current edition of Running Room Magazine, entitled "Running Surfaces" by John Stanton suggests, "Natural surfaces such as grass, gravel, sand or dirt can be more demanding on your body than road running. The muscles in the lower leg have to work harder to maintain stability on uneven surfaces, and with each step you have to lift your foot higher to clear the trail. Your agility will improve on footpaths as you change and move laterally in order to avoid rocks, roots and puddles."

Yours truly, pre-race and pre-ponytail, sporting my arm warmer which reads:
"Dear God, please let there be someone behind me to read this." (onemoremile.net)

OK, so with that in mind, I need to work my lower legs harder and lift my feet higher. I told this to my friend Janate (who, BTW, placed 6th out of 21 women in our age category and who finished over half an hour before me), who warned that yes, this is true, but there is a fine balance between concentrating on lifting one's feet and running correctly and actually just getting into the "feel" of the trail as you're moving along. "Because you know what happens if you're concentrating too much on (your technique), that's when you end up crashing," she advised. Good point.

So I will try to run more trails. I will go to a special 5 Peaks trail running clinic our Thrive Team leader Ann is hosting at Thrive Fitness, Alliston next month (And BTW, Ann placed 3rd in our age category. I am surrounded by awesome female athletes! That's bound to rub off sooner or later, right??), and when I run trails, I will try to lift my feet higher but I won't try too hard lest I trip and fall flat on my face. Or something like that. Maybe I should just pretend I am my 10 year old son who really just gets out there and does it without thinking at all. Except about winning, of course.

So, because I like humour, I wanted to end with a list today, on the positive aspects of placing (almost) dead last in a 5 Peaks trail run. The list will be fused with possible reasons (read: excuses) for placing almost last.

Why I Am Proud of Placing Almost Last 
in a 5 Peaks Trail Run 

1. I ran it, didn't I?
2. I got the woods all to myself. (I planned it that way...)
3. I ran it, despite having an "athletic injury" (rolled the ankle last July, now it's permanently sensitive aka wussy.)
4. Hardwood Hills, I think, is considered the most technical of all the Southern Ontario 5 Peaks runs. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)
5. Hardwood Hills attracts lots of serious trail athletes which means tougher competition. (That's also my story and I'm sticking to it.)
6. I started on Saturday and finished on Saturday. (My answer to those friends who asked how I did after the race was this: "Is it still Saturday?" followed by a resounding, triumphant fist-punching-the-sky "YES!!" when they affirmed it was.)
7. When I turn 50 next year, and place in the top 10 (there were only 7 women in that age category at this race) I can brag about how much I improved over the course of just one year: "Just last year, I was in the bottom 10! Imagine!!"
8. I just run for the joy of the trails. I am not competitive. (I just wanted to type that. Ha ha.)
9. Clearly I was wise in reserving my energy for this coming weekend's half marathon (on a road, thank god!)
10. I showed my true blue Capricorn spirit. We are cautious by nature. (And also ambitious. So perhaps my ambition was not to break my ankle.)

One down, four to go! Looking forward to Rattlesnake Point in June. A breathtakingly beautiful course, that offers a bit of rock climbing and sheer cliff-face drop-offs! (not to climb, just to admire the view from, if you so choose.) This is my second year running the 5 Peaks series and I do enjoy it. It's a great way to challenge yourself and I think it may even be good cross-training for road running. 5 Peaks are offered all across Canada. Check out their web site at www.5peaks.com.

New Photo Section & Make-up Workout

Added a new page today that will be exclusively devoted to my photography passion. Drawback of living in the country with a less-than-stellar internet connection meant it took most of the day to upload the pics, but they're up now, at least the first bunch, taken last month of our flash ice storm. A benefit of living in the country: fantastic photo opportunities on bad weather days.

No workouts to report today. May go to a core strength class tomorrow morning for an hour, then tomorrow night a few of us soccer moms are starting a new Friday night run routine, while the boys practise on the field. I am hoping most people will be okay with a couple of kilometres because I just checked what time the 5 Peaks trail race begins on Saturday. Registration is 7:30 a.m. and race starts at 9:15. Basically have to leave around 7 a.m. While I am not a morning person, I can force myself to be, to get to a race on time.

In-between morning workout class tomorrow and evening "run clinic" I will be playing cabbie for my daughter, who will be getting ready for prom! Hair appointment in the afternoon, then home makeup session, dress-up and photos (my favourite part). If I repeat the "candid photo session" I cheerily undertook with my first born son and his prom date/friends four years ago, my daughter and her date/friends should be sufficiently sick of me and my camera in no time at all! I am so looking forward to it! We practised the make-up ritual this evening. What a workout that was! Apparently the look I gave her was "too dark" around the eyes, but I thought it looked very lovely and dramatic, for a first go at it anyway. It maybe needed a little more blending, but not bad. I would post a picture of her eyes but she'd probably have a meltdown. (Note to Self: Do NOT under any circumstances, offer to apply daughter's makeup on her wedding day! Oh, the drama!) 

Oh what the heck. She never reads this blog anyway and it's just her eye for crying out loud. So here it is, the trial pre-prom "dramatic eye effect." (my words, not hers) :

Yes, a little more blending with the liner needed.
At least we won't have to do this for the mud run next month.

I was almost thinking of skipping tomorrow morning's core strength session, but on second thought, with all the prom stress, I think I will need the relief of a workout! 

Please check out my photos if you have a chance. I have thousands more that I've taken over the years and hope to add to the new page regularly. I used to write/photograph for a local country magazine which is no longer published, and I miss showing my pics. So this is one way to get them out there.

Next blog post will likely be after the trail run (and the prom makeup trial run. Ha ha.) Looking forward to it! Hopefully the sun will be shining again.

Thank You for My Patience?

This call will be monitored for quality assurance purposes.

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us and will be answered by the next available associate. (Happy, up-beat music. Lalalalalala.)

Just for fun I thought I would see how many paragraphs I could get in while on hold with Sears' new improved customer service line. (AKA: Your response to my call will be monitored by my blog post. Thank you for making me hold. Your bill will be payed on time and without delay, so I can avoid your exceptionally high interest rate. Lalalalala.) I will type the exact number of "Thank you for your patience...etc" that it finally takes before the next associate answers my call.

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us and will be answered by the next available associate. (Same happy, up-beat song. Lalalalala.)

Typing that repetitive line is good for me too, because I have been in a bit of a writing funk lately and just the act of typing on the keyboard gets my creative juices flowing a bit better. 

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us and will be answered by the next available associate. (This happy song goes on forever. Lalalala whatever.)

Same with beginning an exercise regime, in a way. You can sometimes get in a real funk with your body - as in, "I REALLY don't want to move this body of mine. It is SOOO comfortable on this big cushy chair and this book I am reading is really getting good. I will exercise after I finish this chapter."

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us and will be answered by the next available associate. (Way to get someone to hate a happy song. Lalalalala please stop.)

 Or, "I will begin my exercise regime tomorrow. I am a morning person and now it is the afternoon so I am done for. Won't work." Or perhaps you're like my husband: "I will begin exercising again after (pick any one of these imaginary starting points: "my business gets off the ground; 

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us and will be answered by the next available associate. (I am totally not listening to the happy song anymore.)

the Olympics are over; hockey season is over; the kids begin summer holidays; my wife finishes her next race; after allergy season is over; when I have more time." ETC ETC ETC ad fin item. 

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us and will be answered by the next available associate. (--------------------------------------------- not listening, not listening.)

Yes I do tend to roll my eyes and tease my husband about his "start date" for getting back into exercising. He does work very hard at his business and also volunteers as a manager for ours son's soccer team. 

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us and will be answered by the next available associate. (Could they not have more than one tune? How is this an improvement?)

When he worked downtown years ago, he had to get up super early to avoid traffic. Being very routine-oriented, he got himself into a great exercise routine whereby he would leave the house at, like, a ridiculous a.m. hour so he could work out at a gym near his office first, and then still be the first guy at work. He was in great shape back then. He's not in bad shape now, but he knows he could stand to lose some weight around his middle. So he's now in the "As soon as" funk.

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us and will be answered by the next available associate. (F..... No. I promised myself I would not resort to F-shots on my blog. Yet.)

It happens to all of us. Because I have been doing more cross-training than running lately, I actually almost dreaded what it was going to feel like to go on a long run last Friday, but I did it anyway, assuring myself, "Even if you have to walk, just get out there. (Like the magazine, Get Out There. Good reads.) Just do it (do I have to credit Nike for that one?)." Turns out I had the stamina for 16 km. Once I got going, I got the groove back. And it felt good.

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us and will be answered by the next available associate. (Unbelievable, really.)

You have to be persistent. I have read that it takes 10 days in a row to make an exercise activity a habit. Sounds pretty do-able to me. Perhaps it works for writing a blog as well. All I know is that it's easier to come up with a whiny excuse than to actually do something that you know will make you feel better about yourself. We humans are so....weird and whiny when we want to be.

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us and will be answered by the next available associate. (My patience and one happy song x 10 and counting...)

Our first trail run of the 5 Peaks series is this Saturday. My ankle still hurts from when I rolled it last July. I am told by my physiotherapist that the nerves there may have a permanent tendency to feel pain a little quicker now. So I have a "wussy ankle" as I've come to call it.  

I could choose to avoid the trails altogether, and blame my ankle. But I like running trails. I am not great at it yet, and maybe I'll just go from fair to good. That's okay. But I'll try to be persistent. My ankle will just have to be happy with some KT Tape and/or a compression sock.

Speaking of persistence:

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us and will be answered by the next available associate. (Eleven times. Lalalalalala. Maintenance appointment finally booked!)

I (Try To) Run, Therefore I Spin . . .

Training for the next half marathon is becoming an experiment. 

(Backgrounder: In general, I chalk it up to "an experiment" whenever I do something incorrectly, so I don't feel like I have totally wasted my time with an activity, or so I don't feel overly guilty about something trivial that I forgot to do. E.G.: Forgot to clean the guinea pig cages this week? Make it an experiment to see if your kid actually notices the stench in his room. Forgot to buy most of the ingredients for a recipe? Experiment! Substitute until you have yourself a brand new recipe and then see how much the family likes it. Slept in late? Experiment! See how fast you can get your kids ready for school and out the door before the bus shows up. You get the idea.) 

So the "experiment" in which I find myself swimming at the moment is this: See if you can run a successful half marathon, with primarily cross-training as your main workout regime, as opposed to running. Makes not one stitch of sense, does it? I did not plan this half-baked, ridiculous experiment, but looking at the calendar and looking at the race day of June 1, I am starting to think this might just be the least amount of kilometres my feet have run leading up to a long distance race since I started all of this running stuff five years ago.

This finishing time is my "personal best" for a half marathon.
I do believe my run/cross-train ratio was 70/30 for that one. 
My current "experiment" has it at, oh, about 10/90.

My run journal for the past month looks impressive though, just not with running entries. It is filled with spin classes and core strength and circuit training and TRX resistance training, with a few measly kilometres thrown in here and there. The heart is in fine shape. The arm and leg and butt muscles are too. But (pardon the pun) is that enough to get me through 21 kilometres? (I have trained for, and completed, about eight or nine halfs in my life by now, plus a marathon, a 30K and a bunch of trail events. That should count for something too...shouldn't it? Hmmm.) And then there are the trail run events looming. "Enduro" events. Meaning long trail runs. Hmmmm.

We had our first trail running session last night. A bunch of us are on the same team for the 5 Peaks trail running series and we are starting to meet on Monday nights at a local trail, just to get some mileage in before the first event on May 25. This should help me get somewhat "on track" so to speak, for both the trail events and the half marathon. But WOW, did I absolutely crash and burn at the trail run last night (not actually crash and burn, just, well, sucked.)

We began in a group, but it took, oh, maybe 10 seconds before I started telling everyone "Don't feel the need to stay with me. I am tired. Just go ahead." Within five minutes they were around a bend and gone, and I was "alone" in the woods. (But not really. Lots of people walk this trail with their dogs, which freak me out when they're not on a leash, but that's another story.) The trail is only a 2K loop but despite that, it honestly felt like gravity was pulling extra hard on my feet with every step I tried to "run." And so much for "powering up the hills" like our coach Ann suggested. Frig. I walked up most of them.

Our goal was to ease into the training and just do two loops. So I "ran" (whatever) the first loop right back to my truck, where my daughter waited (yes, she could have run, but she just got her hair cut and blow-dried and curled, so she decided to wait for me and read Glamour magazine instead). I told her, "If you see my running friends come back, just tell them they don't have to wait. I am going to attempt one more loop." (Because I am stubborn and rule-driven.)

She didn't notice them come back to the parking lot and look for me after they completed their two loops. So as I rounded the last bend in the hilly field, I see two of my friends walking up the trail. "Ha ha - did you send out the search party?" I called. "Yes! We're it!" they responded cheerily. So you get the idea of how slow I was. Slow enough for friends to send out a search party. L. O. L.

Spin class in action, complete with great music.
(Thrive Fitness, Alliston)

Not to sweat the small stuff or anything, but, WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME? My friend Janate, who can't run Monday nights due to a schedule conflict with her kids' activities, ran the hills today instead (and did four repeats because she is Superwoman, but W H A T E V E R. I secretly hate her. I hope she is reading this and laughing because it is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek.) She suggested I was probably too exhausted from the morning class that day, which consisted of a 45-minute spin class followed by an hour of core strength training. I think she's probably right. (Note to Self: It probably also didn't help that you ate a toasted ham

TRX strength class at Thrive.

and processed cheese flatbread washed down with a decaf coffee from Tim Horton's less than an hour before you began your run. You are SO not a role model, Ms Simcoe Fitness Seeker!)

But I love those classes. So I will continue to spin, and challenge my core, and lift weights, because that is good for "older" people (boosts metabolism, improves moods, makes it easier to lift a load of wet towels from the washing machine, etc.). I will try to get some runs in before these run events. If my finishing time ends up being less than stellar, by my own standards, then I will chalk it up to the results of my "cross-training-in-lieu-of-road-mileage experiment."

Sorry for the Delay...

Why do I always feel like I need to apologize for not writing sooner? Is it a Canadian thing? Sorry, online journal, I didn't write for several days. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Sorry you bumped into me. Sorry. I - AM - CANADIAN.

40 days of writing every day about fitness left me thinking that maybe I should have broadened my blog to include all of my other interests - art (other artists'), photography and creative writing. Perhaps "Fitness Seeker" could be broadened in meaning, to include "fitness of the mind" or "fitness of the creative spirit" and such. Flaky? Maybe. But it's my blog. Sorry.

To keep up with the fitness side of things. I finally signed up for a half marathon in Innisfil on June 1. So naturally instead of falling peacefully asleep last Saturday night, I started calculating how many weeks I had to get my legs prepared for this obsession of mine. (My legs are not naturally prepared like some of my running friends' appear to be. Then again, maybe they're naturally prepared because they RUN a lot. At at any rate, my legs don't feel like they are prepared unless I pound the crap out of them several times a week leading up to a race.) As I calculated, I suddenly realized, "Holy crap. I have four weeks to add distance again."

You see I have been doing very well avoiding running long distances since the Around the Bay race. I have run a few scant 6, 8, 10 and recently 12 km distances, with a few hills rolled in. How I have been avoiding isn't such a bad thing though - I have been doing a heck of a lot of spinning, core strength and resistance training. I feel great. My cardio is great. Still, though, the legs need the mileage.

So this past weekend, after calculating what I needed to do for a long run each weekend, I set out to do 12 km on a beautiful, sunny, warm Sunday mid-morning. Actually I think it was noon. And it's hot outside here in Simcoe County these days. (I am not complaining about the heat. I love that winter is finally at rest for awhile. But still, noon is probably the worst possible time to start a long run.) So off I go, about to do "Six times to the top of the road" as I call it. We live on a dirt road surrounded by forest that has a dead-end, so there is no traffic. I like it. It's my 2 km loop. I even (finally) plug in my new Ipod Shuffle that I got for Christmas. I have never made a habit out of running with music because every time I have tried in the past, the sweat would pour down my head and in and around the stupid ear plugs and make them slide out of my ears and then I would end up running and dealing with ear plugs and cords and adjustments and it just drove me crazy. But now I have these awesome earplugs that hook around my ears and stay in place. So anyway, here I am, in my own little world, shuffling to the music on my Shuffle, 2 km done, warming up, feeling good, and in my peripheral vision I see my young son.

"WHAT?" I say, slightly annoyed, as I can see he is saying something to me. I reluctantly turn down the music. "We can't find Stormy," he says, rather guiltily. Stormy is one of our 8-month-old kittens, who is just getting used to the outdoors. I told my son and husband that if they let him outside they NEED TO WATCH HIM. He is a lovable, but dumb and curious baby and he will wander with the butterflies. 

Stormy

So, long story short, I stopped my run to search for a cat for 15 minutes. Twice. Then I got cranky and let the other four members of my family search for the cat while I finished my run. Priorities. (And I half thought, maybe the vet is right: "They're pretty smart. They know where their food is. I doubt they'd run away," she said once, when I asked her about letting them outside in the the summer.) In the end, it turned out Stormy had ran back into the house unbeknownst to everyone, and had fallen asleep under my daughter's bed as we all worried about his whereabouts for nearly two hours. Just when we started to think he was out for the night, he wandered down the hall yawning and stretching. If he could speak, he would have said, "Yo, dudes, what's happenin'? Got food?" 

So I continue on my personal quest to stay strong. My new favourite exercise at Thrive is the chin-up contraption. Don't know it's official name, but basically it requires you to (very ungracefully, in my case) slide one foot into a stretchy bungee loop that is secured to a chin-up bar and then you pull yourself up like you're doing chin-ups. The foot in the bungee makes it a little easier but it's fun and challenging. I am also loving the weight training. 

Many run events are coming up and I will write about all of them. If I include some artsy stuff in with this blog I could probably write every day. Perhaps a new page is in order....