I have been going through a very rough stretch as of late. The exercise routine feels like more of a malaise and I haven't been having much fun. It could be some lingering discontent from my injury in February, when a month of restricted training turned into weight gain and a not-so-unexpected poor performance at the NYC Half. My workouts are inconsistent – I seem to do just enough to check the box, but they are really not doing me much good at all.
I purposefully started a runstreak 10 days ago. It was my way of saying, “I’m going to beat this. Running every day, no matter how little, will eventually kick me into gear.” But it hasn’t. My lunch runs, which earlier in the year consistently clocked in at 4 miles, have been anywhere between 1 mile and 3.5 miles. I never hit 4 miles all last week.
Another year, another marathon. This, of course, means one more thing for me – another fundraiser. I hate writing those words because I always feel like just another 2-bit, online beggar trying to lift some cash out of the reader’s pockets. Each year I do this is more difficult than the year before – because how long can you go on asking your friends for money until they roll their eyes and say, “Enough already”?
But the problem is, it’s not enough. No matter how much money I seem to raise, cancer is still there and it still sucks. It sucked years ago, when I never got the chance to meet my first girlfriend’s mother because she died of throat cancer just before we met. It sucked when my former mother-in-law battled breast cancer, even though she beat it. It sucks when I don’t see my friend Michele posting her normal happy-things on facebook for weeks and I know it’s because she’s busy fighting it. It sucked when my grandfather died from it.
But it especially sucks when it affects children. In the past, I have always raised money in the name of a neighbor of mine, Brielle LaPlante, who was taken from us at the age of 13 and whose parents have raised over $1million for cancer research. During my first marathon, thoughts of Brielle's strength helped get me through those rough final few miles as I listened to her favorite song, "Not Afraid" by Eminem. Last year, a former high school classmate of mine lost his eight year-old son to brain cancer after a 9-month battle fighting it with everything he had. And more recently a local boy whom my daughter and I went trick-or-treating with this past Halloween was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor and is now fighting for his life.
It's just not fair.
The American Cancer Society is an incredible charity that fights cancer by funding research, treatments and patient care. I am reminded how amazing this organization is every time I attend a pre-race dinner and hold back the tears listening to the stories of people like Michele Brodtman or Nora McInerny Purmort. I cannot think of a better way to make training for an event like a marathon be more incredible than by putting on my DetermiNation running shirt and supporting such a noble cause. I hope you will join me by clicking here to access my fundraising page and donating. Every little bit helps. Thank you so much for your generosity - I am truly moved by each and every donation.
“Can you tell me where the Apple Store is?” a man asked as I exited a cab way too early in the morning on a Sunday.
“Umm… it’s right in front of you,” I answered, pointing to the large glass case with the Apple logo emblazoned on the front. I was going there, too, so I led the man to the door where he finally realized how silly his question was. In fairness, it doesn’t look like a store. It looks more like an overblown advertisement. We descended the spiral staircase to an underground vault – the Apple Store, currently posing as a haven for runners waiting out the cold before the United NYC Half Marathon.
The Apple Store - NY, NY
This was the meeting area for my fellow DetermiNation teammates, and we alone occupied about half the store. “Did you guys open the store just for us?” I asked an employee, figuring sometimes companies do nice things for charitable reasons and the good publicity. “No,” he said. “We’re open 24/7.” Oh, the things I miss about New York. Where else can you drop your phone in your beer at 3AM and get an immediate replacement?
The sport of running is ripe for those of us with OCD tendencies. One of the wonderful things about running is that it is quantifiable in so many ways – miles, pace, time, speed, calories burned, hill incline, you name it. When I’m healthy and in good training form, I’ll even create spreadsheets to analyze and track all of this data. Sometimes I can’t wait to get off the treadmill and get to my computer to type in the miles and my pace to see how it stacks up to previous runs.
That is my OCD – speed and distance, one run at a time. I constantly want to run longer and faster than I did the day before. Unfortunately, this may have also led to my downfall.
Starting this past January, I went to the gym every day at lunch for a 40-minute treadmill run, which conveniently put me right around the 4-mile mark as I finished. So I would run 4 miles, record the time and enter it in my spreadsheet to compare it to my previous record. Essentially, recording my runs every day made me want to race myself every day. Even before getting to the gym, I would plot my treadmill pace – from my starting point through all of the subsequent faster intervals so that I could run just a little bit faster than I did the day before. Some days I would be forced to slow down or give up early. But on most days, I’d eek out a new record by a few seconds and be proud of my hard work.
The run-streak officially ended after 42 days. My injured leg just seemed unable to heal under the constant pounding of daily runs, and so I decided to do what I had to do and take a rest. A full week of rest.
I was completely bummed; borderline depressed, really. I thought I could do the elliptical, but the pain kicked up then, too. Maybe it was just annoying pain, but I just couldn’t risk injuring it further.
Initially, I refused to let this injury bring me down, and I attacked my week off with and appetite for success and thirst for improvement.
Wait… I’m getting confused. Actually, I attacked the week with an appetite for Chinese food and a thirst for local craft beers.
The week off was extremely unkind. I have lost my grip on diet and stopped weighing myself and counting calories altogether. It has completely thrown me off-track. This isn’t a reset-type thing. It’s just me, sitting here wondering if I’ll be able to train for my half-marathon in March and whether or not my goals for the NYC Marathon in November are pretty much shot at this point.
Even if I recover my motivation, I’ll be hesitant to push myself over the next few weeks. Any time I sense a tweak in my leg, I’ll wince and think the worst: I’ve re-injured it. Even now I sit at my desk and focus on the leg. Is that the way it always feels or is that a tiny bit of pain I sense? I flex my ankle, my calf, rub the shinbone where the stress fracture is… I’m probing for pain. Is that pain? I don’t know. I don’t think so. At least I’m not limping, so that’s good.
I started on the exercise bike this past Monday. I’ve taken to it well enough and my leg hasn’t seemed to experience any kind of additional pain from it.
But I haven’t gotten my good diet habits back. I know because I can’t pass the “leftover sandwiches in the breakroom” test. There are a lot of meetings held in my office and leftover sandwiches are almost a weekly occurrence. When I’m in a good mode, I barely even hear the clarion call for feeding time. It’s in-one-ear and out-the-other and I barely budge from my seat. But when I’m not in diet mode, I run people over like Marshawn Lynch to get to the sandwich platter.
I know that the only way I'm going to get back into my January form is by getting back into the right frame of mind. I temporarily lost that frame of mind when I took my week off. And while I may have gained a few pounds, in retrospect, the week off certainly seems to have helped my leg heal. And in the short-term, that was the most important thing. Healing remains the most important thing. I just have to accept it, slowly increase my exercise load with low-impact cardio and hope that come March 20, I can stand at the starting line of the NYC Half and make it 13.1 miles.
I knew it was a little different than normal pain right from the start. For one, it was on my shin - not many muscles located on the shin-bone. It was just nagging at the beginning and didn’t really bother me during the run, but it would tend to get sore after. After a while, the soreness would usually go away, until one day it didn’t.
I would wake up and limp to the shower, then limp down the stairs and to the car, and again from my car to my desk. But when I got to the gym at lunchtime and hit the treadmill, I would hobble for the first quarter-mile or so, and then it would be fine. Almost like it just needed to warm up.
One hour, two hours later... I’d get up to walk and be limping again, usually with slightly more pain than I had when I got up that morning.
I persevered. I thought I was being a wimp. There were so many good things going for me – I had lost a lot of weight, I was significantly improving my pace after just a month of focused training. This past Monday I ran my fastest 4-miles all year. I was focused on setting a PR in the upcoming NYC Half on March 20th. I wasn’t letting anything get in my way.
Well, the numbers are in and I really couldn’t be happier with the start of my year. Coming off a holiday season that saw me gain 15 pounds while being unable to eclipse the 100-mile/month mark in either November and December, I needed some refocusing. I made my resolutions and got to work. January was a resounding success.
I was able to log 175 miles on the month, which was well North of what I thought capable. I went from struggling to get to my 2nd belt-notch to easily getting the 3rd. My 38” pants went from being somewhat snug, to now being loose. I’m close to breaking out the 36” pants from my closet for the first time since October. I cannot possibly over-emphasize the importance of comfortable pants, and being able to fit into the half-dozen or so pairs hanging in my closet should really open up my wardrobe nicely.
The past few weeks I have spent some time developing my 2016 race schedule. Every year my schedule tends to be a fluid thing – always changing to accommodate my personal schedule and current fitness level. I have already deferred one race this year, the Ft. Lauderdale A1A Marathon, because I didn’t think I was properly prepared to run a marathon and hadn’t yet made travel plans. There are other races are on my calendar – some written in pen and some in pencil. Only time will tell which ones I run and which ones I take a pass on.
One race I am intent on running this year is in Lake Placid, NY. My good friend Dave runs a hockey store up there (Hockey Depot - the only place for hockey gear in the Northeast U.S.) and has two daughters around Samantha’s age. Last year I brought Sam up with me. The girls ran the kids race and then got to cheer for their fathers as Dave and I ran the Half Marathon.
I say we “ran” the half marathon, but maybe what I should really say is that we “finished” the half marathon. At some point, the hilly terrain forced both of us to walk. Despite being a little over six weeks from PR’ing the Cheshire Half Marathon, the Lake Placid Half completely kicked my ass, and I finished with my worst time ever in that distance.
Ever since I joined the Marriott’s gym in my building, I have been going there religiously at lunch and pushing out 4+ miles. It has pretty much become the bedrock of my training regimen, as it is the only time I can be sure (barring a busy workday) that I can consistently make it to the gym. It has developed into a nice routine and in a weird way I think having the time away from the desk has made me more productive at work, too. The routine has also got me to take notice of a few of the unsung benefits of weight loss that I might not have noticed otherwise.
After arriving at the gym, invariably there is a moment where I have to change my socks. It's just necessary - I’d look silly running in my black work socks, don’t you think? In the past, putting on socks for me had been somewhat of an ordeal. At 280 pounds, it was necessary for me to sit down on the bed and make a concerted effort to bend over and put each sock over my foot. Sometimes I would literally get winded. Of course, nobody was really there to see it – my ex-wife maybe, but I tried not to make a big deal about it. There are sometimes embarrassing moments when it comes to being big, and not being able to comfortably put on my socks was one for me. The thought sometimes struck me, “I wonder if I gain much more weight, if I’ll be able to put them on at all.” Thankfully, I never quite got that far to find out.
I have two running friends named Ed. I have no idea if they would want to see their full names on this blog, so I’m going to just name them Ed 1 and Ed 2. The Eds have been sources of information and inspiration for me over time, so I thought I’d take the time to acknowledge their contributions to my running career.
Ed 1 is my marathon training coach. I probably should say “was” my marathon training coach, but he can’t seem to escape me. Ed 1 was assigned to me by the American Cancer Society’s DetermiNation team and he helped me complete my first marathon in NYC back in November, 2014. Somewhere around mile 21 or so, I ran into Ed 1 on the course and he somehow got me to believe that I still had the strength to continue running through the finish. Afterwards, he stopped being a volunteer coach and went and got married (I really hope you took my advice on that pre-nup, Ed 1). Even though he quit coaching, and even left the country at one point, I still track him down for his running Edvice (I came up with that one.)
I didn’t hold back with Ed 1 – I asked him every question imaginable as I got deeper and deeper into training. Nipple bleeding, undercarriage chaffing, bowel movements… no topic was off-limits. Ed 1 earned his money… although he was just a volunteer, so he didn’t actually earn any money. But someone had to keep him honest, and I decided that someone was going to be me. And even though he quit the job, he still can’t get rid of me until he changes his email address and gets a new phone number. Maybe some plastic surgery. You ever see the movie “What About Bob?” Yeah, that’s me with Ed 1. I’m about to crash his vacation on Lake Winnipesaukee and he doesn’t know it yet.
WARNING: SPOILERS – Please only read if you have already seen the new Star Wars or if you’re not planning on seeing it at all.
I want to start off by saying that I’ve only seen the new Star Wars movie once and that I am actually dying to see it again. From a sheer entertainment point of view, it was incredible. It seemed an impossible task to weave a new story with the proper amount of nostalgia, but somehow they did it.
I told myself I’d try to write a little each day – whether that be on the blog or part of my book-writing resolution. Things were going pretty well – my daughter was in Disney with her uncle for a week and I was able to get some things in order and make plans based on what I thought I’d be able to accomplish over the next year.
Then she came home.
Samantha is such a wonderful 6-year old. She is smart, social, well-behaved and really doesn’t ask for much – just a little of daddy’s attention from time to time. I'm really lucky on that front.
Last week I began testing out my training options for 2016. I tried everything - I woke up early, I ran at lunch, I ran after work. I tried out some meal preparation plans - healthy options for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I went to Costco and loaded up on the things I thought I would need for the coming weeks. I tend to eat healthier when I make my own meals - it's just finding the time to make them that is sometimes tough.
Cucumbers, tomatoes, tuna made with a mustard/agave mix instead of mayo, red onion and my secret ingredient: sunflower seeeds.
