More About Life, None About Running

For a few decades, running dominated my life. That's why I started this blog, didn't I? In the recent past, since running has become a much lesser part of my so called life, other realities happened (like my trip to Zamboanga and being assaulted by a patient).

                So why haven't I written anything about running? After all this blog is about life and running, right? Well that's because I haven't done any running lately. I did try doing so last Monday with disastrous results. Yep, you're right, another injury. My legs seem to have readjusted themselves in a way that they are no longer built to propel me forward faster than walking. About last Monday - having not run consistently for awhile (about 3 times in 6 weeks), I started very conservatively, running for 1 minute and walking for 1 minute. After about 10 minutes of that, I ran for 2 minutes and walked 1 minute. When I reached 30 minutes, I ran for 3 minutes and walked 1 minute. It was on the subsequent attempt at 3 minutes when I felt a twinge of pain in left upper thigh near the hip area. It felt like the same muscle strain I had last spring at the 3 mile mark of a 12 mile run. If I were to guess, it seems like it’s the upper part of the vastus lateralis. The difference between now and then? I stopped running immediately and walked the rest of the way back home. Last spring, I kept on going until the pain got worst. I was hoping that this time, by nipping it in the bud, so to speak, I could keep the injury at a minimum and hoping the recovery would be quicker, instead of several weeks it usually takes. Good idea, right? Over the next few days, I could feel a discomfort on the thigh so my workouts were limited to the stationary bikes (recumbent and spinning).

 Then last Saturday morning, I again joined the Long Beach Area walking club at Signal Hill (wow, three Saturdays in a row for me!). The first hint of trouble came when I ran across the street for a couple of seconds to avoid a car. The hip discomfort was still present so I knew I wouldn’t be doing any running that day. The pace of the walk was pretty brisk and I was making good time covering the distance. It was with about a quarter mile left when we were negotiating a slight downhill on a dirt and gravel trail when disaster struck again. The loose gravel made me slip and while trying to keep my balance, I felt a spasm on the already injured hip muscle. I had strained it further and the pain was so excruciating that I could barely walk back to my car. I knew then that it would take weeks to rehab the injury.

 So, that’s what I’ve been trying to do in the past week – trying to strengthen the thigh muscle when the pain diminished. My indoor cycling workouts had to be limited to the easiest gear so as not to further strain the injured area. I couldn’t even walk on the treadmill, and I had to take the utmost care going up and down stairs because of the pain. Only in the last couple of days have I started doing slow body weight squats and a few wall sits. I guess I’ll be letting you know when everything starts to feel normal again. In the meantime, it looks like more indoor cycling for me.

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Three Weeks Missing

Yipee! After a 32 minute hill walk on the treadmill at 10% incline, I ran for 18 minutes on 1% incline thus completing a 50 minute workout last Thursday morning. It has been about three weeks since I injured my left thigh while out for what was supposed to be 12 mile run (http://aboutlifeandrunning.blogspot.com/2012/07/arec-training-7-7-12-oops-something.html). My very conservative rehab plan was not to start running again until the pain was gone, but sometimes plans go awry. A week after the initial injury, I tweaked it while exercising on the recumbent bike when I tried pedaling on a heavy gear. A week later the thigh felt as if was healing pretty well until I did a weight training workout called the clean and press. Wait, is that weight training or dry cleaning? Anyway, on the fourth set of the clean and press lift which of course involves the legs too, I felt a violent spasm on the healing muscle and fell backwards because of the pain. Fortunately my bed was right behind me and it made for a soft landing. With that spasm, it brought me back to square one. I had my thigh wrapped at work all night and developed contact dermatitis from it. With luck, we didn't have to chase any psych patients around that night.

I started hill walking on the treadmill just a few days ago as part of my rehab.  Previously I could only do the recumbent and spinning bikes on light gears and couldn't even use the stairstepper because of the pain. Today the pain is almost gone but still lurking. I can now do slow non-jerky squats on body weight. I might try running on pavement in the next few days and see how it feels and hope I don’t aggravate the muscle again. For now, I’m still missing from AREC training. Darn, I couldn’t even chat with my newly met running buddies L.

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What Has Gotten Me Running Again

So what has been going on in the past two years as far as running is concerned? Since I reached 10 miles last Saturday, what had I done differently? This is a brief accounting of what has happened. It was just two years ago when I gave up running and I actually bought a road bike to try to make cycling my main aerobic workout. Now and then I would make a foray into running but inconsistently. I even joined a walking club but they walked too slowly and I couldn’t find someone with the same pace as mine. After a summer of cycling in 2010, I didn’t take the bike out again because I found spinning indoors or using the recumbent bike, and even just walking uphill on the treadmill made for a more efficient aerobic workout and didn’t take a lot of time like riding on the roads did. During the times I tried running again, I always felt that my fitness level for the activity was close to what it was before and I tended to push the pace to reach that level. The result of course is making the condition of my ankle tendons worse. It was a vicious cycle.

So what changed this year? Let me think… pace, that’s it! Letting go of the pressure of trying to run as hard as I can. Accepting that being slow is ok, that running slowly is better than none. That and decreasing the number of times I run per week to two so the ankle tendons can recovery over 3 or 4 days. An evolution in stride change also helps. After making a conscious effort to alter it, I can now sometimes subconsciously run with a new but slower stride. Whenever I find myself going back to my natural stride, I pull back because that is the one that causes my ankle tendons to overstretch. It’s the push off of the foot that does it. My new stride is shorter and pulls from the front. Those explanations may be simplistic but it took a long time realizing them and those are what work at the present time.

I can’t assume that everything is now hunky dory because I was able to complete 10 miles. There are no hard and fast answers. With stage II and III PTTD (posterior tibialis tendon dysfunction), disaster can strike at any time with a tendon rupture just by taking an unfortunate misstep. I’m only taking it one run at a time – a midweek short run and the AREC training run on the weekend. Not an ideal training schedule and not something you will find in any training program. Well, that’s okay because I’m not training for anything anyway. It’s just exercise.

Other notes on the past 6 or 7 weeks of being able to run: A happy consequence of this twice a week activity? I noticed in the shower that I was  getting my running tan lines again. Since I’ve had these injuries, I no longer have balance if I try to stand on one leg. Whenever I put pants on, I have to hold on to something or lean on a wall. My stride, if you can call it that, feels more like a quarter lunge.

So everything was going well from mid-May to the first week of July when this happened: Oops, Something Happened On The Way to 12 Miles

I’m off the roads again trying to make my left thigh muscle recover. So far I can only do light gears on the stationary bikes without pain. Well, it was a good 7 weeks while it lasted.

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AREC Training 7-7-12: Oops, Something Happened On The Way To 12 Miles

Still OK past 1 mile

Well, I was writing about how I got back on the road and started running again the last few weeks, eventually culminating with a 10 miler last weekend, then as suddenly as I seemed to be getting better, disaster struck on the way to 12 miles this week, perhaps jinxed by what I was writing about. So what happened? Did I tweak one or both of my perpetually injured ankles? Did that developing knee pain from last week get worse? No and no. I consider this more of a freak injury and the same type on the left leg that stopped my every day running streak of 21 years several years ago. It seems to be a deep tissue muscular strain on the outer left thigh just below the hip that happened for no apparent reason. I wasn’t pushing the pace, or pounding the ground too hard, or bounding up 6^th Street hill at about 3 ½ miles when I felt it. I was actually having a decent run up to that point. One moment I’m telling pregnant Ellen “walking pace, right?”, and urging the walking Kenny (or Tenny) to continue running up the hill, then the next moment pain struck. A normal or sane person would have stopped and walked at that point but since I’m neither, I continued running hoping to work the kink out. Based on previous experience though, I knew it wasn’t going to happen, but still I pressed on until the pain became too sharp and unbearable at about 6 ½ miles. So I sputtered and walked back to the finish using a short cut on the course.

Just smiling for the camera at about 5 1/2 miles but I was already in excruciating pain

Since AREC training started this year, I’ve been running with other people, but last Saturday I did not.  In retrospect, I should have stayed back and ran with someone rather than going on my own. There was just too much separation between me and the next runner ahead that I should have pulled back and made the pace a lot more conservative.

So how bad is it? The thigh hurts even just pressing on the clutch while driving and it’s going to hurt like the dickens when I do my cycling workouts. Certainly it will keep me off the roads for at least 2 to 6 weeks. It almost never surprises me any more when I get injured because that’s been my history in at least the last 5 years. It surprised me more that I ran 10 miles last week.

The Aftermath: Thigh bound in elastic bandage and ankles braced.

 Despite the protracted run and the weeks of rehab ahead, I’m still I’m grateful to have had 6 or 7 good weeks of running and met new people in the process. Old and new running buddies, please forgive me if I’ve gone missing and you don’t see me on the roads any time soon, but like a bad rash, I’ll be back.

p.s. I’ll post the blog about my running comeback (the one that caused the jinx) after this one.

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The Boulder, The Thigh Injury, The Oil Change Walk, and the Pregnant Dream

So there was this rock that rolled into town two weeks ago and I was planning on seeing it on my way home from work. I even made a note of it on a post it pad. Well I totally forgot about it until was at a grocery checkstand and I overheard a cashier mention it to a coworker. I drove less than a mile from the store and found the rock where it was supposed to stay all day. They only moved it at nighttime to minimize traffic problems. The rock was parked in the center median and occupied the inner lanes of both sides of the streets leaving the outer lanes for the vehicles to travel through. I took a picture of course but it’s not anything you haven’t already seen in the newspapers or the internet. Truthfully, I was slightly underwhelmed because I thought it would be bigger than the monstrosity that it already was. Maybe because it was shrink-wrapped in white plastic. Nevertheless, it was nice to experience the unusual event so close to home.

You would think that I had enough problems with my ankles when I do one of my infrequent attempts at running. A couple of weeks ago, the plan was to run a little and walk a lot for about an hour just like I’ve been doing in Signal Hill. It went pretty well at the start because I was able to do my full stride on the running portions no matter how short in duration they were. About half an hour into it, my plan was spoiled when I began having some pain in my left thigh. Oh my, another tribulation. It was not a new type of injury though because it was something I’ve had three times before. The last I can remember was about 4 years ago. The difference was that in the past, I would have kept on running regardless of the pain. This time, I stopped and walked the rest of the way and just extended the workout to an hour and a half. I haven’t tried running since.

On a related note, there was finally a Q&A on the Runner’s World website addressing PTTD (my permanent ailment). Here is the link:  http://sportsdoc.runnersworld.com/2012/03/orthotics-recommendation-for-ruptured-tendons.html. There might be a slight hope for some relief but first I have to find a talented orthotist as mentioned in the article.

A week after the thigh injury, I had my car serviced (smog check and oil change). While that was being done, I was able to do a walking workout of about 8 miles. Rain was in the forecast for several days and the clouds were already thick that morning but fortunately I was spared from it. The walk lasted two hours and I was actually back at the shop in an hour and a half. When I saw my car was still in the oil change bay, I tacked on another 30 minutes. The only running I did that day was to cross one street. When I had my car serviced in past years, I would either run around the neighborhood or if I took it to the shop on a workday, I would take their courtesy shuttle home, go to sleep, wake up in the afternoon and run to the shop to pick up my car. What a time saver, and oh how I miss those days.

The L.A. Marathon was held last Sunday morning and I watched it on TV while riding my stationary bike. I didn’t realize it was the 27^th iteration of the event already. The first time I ran it, it was L.A. Marathon V in 1990 which finished at the L.A. Coliseum. I mentioned the marathon because I had a weird dream Sunday night about a running acquaintance who ran in it. I dreamt that she was pregnant, had a C-section, ran the L.A. Marathon a few days later, then the evening after the race, she was singing and dancing in a Filipino reunion party. I still haven’t told her about that dream. Should I tell her before, or after she runs the Boston Marathon in a few weeks?

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