Author Archives: amyreinink

I’ve long appreciated that the three-day-a-week training plan by the Furman Institute of Running and Scientific Training I’m following to train for the half marathon in March will keep me strong and healthy while training for the half marathon in March. Until today, I didn’t really appreciate that the plan prevents me from burnout, too.

I take an all-or-nothing mentality in training and in life — once I’ve committed myself to some task, I’m in 100 percent. This is great, until it’s not. I’m the type of person who plays a new song on repeat til it makes me want to scream, eat a new recipe meal after meal until I can no longer stomach any of the ingredients and run as many miles as my body can take. Note to self: Just because there’s a plan that says I should run 50 to 60 miles a week leading up to a marathon doesn’t mean that’s what I NEED to do to train effectively.

Having a plan that limits me to three running days, with intensive cross-training the other days, gives me built-in motivation to kick butt on my running days, and leaves me excited to run again when I’m cross-training. If I’d been following a traditional training plan, I’d be a little bit dreading my run today after what felt like a super-human effort in my treadmill speed workout yesterday.

Instead, I had an awesome swim with Steve today, and I’m already looking forward to running tomorrow.

I woke up this morning with conflicting desires: to run outside in the falling snow and to accomplish a long to-do list of quick little errands.

To satisfy both needs, I employed one of my favorite strategies: I literally ran errands.

I grabbed my backpack and set out to mail a package, return a movie to Blockbuster, pick up pizza dough for tomorrow’s dinner from Whole Foods and grab some other groceries from Giant. Seeing everyone bundled up and smiling at the first real accumulation of the year put me in a great mood, and I burned through my first two stops.

It was nearly lunchtime when I hit Whole Foods. Even when I’m not hungry, this store is a black hole of temptation for me. I could spend hours — and entire paychecks — shopping for yummy little dips and fresh, tastefully arranged produce. Today’s stop was especially dangerous, as I was tempted to use my run to justify impulse purchases (“But I deserve the roasted chipotle salsa! I ran here!”). I’m proud to report that I left with nothing more than pizza dough and some frozen vegetables to try a recipe posted by my friend Chris on his foodie blog, where you can find all sorts of yummy, healthy post-run treats.

I clocked a total of 25 minutes running — OK, plodding — through the snow while erranding, which was a little less than I’d hoped for. I decided to squeeze in my speed workout for the week on the treadmill when I got back.

I’m delighted to report that I actually walked away from the prospect of spiced Indian-style vegetables and went downstairs to the little gym instead, knocking out three 1-mile repeats at somewhere between 7 and 7:30-minute mile pace. It just about killed me (both the pace and the restraint in holding off on lunch), but man! Did those veggies ever taste good after a hard workout! Check out the recipe here.

I’ve got serious commitment issues.

I choose which races I’ll run months ahead of time, circling race ads in the back of Runner’s World like a normal woman might earmark wish-list items from a J. Crew catalog. I print out training schedules and follow them to the letter. This time, I’m even blogging about my training for the National Half Marathon on March 21.

The one thing I don’t do: actually sign up for the race.

This is a thing with me. Unless I have reason to fear that the race will fill up quickly, I postpone, and postpone, and postpone, often waiting until race day to officially throw my hat in the ring. Sometimes, I even wait so long I miss the race entirely, which happened with the Philadelphia Half Marathon in November. This was especially rough, as I’d done most of my long runs for the race by the time I realized registration had closed.

I tell myself waiting to sign up is a smart move to avoid losing a bunch of money on a race that I may be unable to run for some reason. I know it’s actually more of a stupid defense mechanism to avoid committing myself wholly to a race.

Not this time. I’m proud to announce that I’ve finally signed up for the race I’ve been publicly training for and blogging about for weeks.

This is a big step for me. Maybe it’s just because I’m usually too tired to sprint at the end of a race, but I like to think of the simple act of committing myself to a race as gutsy, if we’re using George Sheehan’s definition: “Some think guts is sprinting at the end of a race. But guts is what got you there to begin with. Guts start in the back hills with six miles to go and you’re thinking of how you can get out of this race without anyone noticing.”

Looking for motivation? Read about Sheehan, a cardiologist, runner and writer from my home county in New Jersey.

I had hoped to run six miles on Sligo Creek Trail today, and to write here about how invigorating it was to run in the cold.

I’m happy to report that I did, at least, run. None of the other plans worked out quite so well.

According to the National Weather Service, whose Web site has been a regular haunt of mine since it’s been so frigid here, said it got to 37 degrees in Silver Spring today.

My response: Say WHAT?

I offer this hard evidence that it was not anywhere near 37 degrees: at 11 a.m., when I blew my nose on my glove, it froze in the air, leaving me with a horrible littlesnotsickle on my finger. This was about the point at which I first thought about cutting the run short.

Then, there was the matter of the orange fence between Wheaton Regional Park and Sligo Creek Trail, my intended destination. I’ve run parts of Sligo Creek Trail before, but I’d never started from Wheaton Regional Park. I tried to pick up the trail from the park this time, but instead, ended up running around the park again and again, thwarted by a fence marking some sort of trail construction. Rather than a simple out-and-back run, I ended up on a weird hill loop through a bunch of botanical gardens.

The good news: The park is really cool! The rolling hills and placid (OK, icy) ponds in the botanical gardens were pretty enough to run by three or four times. And the playground made me want to quit the whole running thing and just zoom down one of the biggest, baddest slides I’ve ever seen. It also provided some spectacular people-watching, from the guy on a unicycle on my way in to the family of little girls in pink coats playing tag through the gardens.

I’ll definitely be back to Sligo Creek Trail for a long run when the weather’s warmer. If Wheaton Regional Park doesn’t provide enough entertainment, the trail apparently winds through a total of nine parks in Montgomery County.

I have a love-hate relationship with the gym.

It’s not working out I dislike. It’s the cardio machines. They represent the opposite of one of my favorite things about running, summed up by this Jesse Owens quote: “I always loved running. It was something you could do by yourself, and under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.”

Today, the “blustery” 20-degree weather forecasted earlier this week came to pass (blustery is actually a pretty great adjective to describe today — nice job, National Weather Service!). After losing the feeling in my fingers during a short bike ride to do some errands, I was driven inside, to the stationary bike in the little fake gym inside our building.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that working out on an electrical machine is basically the opposite of exercising by yourself, under your own power. It isn’t seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and courage of your lungs so much as burying your nose in a book to forget the fact that you are, in fact, going nowhere on a piece of electrical machinery. UGH.

But here’s the positive part of this blog post (I promise there is one!): I did 45 minutes on the bike, and while I didn’t get quite the warm fuzzies I do after a good run, I felt doubly proud of myself for doing something healthy when I desperately didn’t feel like it. As I got warmed up, I reminded myself that biking today would a) save my joints and muscles from two days of pounding in a row, b) strengthen muscles running doesn’t, and c) make some bike ride down the road easier because I trained today. It also let me finish one book I’ve been working on for a while and start another that will probably end up being the subject of another blog post on another day. It’s “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan. The theme: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Brilliant advice for us runners, who are easily wooed by Gatorade G2 and Power Gels (not that I’m giving these up during long runs … I’m just saying.)

Here’s how I powered through a stationary bike workout I didn’t wanna do: I did a 45-minute interval workout based on a playlist that alternated Bob Marley songs with hip-hop party anthems. During the Bob Marley songs, I turned the resistance on the bike down to 12 and read my book(s). During the fast songs, I put the book down and cranked the resistance to 14. Despite all the bitching about not wanting to bike inside, I was honestly surprised so much time had passed when I checked the bike’s digital readout.

Tomorrow’s a swimming day,which I’m looking forward to immensely. Another thing I’m looking forward to immensely: Warmer weather!