What I Learned Today

I really never thought I’d be one of those people who would go running for its own sake. The pounding abuse to your feet, knees, hips, and the seemingly pointless expenditure of effort for… what? Getting back to where you started, usually.

But since I started training for a triathlon, it seems I’ve gotten hooked.

Running takes effort, and dragging yourself out of bed or off the couch takes maybe more effort, but once you’re out there, this delicious sort of zen descends and you’re zooming along like nothing can touch you. This is a particularly good antidote for those of us prone to unproductive, anxiety-based mind-loops. And when you’re done, you may be tired, but you feel GREAT! Endorphins, accomplishment, fresh air, who knows? It’s all good.

Beyond that, there’s the positive reinforcement angle of seeing measurable progress and increase in your abilities. I started training in December and was able to see the time it took me to run a mile steadily drop (click to enlarge):

Three months in, I’ve shaved 2 minutes off my mile!

I’ve discovered other things I enjoy about running, too: the smell of night-blooming jasmine; spotting Mars, Venus, and Jupiter; seeing my neighborhood away from the computer. Boy, there are a lot of people who walk dogs around here!

And this training process has wreaked changes on my body. My calves are their own, defined muscles. I can see, and feel, the increased muscle tone throughout my legs. I feel like a superwoman at Jazzercise, where a one-hour workout that used to wear me out now leaves me bouncing with energy — so much so that I’ve started doing runs afterwards to help round it out.

Another side effect is that I’ve been eating what seems like a ridiculous amount. Usually I’m not hungry after a run, but the next day, I can’t stop eating. The website where I track my runs estimates that I burn 200-300 calories after a 3-mile run, but I’m *definitely* eating way more than that to compensate — more like an extra 500-600 calories each day. (Plus, I don’t run every day, more like every 3 days.) Yet I’m not gaining any weight. I guess some of it must go to the muscle building process, but where’s the rest? Maybe this kind of exercise does increase your basal metabolism, so I’m burning more calories even when I’m stuck at my desk?

My next goal is to work up to a 10k (6 mile) run. The longest I’ve done is 4 miles, so I’ll need to start lengthening my practice runs and building more endurance. I’d also really like to get below 9 min/mile for a 5k. (The ~9 min/mile data point on the chart was from a short 1.25-mile run.) I love concrete, measurable goals!

Today I ran, biked, and swam in my first triathlon. The Pasadena Triathlon is a reverse sprint, so the distances are much shorter than a regular (Olympic-length) triathlon, and the events occur in the reverse order. Our task for the day was to run 5 km, then bike 15 km, then swim 150 m. I was most worried about the swim, as that is certainly my weakest event right now!

I arrived at 6:30 a.m., an hour and a half before the race start, and had no trouble setting up my transition area, where I would return between events to swap gear. It was very chilly at first, and we were all grateful when the sun finally came up. I was lucky enough to have two friends there to help the time pass quickly: Vali, my race buddy who was competing in the much-harder duathlon (5K run + 15K bike + another 5K run), and Evan, my triathlete friend who got me to sign up in the first place (and who took pictures and carried my stuff around and shouted encouragement at every turn!).

The hardest part of the morning might have been the final 15 minutes before race start! I kept wanting to warm up, but not too much in advance, and itching to just get going. But finally we started off. At first it was slow going because there were so many people in the “women under 40” group, but we eventually spread out and the running felt great. I enjoyed following along behind two women who were wearing tutus (easy to spot!). The run was uneventful aside from one of the tutu-wearing women tripping in front of me. She recovered with a nice roll and was back on her feet immediately.

After the run, I pulled on my helmet, gloves, and hydration backpack. I know the latter is utterly uncool, but since I was riding a mountain bike, I’d already given up any cool gear points. :) And the backpack worked great! I had all of my tire-changing supplies in there (thankfully never needed) and I never got too thirsty. Worth the weight, for me. I got brave enough to call out “Yay, mountain bikes!” to another woman riding one, and we had a brief breathless exchange (she also had a hydration pack, and she volunteered that she too most feared the upcoming swim!).

Three loops around the Rose Bowl went by quickly on the bike — or it felt that way (it actually took more total time than the single-loop run). Each loop seemed to go faster than the one before, according to my bike computer, the opposite of what I expected. I zoomed back to the transition area and got my first surprise when I dismounted the bike. You’re meant to keep jogging so you don’t clog the dismount channel, but if I hadn’t been holding the bike as I staggered along, I’d have fallen flat on my face! My left leg immediately cramped and I couldn’t seem to move my legs properly. Everyone says that the bike to run transition is hard — I guess that’s what that was! Happily, I recovered by the time I got to my bike rack. I pulled off my helmet, backpack, shirt, and shorts, pulled on my swim cap, grabbed my goggles, and ran. It’s about 200 meters from the transition area to the pool, over rocks and grass, and I was so glad I’d left my sneakers on!

Then it was into the pool, and I just went for it. I actually wasn’t as tired as I’d feared I’d be, and although the 150 meters were *long*, it was overall less effort than one of my standard 30-minute attempts at lap swims. I did have to alternate between the front crawl and swimming on my back, as I grew more tired, but I didn’t drown and I actually passed a person or two (!). I staggered out of the pool and happily accepted my medal (a neat one with a bike chain around the perimeter!).

Overall, it was a fantastic experience. I accomplished something I considered beyond my abilities just a few months ago. I really felt that my training paid off, and I was neither exhausted nor in pain at the end of the race. And contrary to what we’d been told to be prepared for, nothing went wrong! No gear failed, no important item was forgotten, I didn’t fall, I survived the swim. I could definitely see myself doing this again — and maybe even improving my time!

Have you ever watched yourself run? Beyond simple vanity, examining how your feet strike the ground can help determine whether you have the right support (and can also help pinpoint causes of foot, knee, and hip pain). Sole Sports, a shoe store in Arizona, has taken this to heart with their free Video Gait Analysis. My sister stopped in to see if she might learn something useful, and my mom and I tagged along.

We all ended up jogging on a treadmill while a small camera recorded us from behind from the knee down. It was fascinating to see a view that is otherwise physically impossible to achieve, and we did learn some things. My mom and I both run in a mostly neutral position, while my sister has some pronation. My mom and sister both run with their feet in parallel tracks, while I run in-line, with my toes slightly turned out. The Sole Sports guy said that both ways of running are common and neither one is better than the other.

The goal of the analysis, of course, from the store’s perspective is to recommend a particular shoe for you to purchase. My sister was recommended the “stability” shoe which helps compensate for pronation. After testing several options on the treadmill, she went home with a shoe that performed admirably the next morning during a run. She said that her knees felt much better than they had with her old shoes, which is great! Thumbs up for Sole Sports.

I’m now officially training for a triathlon. This is the Pasadena Sprint Triathlon, supposedly good for beginners and pre-beginners like me who’ve never even seen a triathlon from the sidelines. As preparation (and honestly, because it is fun), I’ve been doing some morning runs (well, jogs) around the neighborhood. I have a 2.1-mile loop that’s absolutely gorgeous just as the sun is coming up; it heads up into the residential foothills of the San Gabriels, where the houses are reclusive, sprawling, and well-spaced (and oh-so-pricey). I walk on some of the steeper uphill parts. The downhill run, however, is pure joy, feeling the strength of my body and the delight in motion. It is pure joy, that is, except that I’ve started getting a side stitch about halfway through. It’s irritating to have my legs saying “more more faster faster” and my abdomen saying “STOP NOW NO MORE OUCH PAIN DRAT!”

Wikipedia also has something to say about this. It actually has an article about the side stitch and its many alternative terms. Apparently, there is a common theory that the side cramp (a stabbing pain under the lower edge of the ribcage) is caused by internal organs pushing down on the diaphragm, but this is unlikely since the sport it most often manifests in is swimming. The side ache may actually be caused by contraction of the liver or spleen, restricting blood flow, or an irritated peritoneum. The side sticker usually manifests on the right side (fascinating! It’s happened on my right side both times), although wikipedia marks this claim as “[citation needed].”

Advice for avoiding the side crampie (my favorite term) includes both drinking lots of water and avoiding food and drink 2-3 hours before exercising, strengthening the diaphragm and core muscles, warming up and gradually increasing exercise pace, etc. There might be something to the last one, as I’ve never gotten exercise related transient abdominal pain (ETAP) during Jazzercise, which is carefully scheduled to ramp the exertion level gradually up and then back down.

Wikipedia also provides tips for dealing with a side stitch after it happens. One is to jam your fingers up under the ribcage to press on the painful spot. Interestingly, that’s exactly what I did reflexively when it happened. This made it feel better as long as I was pressing but didn’t do any good after I let go. Apparently the main way to stop the pain is to slow or stop your exercise and wait for it to subside. No good! This tip seemed particularly interesting: “While running, exhale when your foot strikes on the opposite side that the side stitch is located. For example, a side stitch on the right, exhale hard when your left foot strikes the ground.” I’ll have to try that one. If nothing else, the effort of focusing might distract me from the pain.

Ultimately, gradually getting in better shape should help avoid any recurrences of the side stitch. Clearly, more practice is called for! Otherwise my triathlon debut on March 19 may be a bit of a fizzle. :)

My hotel presented me with the opportunity to collect some data about myself. On Monday, I went down to try out their exercise room and spent a while running on a treadmill (the first time I’ve ever used a hotel’s exercise room!). After a while I noticed that the shiny metal bars on the hand-rail actually were designed to measure and report your heartrate. After playing with this a little, of course I started to wonder how my body’s heartrate responded to the speed at which I was jogging.

So today when I went down for some exercise, I also took paper and pen with me. Of course what I wanted was for the machine to continuously record timestamps, speed, and heartrate and to deliver a printout to me at the end (or better, just email me the results). But no such luck, so I had to resort to recording it myself. This turned out to be more awkward than I anticipated; I wanted to record heartrate every 30 seconds, but the machine took 15 seconds just to calculate it, and then I had to fumble and write while jogging. Plus, especially at higher heartrates (or jogging speeds, not sure which was the problem), the machine would report garbage that masqueraded as a real heartrate (like suddenly dropping from 120 to 77 bpm). So in the end I had to do some data cleaning, which always makes me uneasy. But I only removed the obvious outliers and left the rest of the noise in.

The result is surprisingly sensible:

The heartrate values at about 8-15 minutes are not reliable; the machine kept reading low, and an independent test with my jugular and the wall clock suggested I was closer to 150 bpm at that point. (The 150 bpm point at 20 minutes was also from a hand-measurement.) But still, pretty cool! A bit of hysteresis, as you might expect. According to the machine, I burned 196 calories (but it didn’t ask for my weight or mass, so…) and traveled 1.9 miles. And I got to make a graph!