Updates (now that I have company!).

Did my old favorite five-miler in my mom's neighborhood yesterday on my way home from work.  I felt every single footfall...just so much effort to get through it and took 65 minutes when it used to take 45-50.  The legs felt fine, the weather was lovely, but my heart (quite possibly literally) wasn't in it.  I think I bonked due to nutrition issues.  I think WHAT I eat, and how much, seems right.  I'm working on the WHEN.

I am registered for the Towpath Half on 10.10.10, and am "training" to that end (my plan is to do it under 2:30, and upon completion, will reward myself with a Brooks Nightlife Jacket!). I've logged a few longer runs (7-9 miles) with the Turtles, and am sticking to an adapted training schedule from Runner's World and including lifting (ideally 3x weekly) and swimming (2-3x weekly).  A swimmer dude at my gym let me try his SwiMP3 player and I just ordered one for myself!  I love being in the pool as a means of increasing fitness without adding miles.  But I think I need to get serious about form and effort to reap those benefits.

Reading Brendan Brazier's Thrive: The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life, and revisiting Matt Fitzgerald's Brain Training for Runners.  Also trying to get through Terry Laughlin's Total Immersion video and books (about the swimming form and all that).

My weight finally dipped a few pounds, so I'm down about 4-5 lb. total.  Most of my clothes fit better by now (scale be damned!), and I'm still hoping to legitimately fit into my skinniest jeans by Christmas.  Then maybe the Cleveland full in 2011?  Any joiners?

back in the saddle

I'm aiming to start running 4-5 times per week in addition to track workouts and long runs to meet the following goals.

• 9/19 Lone Gull 10K - 53:00
• 10/3 Smuttynose Half Marathon - 2:00:00
• 10/10 BAA Half Marathon - 2:00:00

I've been bummed out for a few months because of how out of shape I've gotten. I put running on the back burner while doing lots of extra grad school and professional development work, so I'm about 10-15 pounds heavier and 10 minutes slower than I'd like to be (half marathon wise). I made a goal earlier this summer to drop the 10 pounds and 10 minutes by 10/10/10, but apart from two long runs and one track workout, I haven't done very much to pursue this goal. August may be half over, but there's still a lot of time before school starts to get back into good habits and out of the running doldrums.

new purchase: Garmin Forerunner 110

I splurged on a Garmin Forerunner 110 with heart rate monitor last week, and am very happy with it so far. It's very easy to use. All I had to do was hit the page/menu button to locate satellites, then use the start/stop button to start the run or pause at street corners. I set the autolap at 1 mile intervals so that the watch would beep and display the time it took to run each mile. It also showed the average pace for my current mile. I didn't look at my heart rate during the run, but I think it would have been easy to do so by using the page/menu button.

After the run, I connected the watch to my computer with the USB cable and uploaded the data to connect.garmin.com. I found that this process worked better with Safari than Firefox. I'm happy to not have to map my run from memory on MapMyRun and to not have to find all my mile splits by cycling through the stored ones on my watch.

My very first run with a heart rate monitor.

Running: The best cure for a hangover?

I woke up recently with a familiar pounding in the head and dry mouth, relics of a night of some drinking. Now, as veteran of drinking, I like to think that I consume at a moderate pace, but occasionally I will slip and pay for it the next morning.

A cure that I've had for a very long time has been a simple one: go for a run. Yes, Gatorade, bananas, greasy food and the hair of the dog that bit me have been tried in my experienced life. (But, alas, more alcohol and greasy foods have been proven to simply not work. And a patent, I kid you not, a patent has been applied for using asparagus.) But, they've worked to varying degrees, while running has simply always done the job consistently for me.

What is a hangover? Veisalgia (which has an interesting etymology of its own) is the formal medical term to describe the phenomenon that many drinkers experience the next morning, though there is a disagreement of which symptoms should be included in the definition. (Weise, J., Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol 132, Issue 11, p. 897, June 2000). I think most people would agree though that nausea, sensitivity to sound and light, dehydration and just general not-feeling-so-good are good descriptors for the phenomenon.

What do I do? After rousing myself out of bed, I will get into my running gear, adding the sunglasses or cap if the brightness factor forces me to, and simply go. I try to take a little bit of water or gatorade before the run, but too much and I have found that my stomach will not like it and the contents will be on the ground before me. Depending on the severity of it all, I start at a jog of about a minute or two above my marathon pace. I concentrate on my breathing and get a tempo going before I increase my pace to somewhere I finally feel comfortable.

Some days I actually impress myself. I actually will sometimes get a good 5-K time given the circumstances and come at above the median for myself. (I usually end up running 2 to 3 miles for this "recovery run.") And admittedly some other days I quit after the first mile, having achieved my goal of feeling at least human again.

Why does this work? In my google-perusals, I have found scant articles about exercise and hangovers. This one British article talks about it briefly, though it seemed to not work so well for the writer. In my non-scientific analysis, I suspect it has to do with an increased heart-rate, which results in more blood flow, and therefore more oxygen flow to the head. Also, metabolism is increased, which allows the processing in the liver of all those toxins that you ashamedly polluted your body with the night before. And finally, endorphins are released when we exercise and run (the runner's high).

While I concur that the best way to prevent a hangover is to abstain, I think that approach is a bit too much like the moral-right's approach to teen pregnancies; we all who do drink will drink again, and possibly to excess. Let's just remember the run as a good cure.