Category Archives: Fitness

4 Under 45 on My 45th!

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Not too bad for an old gal!

A couple of months ago, I told you all I had a running goal to beat by my birthday. I just know you’ve thought of nothing else since then, right? Well, I wanted to hurry up and post my results so you can get back your normal life, so here you go.

I had picked completely arbitrary numbers to try to beat. I was still 44, so I wanted to run 4 miles in 44 minutes or less. Alas, I forgot that I was supposed to do the race before turning 45. I just realized yesterday, after doing a leg workout, that I had misremembered my own goal. Smart, huh? Now just imagine the chaos when I’m trying to follow somebody else’s rules. So I turned my challenge into a birthday run. I needed to do something fun for myself today, anyhow.

As I said in the announcement post, I knew the original goal of 4 10-minute miles in a row was out of reach for me in that short amount of time, so I eased it up to 4 miles in 44 minutes. Did I make my goal? Well…

Sorta. It’s within the 44 minutes. I am as ecstatic with this result as if I had shaved off that last 45 seconds! Just look how cool those numbers are! 4 in 44:44, 313 calories (as if that mattered at all), 145 bpm at 45. I just think this is numerologically neat, ridiculous as numerology is.

My fastest 5k to date, as well, except for one fluke back before I got a new watch and lost the old data. I can’t prove it, but I had a 32-minuteish 5k once. Anyway, today’s 5k:

The first several seconds of my run were comprised of Myself arguing with Myself over whether she actually wanted to be doing this today. I was moving, but not really. You know how it is. No starting gun, no adrenaline rush. Next time I’ll have a kid out there with a gun. Why didn’t I think of that?

I guess you could say I missed the mark, if you wanted to be a Negative Nancy about it. But I don’t. I am a Positive Polly. I did 4 miles under 45 on my 45th! If you’re chasing arbitrary numbers (as I do), that’s pretty neat! And I expect sometime in the next month or two to hit my real goal of consistent, consecutive 10-minute miles. I’m improving!

What went wrong:

Now, in retrospect, some things could have gone better. My slow start due to feeling like crap is the thing I feel worst about. I really should have grabbed that thing by the…you know…the thing, and just RUN. There were also a couple of times I slowed down because I was daydreaming. I had no spectators besides some thoroughly underwhelmed cows, so that slowed me down a little.

May be an image of grass

Thoroughly Unimpressed

I did pass one very nice gal in a Subaru who smiled so big it relit my fire for a good half mile.

I forgot to tank up on electrolytes before I went. Who knows? That might have been a good or a bad thing. Less chance of stomach-sloshies or needing to pee. But I do usually feel like having my drink before I go makes me feel better. I think that “mistake” probably didn’t affect me either way.

Like my first real race, I didn’t sleep well the night before. I don’t know why I’m always scheduling my races while I am pre-menstrual, but both runs were preceded by a miserable sleepless night due to hormones. Carnivore has taken care of every single one of my PMS symptoms except that one night of insomnia a couple of nights before I start. I think that if I’d “fat fast” the couple of days before it, that might solve this problem. Gonna try that next month. If anybody has any other ideas what to do about this, I’d be happy to hear it! Drop a comment!

Last night I was pretty sure, given my mood and this massive cold I seem to be coming down with, that I was going to have to post something pretty embarrassing today. I didn’t even want to do it, I was so draggy and sad and sniffly. But I did it anyway.

What went right:

Once I started moving, I had fun, and felt really good. If running weren’t fun for me, I’d find something else to do with my scant leisure time. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Zone 2 training, Maffetone method, and the like. A few weeks ago, I decided to change the way I run, backing off to a less impressive speed most of the time, in order to keep my heartrate down. Even though I was pretty sure it would knock me out of achieving this goal, I felt in the long run that it would make me much, much faster, and (more importantly) healthier. But slowing down all those weeks, surprisingly, didn’t stop me! It made me better, even in such a short time. That 145 avg heart rate is very good for me at that pace! I’m over the moon about this!

I have a really good sense of how I will perform. As with my April race, I was gratified to see that my estimate of what I am capable of, and then my ability to get pretty close to that, are fairly accurate. I set ambitious goals, and I really do try to reach those. But I am also very good at not getting so ambitious as to discourage myself. I like how good my instincts are for how far I can go on the training load I am able to fit into my busy life. Especially since I focus more on strength than running, I am stoked to see how much I have improved in a short time, just because I’m turning out to be a good trainer.

I didn’t talk myself out of the win. 

I felt like crap, y’all. All I could think all morning was “Why do I do these things to myself?” Well, I do them because that’s just who I am now: Not a quitter. Not a fearer. Not a loser. Not even that extra 45 seconds made a loser of me. I’m just too happy with how far I’ve come!

Don’t ever talk yourself out of a win, friends. Maybe you can’t measure up to the gal next door, and you sure won’t ever beat the one on social media who’s been running for years (Michelle Hurn, I’m looking at you!), but you can do your best for that day. It might hurt. It might come at some cost. But you can do something to make today a win. Don’t wait for something outside of yourself to make your day feel like a good one, whether it’s your birthday or not. Take the bull by the horns. I did, and now I don’t have to go my whole birthday feeling like a loser.

I did GOOD, y’all! I gave myself a wonderful birthday present. I pushed myself and got some very cool numbers at the end, no manipulation.

I WON!

 

Run Dump!

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I’m just gonna puke it all up here.

If you zoom in, you can see my little “Suffering Christ” pins I bought to hold the bib on. To Him be all the glory and praise! I know I talk up the Meat Life, but it’s only Jesus that makes me even want to live.

So, I did a thing. And now I’m sitting here, just smiling. And smiling is what I’ve been doing for days in the run up to this…er…this run. I have been so over-the-moon happy to be doing this!

I am having a hard time nailing down why it is that the mere idea of running a race–one which I never had a hope of winning or placing–makes me so happy. For days, I’ve been falling asleep with a smile on my face, thinking “I get to run! I get to race!”

Then last night…well, no smiling happened last night. Instead, I just lay there trying to sleep. You know how it is: when you know you need your rest, it’s really hard to fall asleep. You don’t smile when you’re trying as hard as you can to shut down your excitement and go to sleep. (UPDATE: Actually, this turned out to be PMS insomnia, which I am prone to.) I expect the next race I enter to affect me a little less this way.

Anyhow, I woke up, packed a breakfast for the family to eat while they waited for me at the finish line, and went and ran this thing:

On about 3 hours of sleep. And a weak left ankle. I’m not making excuses. Just telling the sad truth. I was not really in the best shape for this race because of these two things. But I was mentally into it, so I did it anyway. All things considered, my expectation to cross the finish line in an hour and twenty minutes (remember when I said I was slow?) was not too far off the mark. Taking it easy so as not to blow out my Achilles tendon, which I’m working on strengthening, I did it in 1:23! Woot! My average pace was an unimpressive 12 minutes per mile.

I finished ahead of only (I think) five other runners. Almost everybody, even the old people, came in ahead of me. I “lost”. By a LOT. I’m still happy.

And it’s because I’m so grateful. Six years ago (actually, my calendar tells me it was more like seven now), I could not breathe because of asthma. I could not run because I was fat and my right knee hurt all the time. Even if I could have run, I’d have had so much social anxiety that I’d have never considered going out in front of God and everybody and making an absolute fool of myself. But the biggest smiles I’ve smiled when anticipating this race have been the ones where I knew I was going to make a fool of myself. Because it doesn’t matter! I’m a fool? The world needs fools, too!

I had fun. I did something hard. I beat me. I beat Ten Years Ago Me. I even beat Last Week Me:

All personal bests!

Now, nobody is going to look at that and say “Wow! What a natural talent!” Really, I’m 4’11”. I’m not ever going to outpace people with actual legs. But I got faster today. And I’ll get still faster tomorrow. And eventually those numbers might start to look respectable. Maybe. If they don’t? Who cares?

What’s respectable about all this is not the numbers, but how far I’ve come. I’ve worked to be able to do this. I’ve sat at the dinner table with people eating “normal” food and cried because I knew I was never going to enjoy pizza again. I’d love to be able to say it was a tear of joy running down my cheek because I was so glad to be rid of all my health problems, but it wasn’t. I was just sad not to eat pizza anymore. (There are carnivore-keto ways to simulate pizza, by the way. But they don’t agree with my system very well, so I don’t eat them.)

I’ve been lifting weights, rowing, and running for a few years now.

I’ve done the hard work of getting myself to enjoy human contact, after living most of my adult life in abject dread of social interactions. I’m not going to try to make it sound like it was worse than it was. I was able to get the kids to church and playdates and basically live a normal life. But it was miserable. I cried–or cringed–myself to sleep frequently. Social anxiety sucks! But I beat it.

I deserve the respect I have for myself right now. 

As the last two runners came in at the 1:43 mark, I cheered for them as hard as I could. I was as proud of them as I was of the guy who finished in FORTY-FOUR minutes! Maybe those slow finishes don’t mean much to a “real runner”, but we have no idea what they may have overcome to be able to get to that finish line.

They didn’t lose. They just won last.