Small Talk with kfloydh

Injured

Mon, 5 Jul 2010 11:08:54 -0400

I had been running consistently for about a year gradually increasing my milage by 5 miles per month and got to 85 miles in May. But I had started to notice some pain in my right leg and some instability in my right knee.

I stopped running and went to the doctor, had a bone scan which did not show any stress fractures (which I dealt with through most of high school and college), and did no high impact activities for 2 weeks.

Today I did my first run in 19 days, only 2.5 miles...and it STILL hurt... :(

It pretty much hasn’t gotten any better with no running and minimal P90X workouts. And with no stress fracture I guess it’s some sort of soft tissue injury. My right knee definitely feels more unstable, but I thought that was maybe just from limping when it hurt more earlier.

But it still hurts really, just enough to make me limp through most of the day.

Anyway...I’ve decided to take another month off from running and try to do some things that could strengthen and increase the stability of my right knee.

So my next run is scheduled for Aug 2. Until then I’ll be doing the P90X thing and trying to get some Physical Therapy friends to help me with some exercises to strengthen my right knee.

Would be nice to get back to running sooner than later, but seeing as how I’m not a competitive athlete any more it’s not really worth pushing through any injuries. And I’ve been better able to control my weight and haven’t really gained any since stopping running. Hopefully, I can keep that up.

P90X X 1

Sat, 8 May 2010 14:45:26 -0400

I have been running consistently for almost a year now, but about 7 months ago I realized I needed something more, something to improve strength and flexibility, something to shrink my gut and maybe even give me some abs.

I decided I’d give the P90X workouts a try...

Similar to my plans of not burning myself out running too often, too far, and too fast I started P90X slowly. So slowly in fact I only just finished the first 90 day cycle in about 7 months.

I’ve only been doing workouts on days I don’t run. Occasionally I’d double up and do a workout and a run in the same day if for some reason I skipped either previously in the week.

And I don’t do the full workout every time. For instance, Yoga is 90mins long, but I skip the “Yoga Belly” stuff that is a little more of a workout than I want from Yoga.

Similarly I follow the instructor’s advice of “Do your best, and forget the rest.” Meaning I try to do better quality moves as opposed to doing all the reps they do. When weight is involved I use very light weights, 10lbs at most right now. And for pull-ups I pretty much have to use a chair to support my legs on every rep.

This has worked out well for me I think as a supplement to my running, with the running being more important to me. But I’ve never been much of one for lifting, so I figured this would be a good way to get some strength and definition.

Since adding the P90X workouts to my runs about 7 months ago I have lost 22lbs. I was 228 at the start of October 2009 and I was 206 this week.

And that’s just doing the workouts on days I don’t run.

I have just started my second cycle of P90X and now I’m doing the workouts on my off days as well as days I run anything under 3 miles. With plans for the next cycle to be the same with runs under 5 miles, and then eventually get to a P90X workout every day and a run every day.

That’s highly ambitious, but running 80 miles a month and doing 3-4 P90X workouts a week would have seemed very ambitious a year ago as well.

Doing the running and working out has given me a positive attitude. I’ve not varied my eating habits much at all and I’ve still lost all that weight. The weight is not my main goal though. I just want to be a better runner and be more fit in general.

With continued use of Nike+ to track my runs and P90X to keep me in shape I plan to continue doing just that for as long as I can keep it up.

An Argument for Unplugging the Toaster

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 10:02:47 -0400

My wife has a habit of unplugging the toaster after each use. I thought she did it for fear it would start a fire while we weren’t watching. I never quite understood the need for this...

Until today...

Let me preface this story with another story. You see, when I was a kid and was in the kitchen and needed to go pee I would occasionally walk over to the trashcan as if I was going to urinate into it. It only happened a few times, but one time I did get so far as stepping on the pedal to lift the lid and unbuttoning my pants. But never actually peed in the trash can.

A similar mistaken identity almost happened today.

After toasting some mini-bagels I began to butter them dipping my knife in the butter and spreading it on the bagels. But one time rather than taking my knife back towards the butter I took the knife towards the toaster.

With the toaster still plugged in, luckily I was able to stop myself as I have in previous mix-ups.

But from now on, maybe I’ll take to my wife’s habit of unplugging the toaster after each toast lest I be electrocuted in the future.

My New 5K PR

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 19:11:41 -0400

I ran my fastest 5K in about 10 years yesterday, 24:53

That’s over a minute faster than any 5K I’ve run since starting to use the Nike+ system a little over a year a go.

And it wasn’t even a race, it was just a workout.

While I’ve started some track workouts to try to increase my speed, distance is still my main goal at this point. So today when it took me about 30 mins to run 3.3 miles I wasn’t too upset, especially since it was raining and 40 degrees with about 20mph winds.

I’m still just plugging away and don’t have any immediate goals that will crush me if I don’t meet them.

But I’m very happy with that 5K yesterday, especially since my first mile was in 8:30 and overall I averaged a pace of 8:00, which means I must have been running about 7:45 pace over the last 2 miles or so.

That’s 15 seconds per mile faster than I was training on the track the day before.

Back On Track

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:28:20 -0400

I’ve been running rather consistently (about 3-5 times per week) since about last July.

The goal then was just that, to run more consistently. And my pace has gone from about 10 mins per mile down to about 8:45 per mile.

But with my plans to continue to increase my distance I’m thinking my pace may suffer and it will be harder and harder to get faster and faster.

So I decided to start working in some track workouts. Just one a month for now, but I felt so good after my first one today that I may start doing it every other week.

I did one of my favorite track workouts from Jr High and High School. It’s a 5 mile workout that my XC coach, Mr. Hendricks had me do to try to improve my 5K times.

Back then I was running it with the idea of running 5:20 pace for a 5K, but where I’m at now I thought maybe shooting for an 8:00 pace would be a good place to start.

So today I did the workout like this:

1 mile warm up just jogging
4x400m at 8:00 pace with 400m jog in between (2 miles)
8x100m at 8:00 pace with 100m jog in between (1 mile)
1 mile cool down

Trying this kind of track workout 6 months ago would have been rough just because back then 5 miles seemed like it was so long and to do it all on the track would have been terribly monotonous.

But now 5 miles seems like a breeze and in fact at the 8:00 pace I was actually still pretty fresh that I kind of pushed it over the last half mile of the cool down and probably ran that under 4 mins.

So the plan now is to do that once or twice a month and increase my pace by 4 seconds per mile each time. So next time I’ll be doing my 400s in 1:59 instead of 2:00. That seems easy enough since I did them all that fast this time.

But just like building my distance slowly has worked well so far, I’m hoping increasing my pace slowly will work just as well.

If I keep increasing my pace by 4 seconds per mile every other week...in one year I’ll be down to a 6:15 per mile pace.

If I ever see the underside of a 6 min mile again I’ll be pretty impressed with myself.