Monthly Archives: June 2009

When motivation shows up late to the party

Don’t you love those days when you drag yourself to the pool or the track,

The Chris Greene Lake Cable Swim powered me through my workout yesterday.

The Chris Greene Lake Cable Swim powered me through my workout yesterday. Even its logo, shown above, makes me wanna swim!

content to slog through whatever workout you have planned, only to find you had way more in you than an everyday slog?

I had one of those days yesterday, when I headed to the pool in a state of inexplicable exhaustion for a 4,500-yard swim to get ready for the 2-mile Chris Greene Lake Cable Swim, which I committed to doing, oh, about an hour ago. I tend to sign up for open-water swims when big running events are in jeopardy because of some sore spot. In this case, it’s my IT band and the Marine Corps Marathon. Even though the race is a long way off, and my ITB is actually feeling OK at the moment (knockonwood!), I needed an immediate reason to kick my own butt in workouts while I’m laying low running-wise.

To that end, I got in the pool yesterday kind of dreading my planned 4,500, which started with a 1,500 warmup. Then, something really cool happened: Without making a conscious effort to do so, I visualized — daydreamed about, really — the lake swim. I imagined how cool it will be to feel the sun on my back and to see the other swimmers around me. I thought about sitting on the shore after, pleasantly sore and tired after swimming the crap out of the race.

I turned my 1,500 warmup into a timed 1,650 (24:40 with a pull buoy, thank you very much!), starting what would become my first 5,000-yard workout since last summer, when I was training for a 2.5-mile ocean swim in Jacksonville, Fla.

Here’s how the rest of the workout went down:

5X400 IM (2,000 total)

4X300 free, six hard strokes every 50 (1,200 total)

4X25 sprint

4X25 no breath (yes, I do this 8X25 set at the end of almost every swim now. Thanks, Mer!)

Motivation came late to the party, and without any kind of conscious invitation on my part. But it’s the kind of party guest that’s always welcome. I just wish it would come early sometime, to help set up the bar, you know?

7 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

New playlist alert!

This one’s a quickie, perfect for a 5K or speed workout (plus a nice warmup ipodsong from Feist). It’s inspired by my new running companion, Eminem. Who knew misogynistic gangsta rap could be so motivational? If you’ve tried any other songs from his new album, or if you’ve found any new running songs for me to add to the mix, let me know by posting a comment. Browse my past playlists by clicking here.

I Feel It All – Feist

Live Your Life – T.I. feat. Rhianna

Lost One – Jay Z (my friend Jen got through the hills in the ZOOMA 10K by repeating the part that goes: “Sorry, I’m a champion …”)

Nothin’ But a G Thing – Snoop

Crack a Bottle – Eminem

Shake That – Eminem

Stronger – Kanye West

Other things motivating me this week:

This cool story from O magazine about why we overeat — and why breaking the habit is all about declaring a truce on ourselves.

The list of motivational tips I compiled for Examiner.com. I may have reached the end of the Internet while searching for great links, so it’s a pretty good one, if I don’t say so myself.

8 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

The joy of picking a race lineup

Is there anything more fun than picking out your next few races?

Paging through a race report, or through fliers you get in some other race’s goody bag, you feel full of possibility. Could the 5K with the flat, fast course be your next PR? Could daydreams about a great-sounding post-race party carry you through your next couple long, hot runs?

Here’s a glimpse of what I’ve got ahead. Race schedule subject to change at racer’s discretion.

The Crystal City Twilighter 5K in Crystal City July 25.

Blue Crab Bolt 10K Trail Running Series: first race on Aug. 1 is held at Seneca Creek State Park in Gaithersburg, Md., second is Aug. 15, in Little Bennett Regional Park in Clarksburg, Md.

I’m also planning on a good half-marathon to run as a pre-MCM tune-up. Something flat, fast and fun to massage my ego before the marathon. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Half Marathon in Virginia Beach on Sept. 6 is the current front-runner (ha), and the Philadelphia Distance Run on Sept. 20 is trailing just behind.

And to keep me honest in the pool, I’m looking at:

Chris Greene Lake Cable Swim, Charlottesville, July 11. I’d do the two-miler.

Wildwood September Splash, Sept. 26. A fun-sounding 1-miler.

Any other suggestions for open-water swims in the Washington area this summer? If so, suggest ’em below!

Looking for more great summer races in the Washington area? Check out my Examiner post on that very topic.


11 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Gearing up for the Marine Corps Marathon

I don’t want to jinx myself or anything, but man, does it feel good to be back into my running routine!

I missed the camaraderie of my group runs. I missed the ability to get my daily outdoors fix while relieving my stress. I even missed my favorite music — Eminem isn’t my artist of choice while I’m sitting in my apartment working, but there’s nothing quite like running your heart out to “Shake That.”

And I missed having the Marine Corps Marathon to look forward to. I signed up to run it after a successful performance at the National Half Marathon in March, and all but put it aside while I was nursing a sore IT band. Now, I’m starting to get excited about it again, printing out my training plan and considering my warmup races.

I’m following the FIRST plan, which calls for three days of running per week, plus some hard cross-training the other days. In particular, I’m following the beginner’s plan, a fairly straightforward plan that calls for just one 20-miler before the race.

8 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

And … I’m back!

It’s been almost a month since I made it to my beloved Pacers Silver Spring Fun Run, thanks to a scary-sore hip. After a 30-minute “test run” last week, I braved the five-mile hill loop my running group did last night.

And you know what? I was fine! Tired and nervous the whole time, but fine! My hip’s a little sore this morning, but it’s nothing like the throbbing, terrifying mess it was reduced to after my standard five-milers a month ago.

We did the Grubb Road out-and-back I trained on frequently before the National Half Marathon in March. The run features several leg-burners through the gorgeous Colonial Village neighborhood near Rock Creek Park. (Need more hill-route suggestions? Check out my Examiner post for today). It just felt so good to return to my running routine, which I rely on to keep me honest about my workouts and sane for the rest of my days.

Next up: A BOSU and swim workout today. I’m thinking of reverting to an old favorite swimming-wise, a timed 1,650, followed by 5X200, then 10X25s, half of them sprint, half of them no breath (this last part is new, but in the instant-classic kind of way).

4 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Last Florida swim proves a cathartic one

This morning’s swim, my last in Florida before I head back home to Washington, was unexpectedly fabulous.

I’ve been swimming with the New Port Richey, Fla., masters team, which meets at the city’s recreation center at 5:30 a.m. weekday mornings. Today was the first day I made it to the pool for the very beginning of the 5:30 a.m. workout, and it was a hot one. How hot? When I opened the door to my parents’ house at 5:15 a.m., I felt wave of sticky heat gush in. The pool temp was 91 degrees, even with an aerator spitting cold water in to cool it down. The coach warned us to take it easy.

I really intended to. But you know how you have those days when you just need to run, or swim, or lift something out? When you feel like your workout is the only thing in the world in your control, and you just have to take it by the reins and kick your own butt?

It was one of those days today. So I swam the warmup easy, and then swam out my frustration and heartache and other emotions on several sets of 75s, which somehow, didn’t get boring at all.

The workout:

1,600 warmup: 400 pull, 400 swim, repeat

12X 75 swim: Free, stroke, free

16X75 pull

I felt so good at the end, I added:

8 X 100, choice (free, or stroke, or whatever)

Next up: Deciding whether to run with Pacers tomorrow night, my first night back home. I’ve been laying off for the past couple week, as I’ve needed some time to nurse my stubbornly sore hip. But a quick run on the beach went fabulously well yesterday morning, so I’m pondering the possibility of getting back into my routine. Wish me luck!

7 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Powerfully feminine, or beastly?

My husband called me beastly the other night.

I look a little beastly here, and I think that's awesome.

I look a little beastly here, and I think that's awesome.

This was, of course, a compliment. He was telling me that our running group had seen pictures of me from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Swim last Sunday, and that they said I looked beastly. I questioned this, and he acknowledged that beastly was his word, not theirs, which led to several minutes of him describing how pretty I am.

I know he thinks I’m super-hot, and that it’s a great thing that he thinks of me as just another dude when it comes to working out. But it’s one of several comments that sparked an old insecurity: That when I’m training hard, I cross the line between powerful femininity and — well — beastliness. More importantly, that raises the question: Why are we, as women, so afraid to be beastly — in other words, strong?

It’s not just me. Check out the poll in this pieceby trainer Leigh Peele, in which 41 percent of 200 women surveyed reported that they never find muscles attractive on a woman. Twenty-six percent said they find muscles on a woman attractive ” sometimes, in small amounts.” Only 4 percent responded with an unequivocal “yes.”

Really, ladies? Muscles? Like, the ones that allow us to move? When I read the survey results, I thought about the way a male Sports Illustrated reporter described members of the U.S. Olympic Swim Team recently: “The image of powerful femininity.” How come that dude sees us as powerfully feminine, while a huge percentage of us would rather be too skinny than too muscular (according to the Leigh Peele poll)?

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand what this was about. For me, my love-hate relationship with my shoulders started in eighth grade, when I saw a picture of myself for the first time after I started swimming with a club team. As an eighth grader, I had biceps. And I didn’t like them. My friends noticed, too. At pool parties, they’d tell me to flex, my little 13-year-old arms a party trick to rival the pool toys.

In high school, my swim teammates and I joked that rather than breasts, we had pecs. But by that point, I had learned to be proud of my weirdly muscular arms, with the focus on what they could do, not how they looked. We weren’t totally immune to the body-image issues that besiege most high-school girls, but we strived for rippled abs, not model-skinniness.

So what happened between then and now? I stopped swimming for a good decade, until some running injuries forced me back in the pool. During that decade, I should have become more at home in my body, and more secure in myself. And I am — it’s just that the fact that I’m even writing this blog post makes it clear that feeling perfectly comfortable in one’s body is a lifelong struggle, not a simple fact.

Most days, I still believe it’s not about how my shoulders look, but what they can do. And since they can cut across what I swear were 4-foot waves in the Chesapeake Bay, or make me glide through the pool faster than the dude in the lane next to mine, I think they’re pretty awesome.

7 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Working out on the road — without running

One of my favorite things about running is its amazing portability. You can run

The outdoor pool near my parents' house is beautiful, but HOT.

The outdoor pool near my parents' house is beautiful, but HOT.

anywhere, so long as you have your shoes, making it easy to squeeze in while you’re traveling.

I’m writing this from New Port Richey, Fla., where I’m visiting my parents for the week. I have been taking some time off from running to nurse a sore hip. The portability is sorely missed.

There’s a beautiful outdoor public pool near my parents’ house, and I almost always try to squeeze in a swim while I’m here. The outdoor pool is ideal in the winter, but not so great in the summer, when it’s so hot midday, it’s literally hard to breathe. So I headed out at 6:30 a.m. Monday to try to squeeze in a workout before things got really uncomfortable. Perspective on “uncomfortable:” When I left the house, it was 91 degrees, 99 percent humidity. The pool temp was the same, making the workout feel a bit like doing step aerobics in a hot tub (not that I’ve done this. I’m just sayin’).

Making things worse, a club swim team kicked me out of the main lap pool and into a 20-yard kiddie pool. I’m not so great at math on a normal day, but converting all my normal sets from 25-yard laps to 20-yard laps was about all I could take before sunrise.

However: The coach, a fit-looking middle-aged man with a booming voice and a stopwatch, apologized for the situation, anc invited me to swim with his masters swim team this morning. At 5:30 a.m. Because I’m a little crazy, I decided this was a good idea.

I’ve never felt super-comfortable with masters teams. There’s something awkward about meeting a bunch of strangers in your bathing suit. My last experience involved a big group of snooty patooties who informed me that theirs was “kind of the fast lane,” and an older dude who said, without a hint of kindness of humor, that I could only swim in his lane if I didn’t run him over. It felt like the middle school lunchroom all over again, except I never had to wear a bathing suit while searching for a table in seventh grade. Then again, I also never got to blow past the so-called “fast lane” in seventh grade, which I did at that practice.

So. This morning, I headed out for the workout. Last night’s hail storm had cooled the pool temperature to 88 degrees, and I was one of only a few swimmers to join the coach in the water, meaning I had my own lane. It was GREAT. He prepared a workout tailored to the heat, with lots of sprints followed by a decent amount of rest (why didn’t I think of that?).

Here’s the workout, if you’re interested in replicating it. It would work for any ability, if you adjust (or forget about) the intervals, make the whole thing freestyle and/or skip some of the sets as you see fit.

Warmup set: 10X100 w/ 5 seconds rest

20X50, first 25 stroke, second 25 free, on 1 minute

21X25, in sets of three, with first 25 easy, second medium, third hard, on 40 second (kick it up to 30 seconds if you’re not battling heat exhaustion). Stroke or free; just keep it the same stroke for each set of three.

I added: 5X100, first lap non-free

4X25 sprint, 4X25 no breath

In other news: I hit the treadmill for 30 easy minutes yesterday (only chance to run was midday, which is seriously dangerous here), and it felt OK while I was running! I kept it to about 8:40-minute miles except for the last two minutes, when I just had to kick it up. Hip hurt a little after, but it felt amazing to run again. In a desperate attempt to make it feel better, I have been taking glucosamine again, and also my mom’s fish-oil pills, which allegedly help knock down inflammation.

The weird thing: The pills might actually be helping! Then again, I could just be desperate. Has anyone else tried these with good results, or heard any evidence to suggest I’m not just crazy?

I’ll continue to blog/Tweet/etc. when I can grab a few minutes of Internet access, but will be back to normal next week.

5 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Post-race report: 1-Mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge Challenge

*Editor’s note: This report was filed from Florida, where I’m spending a week visiting my parents. I’ll have spotty Internet access, so don’t be alarmed if my blog posts/Twitter use/communication in general are a bit sporadic.*amywater

I don’t want to brag or anything, but I sorta kicked the Chesapeake Bay’s butt yesterday.

I set out to break 30 minutes (I finished in 31 and change last year), and to place in my age group (I placed third last year) in the 1-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge Swim Sunday. I finished in 29:54, placing second among 24-29 year olds.

More importantly, I had set out to swim harder than I did last year, when I finished smiling, happy and feeling like I had energy and muscle power to spare. This year, the guy in the medical tent asked if I was OK as I stumbled across the finish line. Mission accomplished.

The start of an open-water swim of this size will always be a bit jarring, I think. The roughly 600 swimmers competing in the 1-miler are broken into four waves, differentiated by cap color. Swimmers start in the water, and spend the first a third of a mile accidentally kicking, scratching, groping and smacking each other as they angle for position – or try to get out of the way. Last year, I accidentally grabbed someone’s butt (ha!). This year, someone accidentally kicked me directly in the right goggle (ouch!).

Then, the writhing mass of bodies thins. The cap colors start to change as you creep into the wave in front of you.

For me, the best part of the triangle-shaped swim course is after the first turn, when a glimpse of the buoy ahead is accompanied by the sight of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The sight of the bridge looming over the silver-blue glitter of the Bay is as powerful a symbol of my love for this region as the monuments, memorials and museums in Washington, and has come to represent the most comfortable and euphoric part of the swim for me.

Except this year, I made a point to not get too comfortable. I swam the crap out of it, actually grunting into the water from the exertion. I felt like the waves this year were a little bigger than the ones last year, though that could just be selective memory. At one point, I was startled to see a swimmer a few feet below me when I took a breath at the crest of a swell.

Only one swimmer passed me from the wave after mine, and I’m pretty sure he won the race in a time of 23 minutes and change. I drafted him for a good minute, effectively using up any ounce of juice my triceps had left. By the time I finally lost sight of him, the shore was in sight, and it was just a matter of hanging on for the finishing kick.

After the awards ceremony, we sat on the deck of Hemingway’s and watched the swimmers competing in the 4.4-mile swim inch across the Bay – a reminder of my goal for next year.

But that’s next year. For the moment, I was content to dig into my crab soup and chill out.

13 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Resources for injured runners

Rest. Ice. Stretch and foam roll (yeah, I made it a verb. What?). Pop glucosamine tablets. Pop anti-inflammatories. Get a massage.

I’ve tried all of these remedies to soothe my sore hip. I’ve also spent way too much time searching for helpful tidbits online, and I thought I’d share some of the best links here.

This Runner’s World story provides some great tips for getting your head in the right place, and offers real-world experience from Kara Goucher, who says being injured made her realize that she is more than a runner — she is a person who loves to run. If she can wrap her brain around that, certainly, I can, too.

Other take-aways: Almost all runners — some research suggests 70 percent per calendar year — end up with an injury at some point. Almost all runners recover from those injuries. Stay positive. Focus on recovery, using it as an opportunity to strengthen weak muscle groups. And if it helps, hang out with your running buddies off the road.

Other resources I’ve found helpful:

Runner’s World Injury Prevention Guide: This link takes you to the mother of all injury-prevention pages, with links to everything from exercises to strengthen weak muscle groups to a “What Hurts” database that helps diagnose aches and pains.

Running Times guide to injury prevention and recovery. This offers insights from MDs, professional marathoners and others, and explains why things like ice, massage and stretching help.

This Running Times spread about cross-training explains how cross-training can actually make you a faster runner, starting with an anecdote about how Alberto Salazar qualified for the Olympic team after a two-month hiatus from running, relying on swimming as his primary activity following an IT band injury.

This Amby Burfoot blog post about coping with injuries offers some great tips and insights. Says Burfoot: “We all get injured eventually. Like, 100 percent of us … it’s no big deal, since 100 percent of us also recover from our running injuries.”

Playing the Pain Game from active.com

Have a great injury-prevention link? Share it by posting a comment!

Looking for inspiration to cross-train — or just to train? Read about Runner, triathlete and DC Mayor Adrian Fenty who Men’s Fitness has named in its list of the 25 fittest men.  This is no small feat, considering “fittest” includes Rafael Nadal and Tim Tebow.

4 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized