Tag Archives: marathon training

Running Field Trip: The Hills of Apopka

29 Jan

Yesterday morning, us Marathonfest runners took our first field trip of the training season: the hills of Apopka.

Just mention the words “hill training” to me and I tend to cringe. I’m the kinda girl that considers a speed bump a “small hill” and typically go out of my way to avoid any road inclines.

And yes, this is how I feel even though I’m told they will make me stronger. They will only make me stronger if they don’t kill me first.

So why does running hills suck so badly? I think this article from Runner’s World answers it well: “You have to recruit more muscle fibers to get yourself up the hill, which causes those muscles to fatigue faster,” says Carwyn Sharp, Ph.D., assistant professor of exercise science at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. On the bright side, keep doing hills and eventually your body adapts and gets stronger.

Since the Flying Pig Marathon has hills, I figured it was time to change my attitude. It’s either conquer them in training or face them unprepared on race day. So for the time being, when I hear the words “hill training” I will feign a “yeah!”

We started our run yesterday morning at 6 AM in Apopka. The street lights aren’t as plentiful out there and the roads were dark. Combined with the fog, it looked like a scene from a scary movie.

At least you could see our shoe reflectors:

Since I’m trying to work on my speed, I set out to keep up with the faster runners in our group. For the first 6.5 mile loop, I felt great! The hills were beasts, but I trudged up them, one foot after the other. However, towards the end of that loop I started to feel light-headed. I made sure to refuel with some Chocolate #9 agave gel.

For the second loop (only 4.5 miles) my energy level evened out. But around mile 8, my IT band started to lock up. Suddenly it felt like I was on mile 20 of the marathon and I had trouble bending my left knee. Rather than push myself through unnecessary pain (it’s just a training run) I decided to call it a day and walk the rest of the run out. The entire way back I lectured myself in my head for not doing more strength training in my legs. But at least I had a good 7.5 miles of hill running under my belt.

Lucky for me, I was sore by 5 PM. I guess I should’ve taken an ice bath, but with such low mileage it just hadn’t occurred to me. But at least the hills didn’t kill me. Well, at least this time.

Here are some more pictures from the run:

This hill was a beast.

My group running uphill. We had to be on the special lookout for cars, since they'll pop up over the hill.

With all the fog it was like we were running in a scary movie.

Farmhouse engulfed by fog

Do you run hills? If so, do you like it, or do it begrudgingly for the benefits?

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One Final Long Run

2 Jan

Saturday morning I started my New Year’s Eve with one final long run for 2011. Our schedule suggested 8 to 10 miles.

Before long runs I typically get the baked chicken platter with a salad and black beans and rice from Black Bean Deli in Winter Park. I’ve found this to be the perfect pre-run meal.

However, Friday night I might have fun its competition at Antonio’s in Winter Park.

D and I each started with the soup of the day, which was a potato soup with sausage and spinach. The soup was hearty and absolutely delicious. Honestly, I would’ve stopped there if I wasn’t running the next day! For my entree I had the Pollo all’Aglio e Rosmarino.  The chicken was perfectly cooked. Even the white meat was moist, which is really hard to come across. The best way I could describe the meal was that it was clean. All of the flavors were subtle and simple, and the entree as a whole was delicious.

Here’s a pic of my meal:

I only ate half my meal. We skipped dessert because we were stuffed, but by the time I got home I wanted a little something sweet. Seeing as it was International Bacon Day, I thought it would be fitting if I finally tried this:

I knew that bacon made everything taste better… but even chocolate?? It was surprisingly delicious!

Saturday morning I was up early. Earlier during the week I slept through not one, but TWO runs and couldn’t sleep because I was so nervous I would sleep through my alarm yet again.

We did something different for our last long run: laps around Lake Baldwin. Each lap is approximately 2.4 miles. One of my running ladies and I were running the longest: we ran approximately 9.5 miles, then stopped to get coffee on our final lap.

When we got back to where our cars were, the rest of our group was waiting for us so we could start the Most Awful Christmas/Hanukkah Gift I Got and Want to Get Rid of White Elephant Gift Exchange.

Those gifts look pretty, right?

Here’s what was amongst them:

  • A 1lb. gummy bear
  • A travel-size can of shaving cream and a razor blade
  • A tacky Christmas mug and a ‘Welcome’ frog statue
  • A bag of coconut candy and a March birthday plaque
  • Christmas shot glasses and a flask

I didn’t think the last one was so bad. Neither was the shaving cream and razor blade. That’s what I took home and will definitely use it.

My last run before the marathon went well and helped me end a bad running week (missing two runs in a row) on a positive note.

I can’t believe that I’ll be running my first marathon on less than a week!

Any words of advice?

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Road Kill Saturday

19 Dec

On my last long run before my taper for the Walt Disney World Marathon, we saw no less than four dead carcasses on our run. The road kill was horrid, and the run was almost as bad. Let’s start at the beginning.

Friday night I had trouble falling asleep. Because I didn’t leave my job until almost 9 PM and still had to go buy dog food before grabbing dinner, I didn’t actually walk through my front door until 9:30 or so. Perhaps it was the eating dinner so late that made it difficult for me to fall asleep. Or the nerves. Or both. I even typed up my fears in this post as I laid in bed.

My post must’ve been a premonition of what was to come.

The first thing to go wrong: I slept through my alarm for an hour. It was one of those times where the alarm becomes part of your dream, and for the life of you, you can’t figure out why the phone won’t stop ringing in your dream. And then you wake up and realize it was your alarm the whole time. This is exactly what happened. I woke up in a startle and looked at my clock. The time read 4:21 AM. My alarm had been going off for an hour.

I tumbled out of bed and for the next 45 minutes was in a hazed panic. I called my group and arranged to meet them along the route at 5 AM. Unfortunately there was a bit of phone tag and a voicemail message was left on my phone instructing me to meet my group in a location I was unfamiliar with. Meanwhile I was tearing my house apart looking for my ankle brace, which had apparently gone into hiding.

After also having difficulty finding my fuel, I finally gave up on the ankle brace and raced out the door without stopping to pull up directions. I got lost and missed the 5 AM meet-up time, so I headed to the next  water stop.

I thought I would only have to wait 20 minutes for my group to arrive at this next location. It was cold, but I jumped out of my car to do some dynamic stretches. Soon, twenty minutes turned into forty minutes. I started to run around in a circle in order to stay warm and start working up my mileage. As the clock hit 6 AM, I realized I was losing those precious before sunrise hours and had to get going. Just as I headed out to start 20+ miles on my own, my group showed up. Thank God. That would’ve been a long, long run without my iPod.

My group was 6 miles into their run. My laps around the waiting area had knocked my mileage up to 1 mile, so I was only 5 miles behind them. I’m usually pretty chatty when I run, but at this point I was so frustrated with my morning that I was silent. Silent for 2 whole miles. This is unheard of for me. But all I could think of is after my group finishes their 22 miles, I was still going to have 5 more miles to run… by myself… without my iPod. I was horrified.

A couple miles into my run, we got to play my favorite game “Find an open bathroom” for one of my group members. Lucky for her I just happened to know where a nearby 7-11 was and led the way. We then headed to our next stop to meet up with the rest of the group that was joining us for the back half of the run. I think I was at 7 miles when we met up.

It was soon brought to my attention that I had taken over the role of group bitch. This distressed the former holder of said title and she vowed to regain the title. Meanwhile I just laughed. It took my group six months to figure this out? Impressive.

Every couple of miles we stumbled past some road kill. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was what I would look like towards the end of my run.

There were three highlights to the run:

  • The Street Drug Game – Go through the alphabet naming as many street drugs as possible for each letter. Things got a little hairy when I insisted (very loudly) that ‘beer’ was indeed a street drug.
  • The Sex Swing – We ran past this swing early during the training season and I’ve been wanting to capture it on camera since then. This totally looks like it belongs in someone’s bedroom, not their front yard:

  • I Sweat Pretty – This is exactly what the back of my group leader’s shirt said to me with her heart-shaped sweat mark on her lower back.

I broke off from my group around 16 miles into my run. They ran back to their original start point while I ran back towards my start point. By this point the sun had come up and was beating down on me. “Crap,” I thought, “I forgot to put on sunblock.”

My original plan had been to run to my car, get some water at the water stop, and then extend the run for whatever mileage was needed for me to hit 22 miles and end up back at my car. But when I got to the water stop, they were taking the water down. I filled up one last time and changed my route to run home. That would get me to 20 miles, I could grab some water from my house and then add on another 2 miles and have water available at the end of my run. I would just ask Donnie and his dad, who was visiting, to go get my car for me.

At the end of a long run, there’s not much rational thinking going on, so I was impressed that I had even been able to come up with that plan. However, halfway to my house I realized I had forgotten to grab my house key. At this point I wasn’t turning around, so I kept running. I decided to run on a more popular road in case Donnie and his pops happened to drive by. Thank God I did, because they did drive by on their way to breakfast and pulled over when they saw me. We did a quick key exchanged and I kept chugging along.

Around this point (18 miles), my IT band started to hurt. At 19 miles it was throbbing and by 20 miles I was having trouble bending my leg. I knew that if I stopped at my house for water I would end the run, so I tried to keep going. But I didn’t make it far. Whilst grunting I realized it was time to just call it and walked home.

It took 5:02:22 for me to cover 20.85 miles with some breaks along the way. I walked unto my front porch and sunk down into one of our porch chairs. Then I mustered the energy to make it inside my house, sprawled out on the hard wood floor, just like the unusually high amount of road kill we had run by all morning, and fell asleep for 10 minutes.

Then Team Hemarie (Donnie and his Pops) arrived with a big breakfast and three bags of ice for me. Their words of encouragement and the french toast made me feel better. And the ice bath made me curse. And scream. And helped reduce my swelling.

The first 16 miles of my run weren’t bad at all. I actually felt pretty good! And miles 16 to 18 were just lonely and hot. But when the IT pain hit me, I knew I only had a matter of time before I would lose the mobility of my leg.

I’m going to have to pay extra attention on leg before the marathon to try to delay the inevitable IT pain for as long as possible.

And now I’m officially tapering for my marathon. Let’s hope my alarm goes off for that one!

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Post-Turkey Run

26 Nov

Is the first run after Thanksgiving Day always painful? Because this morning was brutal.

This morning we were scheduled to run 10 to 14 miles. I opted for the 10 and mid-run downgraded to 8 miles.

Actually, we were scheduled to run 20 miles today, but we swapped out our weeks and ran the 20-miler last week. I’d like to thank my group leaders for this suggestion, because running that 20 miles this morning wouldn’t have gone well.

I wonder if it’s the turkey that slowed me down… or the pumpkin pie… or the Black Friday shopping… or all of it combined.Whatever it was, it seemed my entire group was suffering from the same ailments.

Speaking of pie, Tuesday morning we ran four miles then had our usual coffee at Starbucks. One of my group members had been baking pies the night before and surprised us with this early Thanksgiving treat:

Post-run pumpkin pie

One of the reasons I run... DESSERT! Nom nom.

How about you? Have you found it hard to get moving this post-Thanksgiving weekend?

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My First 20-Miler

20 Nov

First 20-Miler

Yesterday I did something that I never thought possible: I ran 20 miles.

I just looked up the distance from my house in downtown Orlando to my mom’s house in Lake Mary and it’s 18 miles. The fact that I could’ve run home to visit my mom is absolutely insane to me. And yet I more than covered that distance yesterday.

My morning started up early Saturday with a 3:25 AM wake-up time. As I rolled out of bed, I couldn’t help but think that there were people probably just finishing their Friday nights. I rolled my legs with my BFF foam roller and got dressed while Donnie went out to the living room. Since we had fallen asleep at 9 PM the night before, he was wide awake.

When I walked out to the kitchen, I stared in the pantry and asked him “What do you think I should have for breakfast?” “Life,” he said. (If anyone watches The Soup like we religiously do, they you’ll get the reference to a bad scene from a soap opera where the dumb hunk says “It’s not what’s for breakfast any more. It’s what’s for life.”) Since life was too much for me to handle at that hour, I settled for some wheat bread with my new favorite peanut butter: Peanut Butter & Co Dark Chocolate Dreams.

My new favorite peanut butter. Don't mind the smudge... I was just snacking on some. 😉

I left Donnie on the couch watching the movie Heat and drove to the spot where I was meeting the rest of my group. My friend, Christina, is training for the Walt Disney Marathon too and this was going to be her first time running 20 miles too. We started our run both excited and nervous. I reminded myself to take it one mile at a time.

Surprisingly, our first 10 miles went by pretty fast. I didn’t even check my distance until we were about six miles in and that’s because someone asked me to. I remember at one point asking my group to not ask me how far we’d run because I didn’t want to know. Don’t worry, this ignorance-is-bliss thing changed around mile 16. 😉

Our first 10-mile loop took us back to our meeting spot, so I took the opportunity to use the bathroom real quick and run over to my car and reapply glide under my sports bra. After a short break, we were on the road again. This time there were only three of us: Christina, Emily and me.

I need to mention that since the majority of our group has already run their fall marathons, our support for this long run was scarce. Our awesome group leaders, Sue and Emily, wanted to make sure that us noobs had support, so they developed a plan. Sue was experiencing some ankle problems and is running the Space Coast Marathon next weekend, so she decided to drive her car along the route and make sure we were okay. Emily, who’s also running the Space Coast Marathon, was on a taper, so she ran every other 2 to 3 miles with us, and rode with Sue the rest of the time.

The best parts about this plan:

  • This resulted in making Sue that creepy lady sitting in parking lots by herself. She got quite a few dirty looks from other runners, parents, etc. Awesome.
  • Emily’s little breaks gave her extra energy for the portions she did run with us. We fed off that energy.
  • It made us laugh every time they would ride along our side and yell encouragement as they sipped on their Starbucks Gingerbread lattes.
  • When it was dark, the car lights lit the rode ahead of us.
  • I was reassured knowing that if something happened to either of us, help was nearby.

What they both did for us was pretty awesome. They both went above and beyond and I can’t thank them enough.

Somewhere in the midst of our second 10-mile leg, Sue leaned out her window and told us that at the next stop we would be getting Atomic Energy Bites. This seemed to put a little pep in Christina’s step since she’d had some before. I, on the other hand, had only heard of this energy chew so I lacked her enthusiasm. I told Sue that it seemed like she was dangling a carrot in front of us. She said she was.

They don’t seem to have a website, so I still question the legality of Atomic Energy Bites and whether they are in fact FDA approved. But let me tell you, these things WORK. Within minutes I had a newfound pep in my step.

Here’s a pic of us right either right before or right after we took the Atomic Energy Bites:

Feeling strong around mile 17

If you ask me, we looked pretty strong regardless. 🙂

We then started to play the name game in order to distract us. This did the job for a couple of miles. But then we got bored and moved to the Food Game after Sue suggested it from her car.

She explained the rules of the Food Game: For your first mile, try to name as many food items that start with the letter A. For the second mile, do the same with the letter B and so on and so forth. We decided to break it down into 5-minute increments instead. I don’t think she intended for this to be such a funny game, but that’s what it became. I’m pretty sure delirium (and Atomic Energy Bites) had settled in at the point. Let’s just say that for the letter D, the first food I could come up with was “dead animal” and then I almost peed my pants laughing. I also insisted that “anaconda” was a food that people ate (people eat snake, right?).

At this point we were laughing uncontrollably. At one point we got to an intersection and realized we didn’t know which way to turn. We turned back to look at Sue’s car and then laughed so hard that it took approximately 20 seconds for me to spit out my question, “Which way do we go??” Sue took this opportunity to capture video. I swear, I look drunk in the video.

At mile 18 Emily joined us for the final two miles of our run. By this point my IT in my left leg was hurting me and the laughter had wore off. It was a quiet two miles where I started checking our distance every few seconds while Emily shouted the occasional encouragement.

Finally, my watch hit mile 20 and I yelled “stop!” and we started walking. And then the neighborhood tyrant rode his bicycle by us and cursed us out. I’m told he has Tourette Syndrome, but I think he must have something else too, because I didn’t think Tourette made you flick people off too. I pretended he was the crowd at the finish line, and instead of yelling “You stupid motherf#%@” he was yelling “Awesome job!”

Afterwards I went home and sat in my car for a few minutes while I contemplated how I would get out of the car. Donnie poked his head out of the front door and sent Rex, one of my two pugs, out to get me. I managed to get out and pet Rex and shuffle into my house, where I took an ice bath, a nice long, hot shower, and remained on the couch for the rest of the day.

Have you ever tried Atomic Energy Bites? Or do you have another other energy chews you use on your long runs?

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