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Posts Tagged ‘hill repeats’

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, in Pictures

Posted in ElliptiGO, Injury, Running, tagged , , , , , , on December 19, 2015| 2 Comments »

Let’s start with the ugly. I sustained a non-running running injury — a foolish slip in the bathtub that sprained my left big toe and affected my ability to run. If you don’t want to see my ugly foot, start scrolling now.

Foot with sprained toe

As a rule, I don’t run through pain that affects my gait in any way, because I know that just causes more problems in other areas of the body. This sprain hurt when I ran but didn’t change my gait and didn’t affect my ability to take on this bad boy:

Hill for hill repeat

Why do hills always look so tiny in pictures and so massive when you’re running up them? I did this hill workout on Wednesday:

1 mile warm up
6 hill repeats (1/3 of a mile up, 1/3 mile down (my favorite))
0.4 mile cool down (usually I’d run a full mile but I had to get home to my kiddos)

I have been struggling to get in my running over the last couple of weeks. It’s hard to get motivated to go out the door when it’s 4 p.m., 40-something degrees out, and starting to get dark. Yesterday I was supposed to do a 7-mile tempo run and I came up with every excuse not to do it until I finally just forced myself out the door. I only ran 5.6 miles before I had to take my youngest daughter to gymnastics, but 5.6 miles is greater than 0 miles (I was a math minor in college, can you tell?) and I was super proud of myself for getting those miles in. I ran the first half (the uphill portion) at an 8:55 pace and the second half (the downhill return portion) at a 7:49 pace. Normally I’d choose a flat stretch for a tempo run but when you live in “the Heights” you take what you get when you run out your door.

And finally, two pieces of good news. About five minutes after I posted this post about how my husband lost his job, I got a call offering me a job as a substitute instructional assistant, helping out the main teachers in special education classrooms in the district. The hours are perfect and allow me to drop off and pick up my girls from school. If I cannot work one day, I can specify that I am not available that day. Supposedly there is enough work to work every day if I want, but we’ll see when the job starts after the holidays.

And Santa heard my wish for an ElliptiGO! My parents gave me one for an early Christmas present! Mike and I drove back out to Hermosa Cyclery on Thursday and picked up my Green Machine, an ElliptiGO 8C!

Normally I would wear a helmet but we just took the ElliptiGO for a quick spin on the Strand at Hermosa Beach to make sure it was assembled correctly.

Normally I would wear a helmet but we just took the ElliptiGO for a quick spin on the Strand at Hermosa Beach to make sure it was assembled correctly.

I love it! It’s super quiet and smooth and frankly right now I would rather ride than go for a run. (Does that make me less of a runner? Or just a girl who loves her new Christmas toy?)

Have you ever sustained a non-running running injury? Do you like hill repeats? What gift is on your wish list?

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Rising Up from the Ashes

Posted in Marathon, Running, tagged , , , , , , on October 10, 2014| 7 Comments »

Please excuse me when I get all dramatic up in here. I’m just being honest about how I felt when I didn’t make the cutoff for Boston. I didn’t exactly handle it with the grace I would like to have had. I felt very bitter. I kinda wanted to shout, “Fine then! I didn’t want to run your dumb old super-expensive race anyway! I already lived in Boston for two years. I don’t need to see it again! You just saved me the cost of airline tickets and a hotel room and now I don’t have to pull my kids out of school to fly across the country!” I thought of boycotting The Boston Marathon, of not even trying to qualify again.

Of course, then I calmed down and admitted that if I was so upset by not getting to go to Boston, it simply meant that I cared a lot about getting to go. And I promptly signed up for full marathon #5, the Phoenix Marathon (hence my oh-so-clever post title about the phoenix rising up from the ashes).

Phoenix Marathon logo

So that’s where I’ll be on February 28, 2015. Believe it or not, the 20-week competitive marathon training plan I chose from Smart Marathon Training starts next Sunday with a 10-mile long run. Today I knocked out an 8-mile tempo run at 8:00 per mile and that felt great, so I feel ready to tackle the plan.

I had the tiniest bit of buyer’s remorse (racer’s remorse?) after hitting the “register” key for Phoenix because it has a downhill profile with nearly 1,000 feet in elevation loss, similar to the Mountains 2 Beach Marathon where I bonked so hard. Downhill running can pound your quads and also trick you (and by you I mean me) into going out too fast and then bonking later in the race. So, I’m trying to learn from my past mistakes and I’m incorporating downhill training into my weekly runs. Most people would call it “hill repeats” and consider the uphill part the part that’s building strength and thus speed, but I’m more interested in the downhill part where I work on keeping my foot turnover light and quick! Last Wednesday I ran a warm-up mile to a perfect, steep 0.4-mile hill. I ran up (and down) that four times and then ran a cooldown mile back to my car. (I would have run more repeats but that was the amount of time I had in the 45 minutes my daughter is in gymnastics class).

To help allay my downhill race worries I’ve also signed up for a downhill half marathon that fits perfectly in my training plan. In place of a 16-mile long run on a Sunday, I’ll race 13.1 miles on a Saturday down Highway 39, a beautiful route through the forests and canyons of Angeles National Forest to the foothills of Azusa. It’s the inaugural REVEL Canyon City Marathon & Half Marathon on November 15, 2014. (Tip: if you want to sign up for the race, make sure you go to RaceShed.com for a $5 off discount code, and also snag an extra $5 off for allowing REVEL to share your entry on Facebook). The half marathon has a net loss of 933 feet, close to the amount of the loss over the full marathon course in Phoenix.

So, here I go again! Does anyone have any thoughts or tips on downhill running?

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