Amy Reinink

I’m spending this Labor Day weekend lazing around and helping Steve recover from the hot, sticky, horrid Rock ‘n’ Roll Virginia Beach Half-Marathon, which he valiantly finished on my behalf, and which I am deeply glad I did not have to run myself.

The heat and humidity made us both rejoice in the fact that fall is almost here, bringing honeycrisp apples and butternut squash to our local farm stand and deliciously cool camping trips to our schedule. We’re planning one for October to one of our beloved PATC (Potomac Appalachian Trail Club) cabins, and the trip sparked a story idea for which I need your help.

One of my beloved PATC cabins.

I’ve spent the week in Florida helping my mom recover from some surgery (which went quite well, thanks!). I have not once managed to wake up early to run or swim in the semi-tolerable pre-dawn “cool” (75 degrees with 99 percent humidity). I did, however, manage to get off my butt and run in the completely-insane midday heat (89 degrees with 99 percent humidity).

I am trying to be OK with the fact that right now, in the wake of a crazy past year and a kinda emotional week, it’s OK to have slightly lower expectations for myself. As part of that, I’m accepting that 5:30 a.m. was just too early this week. I’m also accepting that 9 a.m. was just too early to post on this blog. A much better time to provide a blog post: at 5 p.m. on the Friday before a holiday weekend, when nobody wants or expects it.

In other news: Remember that half-marathon I was supposed to run before life got in the way? Steve’s running it in my place! I’m thrilled that this time, he’ll be the one running, while I’ll be the one on the sidelines, opening the Champagne bottle for mimosas.

During the 2011 New Jersey Marathon.

Happy weekend!

I’m in Florida. The air is too hot and sticky to run. In fact, it’s almost too hot and sticky to swim, considering the fact that the pools here are all outdoors, and that the water temperature is a toasty 82 or 83 degrees (the local master’s swim team coach has the team practice at 5:30 a.m., and showers swimmers with cold water from a huge piece of irrigation equipment to prevent heatstroke). So when I watched this video of a powder day in Jackson Hole, Wyo., courtesy of an email from Steve, I knew I had to pass it along to you guys, too. As a skier (and probably even if you’re not a skier), I can’t imagine anything more delicious to see on a sticky summer day.

As is the case with most readerly/writerly types, when I face a problem, I arm myself with research, checking out books from the library, scouring websites from governmental or otherwise official sources, and even reading recent studies on whatever my issue du jour happens to be.

So it’s little surprise that when I found myself unable to defend my position on protein powders (unnecessary except for the very frail, and inferior to real food) during a discussion about sports nutrition, leading me to question most of my beliefs about sports nutrition, I turned to a nerdy, research-heavy book, Dan Bernadot’s Advanced Sports Nutrition. It’s a book recommended by a runner-friend who happens to be a registered dietitian, and it helped me establish something extremely motivational: confidence in my methods.

Because nothing saps motivation quite like the insidious worry: “Do I *really* need to be doing this?” Or, as Daniel Duane put it in his 2010 story Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie, “the unfocused mind is the vulnerable mind, deeply susceptible to BS.”

Bernadot confirmed my belief about protein powders. Also, citing a large body of scientific research, he laid out the reasons why athletes (including bodybuilders) mostly need to be concerned not with their protein intake, but with consuming enough overall calories to support their training, and with consuming sufficient carbohydrates, our muscles’ preferred fuel. My R.D. friend particularly likes this quote of his: “Burning protein for energy as a fuel is a bit like sprinkling your family diamonds on your breakfast cereal because you think it improves the texture.”

I was all set to do my long swim yesterday. My swim bag was packed, I had an hour-plus to spare, and Steve was heading out on his long run. I had just enough time before the thunderstorms forecast for yesterday afternoon to get in a good workout, I figured.

At least, that’s what I thought before walking down to the Bay, which was already roiling with storm-induced currents, and which looked a little too ominous even for me (I’m normally dumb enough to want to jump right in and play in the waves/rip currents). This is stupid, I thought. Even for me. As I turned around to head home, I heard the first rumble of thunder.

I spent about 20 minutes back home searching for a pool nearby in Virginia Beach where I could swim during the storm, which was expected to last all afternoon. No luck. So I headed to the gym and did a quick workout, fighting feelings of low-grade panic as I tried to figure out when I’d squeeze in the swim later this week.

When I got back home, I looked at my calendar, and almost laughed out loud. I have weeks to prepare for the Daiquiri Deck Tropical Splash 5K open-water swim on Oct. 6. Weeks! I could skip swimming for the rest of the week without really screwing up my training cycle. Oh, the freedom!

I’m so accustomed to packing seven-week training schedules into four-week training periods (or some other variation of this), I automatically panicked when I missed a scheduled long swim. Does the rest of the world live like this, training with enough time to accommodate bad weather, schedule conflicts and unexpected soreness? Is it possible that this marks a return to careful, well-planned training for me? And is it equally possible that I can return to careful, well-planned training without going all OCD about things and planning each workout like a rocket launch, as I’m inclined to do? That I can approach an entire training cycle with a balance of discipline and flexibility? Only time will tell. But for now, I’m motivated by the idea that I’m headed in that direction.

What’s motivating you this week?

Last week, a TRX friend of mine had a tough decision to make. She’d hurt her calf muscle during a workout, and she knew she should probably lay low and let it heal. But she’d signed up for an 8K scheduled last weekend, and was part of a team that was counting on her. They’d even made team T-shirts.

My first reaction was to unleash a judgy, cranky lecture about how listening to your body’s whispers means it will never have to shout at you, and about how her calf was already speaking quite loudly.

My second reaction was to sigh, and give her a “well, IF you’re going to do it” talk (the kind you’d give to a middle-schooler about to TP your neighbor’s house), in which I warned her to be careful on the course, ice it afterwards, blah, blah, blah.

I also told her to make sure it was her Kerri Strug moment. Because here’s the thing: Injuries happen, and sometimes, we train and compete through them. Sometimes—like when Kerri Strug helped secure a gold medal for the U.S. women’s gymnastics team in the 1996 Olympics by continuing to compete on a badly sprained ankle—it’s even a good idea to compete through an injury.

We all want to be the Kerri Strugs of our own motivational head-movies. It’s cool to think about being that brave and that hard-core! But unless the event in question is really, really important to us, we’d be better off saving that toughness for another time.

Kerri Strug gained sports-hero status by helping the U.S. women’s gymnastic team win a gold medal in the 1996 Olympics by competing through a bad ankle sprain. I’m not looking to replicate any part of her experience.

That’s kind of a long-winded way of saying that the Virginia Beach Rock ‘n’ Roll Half Marathon over Labor Day weekend was never an A-race for me, and that because I can’t even pretend it’s comparable to a Kerri Strug moment, I’m going to sit this race out thanks to a slightly twisted ankle (courtesy of the agility ladder at TRX class last week).

I’m highly optimistic that my ankle, which is actually 99.9 percent healed at this point, will be just fine in time to train for the Philadelphia Half-Marathon on Nov. 18. I’m doing some ankle-strengthening exercises to help it along. And with training for the Daiquiri Deck Tropical Splash 5K open-water swim on Oct. 6 going so well, I feel strongly that there’s no need to force a Kerri Strug moment for a race that’s not worth it.

My TRX friend, on the other hand, totally Kerri Strugged it last weekend, helping her team place fourth overall in the 8K. Her calf still hurts, but she says in her case, the prolonged pain is worth it.

How do you determine whether it’s worth it to train and compete through an injury? Are there cases in which you’ll do it, or do you always err on the side of caution?

On Monday, I talked about how I hope the new crop of women Olympians will help foster acceptance of diverse body shapes and sizes among the rest of us. It seems only logical to follow up with Tina Fey’s take on the topic. I’m not sure where this meme came from, but the text is from Fey’s “Bossypants,” Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown & Co.

Making me feel all warm and fuzzy and motivated to kick butt this week: The Olympics. For one thing, now that they’re done and no longer on TV every night, I now have several hours of free time per week to fill with workouts. More importantly, though, I’m super-motivated by the fact that for the first time ever, the U.S. sent more women than men to the Olympics, and that U.S. women claimed almost twice as many gold medals (29) as their male counterparts (17) (source: Reuters).

What does that mean? espnW (which is a terrific effort to provide coverage of women’s sports, by the way) ran a story on its site examining the likelihood of this most recent Olympic success leading to more professional athletic leagues for women.

That would be terrific, but I’m hoping for micro effects as well as macro. I’m hopeful the latest crop of kick-ass female Olympians will lead the charge toward greater acceptance of strength and ferocity among women athletes of all calibers; that girls won’t wrinkle their noses and complain about not wanting to “bulk up” when their high-school coaches suggest weight training to supplement their sports. I’m hoping that watching women with bodies as diverse as Missy Franklin, the 6-foot-1 swimmer who’s proud of her size 13 feet, and Gabby Douglas, the diminutive gymnast, achieve athletic greatness will help girls struggling to accept their own bodies focus more on how their bodies perform than on how they look.

OK, stepping down off the soapbox now. In closing, I’d like to share once more the awesome Nike ad that got me all fired up about the Olympics–specifically the women’s side of it (getting me excited about the men’s side: Ryan Lochte. But that’s another story … ). I know you’ve all probably seen it by now. But be honest: Are you sick of it yet? Yeah, me neither.

For the panzanella: