Rusty's Blog

Well, as you can probably tell by the title, I’m not really satisfied with my results today. I can come up with a number of plausable reasons, or combinations of reasons, but it comes down to either re-do this week, or redo today’s run this weekend.

As I’ve indicated before, I work nights, and last night was no exception. So when I ran this morning I had come off of a 12 hour shift, along with about a 1 hour bus ride each way. On top of that, I did not sleep well yesterday. I think I was up some 5 times in the 7 hours I was planning on sleeping. So when I went to run this morningI was not in the best condition. That said, I had hoped to do better than I did. I would say that I don’t think I did as well today as I did Wednesdayh, but I could be wrong.

I started out well enough. I got further during my warm up walk than I had the last time I too anything like this route. Once I started running I was going along well enough, but at about 7 and a half minutes I had to recover. I walked for about a minute, then got back going again. 2 and a half minutes later I needed to recover some more. This time I think I walked for a minute and a half. Then I got back to running. I’m a bit fuzy on how long I ran this time. I wasn’t tracking the intervals this time very well, but I did take another walking break and got to running with about four and a half minutes left, and stuck to it till the end of the 20 minute interval. So worst case I walked about 5 min of the 20, and best case I walked about 4 minutes.

My plan at the moment is to try to get a good night’s sleep Saturday night, and make another attempt Sunday morning. If that works, I’m going to roll Week 6 a day back and start Tuesday morning. I’ll take to running before I go to work in the evening. Presumably I will get a good day’s sleep on Thursday and Saturday. Then I’ll continue on with Week 7 the following Monday.

This schedule presents some problems for me participating in the 5K in June, as if I didn’t have enough problems with that, but I’m hoping that by then I will be in much better condition, and should be able to do a run like this, or longer, OK, quite a bit longer. It may not be ‘with ease’ and I’m not planning on setting any records in any case, but we’ll see what things look like in a week or so.

I suspect that one thing that will happen this weekend, is that I will force myself through a affine withdrawl headache. I suspect that is one of the things that kept waking me up yesterday.

Just loaded up the MP3 player with Friday’s set for the week. I have a little bit more time available to me today than I was thinking.

Somewhat out of plan for this morning was an early morning run. I normally plan on running around noon or very early afternoon on Wednesday, so that I can run either when I get home Friday morning, or before I go to work Friday afternoon, or even Saturday morning should that be the best opportunity.

However this week I have a dental appointment a little before 8 this morning, and I really didn’t want to have to be concerned about how a workout would either effect, or be affected by the recovery from that. So chose to wake up about 5 this morning and get the workout out of the way first thing.

The sky was already lightening up significantly by the time I got out and hit the streets. and I noticed that for the first time my shins were not complaining about the walk. They didn’t complain about the first run either. Today’s routine was a 5 min warmup walk, an 8 min run, 5 min of recovery walking, 8 min of run, and a walkout. The MP3 walkout was about 2 min, though I was further from home than that by about 8 min.

A couple of things concerned me duirng the first run. A bit of carry over from what sleep I got, or what kept me from sleeping well. I woke up about 2 am and had a vary substantial, though not solid bowl movement. I was a bit concerend about the prospect of having the runs today, though other than a second episode about an hour later, it has not continued to be an issue. On the other hand my stomach was not feeling the best either. So during the run I was a bit concerned that I would end up thinking I was passing gas, only to end up with very fowled shorts. That didn’t happen. I was also concerned because on at least a couple of occasions during the run I felt very much like I needed to throw up as well. Fortunately that did not become a significant issue either. Oh, my stomach still does not feel it’s best, but it is significnatly better than when I started.

I don’t know if it’s because of whatever bug I’m fighting off, or if it’s just because this was one of my first times with some fairly long runs in the mix, but for the first time after a run I’m feeling a bit chilly in a way that does not feel purely like I am cooling off from evaporation. I suppose it could also be the cool temp on the walk out, but I think I understand a bit better why runners need a blanket to warm up with at the end of a run.

Over the years when I was in HS, and the Army, all my exercise workouts ended with me going inside towards the end of the cool-down period. I was always fascinated by the fact that while I knew that I perspired while running, the recovery phase almost always included me being heavily coated in sweat.That said, I tend to suspect that the situation I’m dealing with now is the result of this bug dehydrating me, and I now need to address that as well.

When I was in College, one of my ROTC instructors had commented to people that running was not the best way to lose weight. Oh, it was find as part of a program that included other things, such as watching what you eat, and light weight work, but the problem with ‘running’ to lose weight is that more often than not, you replace the fat with an equivalent of muscle. Walking is more often than not going to give you better results for loosing weight. That said, you rarely see long distance runners, and I consider anyone regularly running more than a 400 meter distance to be a long distance runner, as unusually heavy. Part of that is that if you are carrying too much mass, you can’t effectively run long distances. So people who are interested in running more than a couple hundred yards or meters, and do so with some regularity, tend to change other aspects of their routine and diet to accommodated the changes they need to make. I will say that I really haven’t lost a significant amount of weight in the past month, but that may be changing as I will need to make changes along the way myself.

Assuming I don’t mung the data again, the kml will be at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c25k/May06.kml Remember that you can paste that link directly into google maps to see the route I took, or download it and open it in Google Earth to see the details as well.

Stay safe.

Literally just got back from my first workout this week. Legs muscles are still twitching. That will happen for another 20 min or so I suppose. If it goes on beyond that I would be somewhat surprised. the KML for today’s workout will be at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c2k5/May04.kml once I have it collected. If you look at the route I took today, you can see approximately what my 5k route is. I actually have two possibilities, one is to just do the loop around the blocks you see I’ve started today, the other is a bit longer, but gives me a reasonable walkout, and that’s to run down to Winetka, then up 36th, and walk about 6 blocks. If I take the ‘shorter’ route, I need to come up with a way to do the cool down walk as well, and I don’t think walking back along the initial 5 min warmup walk is going to be enough. But that’s the better part of a month away.

Today’s workout was interesting in that I kept telling myself during the walk portions that I really could be jogging a bit. I chose not to, if only because I also remember that near the end of each jogging/running portion, I really felt like I needed to do some walking. The pace felt good.

This week is a bit different workout routine wise. It’s the first of 2 weeks where the routine each day is different. And this firday I should have a 20 min run under my belt.

Well, the leg twitching is going down, so I am going to og and talk with the dogs, let them know how much I appreciate them watching the apartment, and see if I can scrounge up something to eat.

Edit:

Well, unfortunately my GPS did not retain the track information, when I mistakenly pushed the track from last Friday, instead of pulling the track that was sitting on the GPS. So it will take me a bit, but I’ll generate a path .kml file of the route I took, and attempt to identify transition points, but it will be anything but perfect from the perspective of what my real path was. That said, it won’t have me crossing streets that I didn’t cross, or have me running head long into traffic on busy streets, through and over buildings, etc. However since I can’t edit points on the path, it does have me running on lawns that I didn’t actually travel over…

Another week done. 5 more to go. A buddy of mine in the service, had taken up running for a while, and one day just stopped. Oh, he continued with PT and such, but in hs spare time he had been running as well. The reason he gave for stopping the running in his spare time had nothing to do with finding something else to do that was taking up his time, it had to do with the fact that he finished a run one day, felt ‘good’ and then realized that he had just run 10 miles, and felt good. In his world view, someone who has run 10 miles should not ‘feel good.’ Oh, he was OK with the endorphins, but he was not OK with the fact that he was not feeling any effects in his feet or llegs, etc.

I’m anything but in that boat at this point. But I can see me getting to the point where I’m pretty much OK with the 5k segment.

My workout today is already posted as a KML file. If you open maps.google.com then in the search field, type http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c25k/May01.kml, you should see my course show up for today. It’s not perfect, when you zoom in close, you’ll see that it thinks I wandered through some walls on an apartment building, and spent a lot of time on people’s lawns and suck. I gues I can say that fortunately it doesn’t show me swimming at 49 miles an hour though.

S stuck with the road I started the run on today, and ended up a block from the next major cross road. where I traveled around the block, and came most of the way back on the street one street over. I walked and ran on that till I got back to the cross street that I had used Monday and Tuesday, followed that to the bottom of the hill, went around the lake, and then followed the street that had confused me on Monday, ending the final run a block north of where I ended up turning on Monday.

Odd as it may seem, I’m looking forward to the bbegining of next week now. Part of that is the wanting to get this over with part of me, the other part is looking forward to having different schedules each of the three days next week, as well as for the week following. I’m still not enthused about Friday’s run this next week, but that will happen, so I’ll take that on as it get’s here.

Till next time, have fun.

I ran at about the same time today as I did on Monday, but for my ‘Wednesday’ schedule it was significantly earlier. I heard a Ham mention that it was raining pretty hard where he was as he was going to the gym, and knowing that it is supposed to rain today, I decided that now would be a better time to go for the run than latter. I ccan always take a nap later on and get rested up for my overnight at work. I’ll only have one sleep cycle between now and my next run, but it will be about 44 hours away, so that should work out ok.

I grabbed the foretrex gps today, somewhere in storage I have a forerunner 201, but I have never gotten a good sync to a computer with it, which I do get out of the foretrex. The down side is that the foretrex really isn’t designed around exercise, but I’ll at least be able to get the tracks and hopefully be able to post a link to a .kml file with an embeded google maps page as well. We’ll see.

I started on mostly the same path today as I took on Monday. However when I came out of the General Mills nature preserve, the first place I could take a right, I did. It wasn’t quite as much help as I would have liked, because that street immediately turned back to the left. Oh well. I took another right at the next intersection, which put me back on Monday’s route. However where I turned left to start my path back on Monday, I continued on for another 2 blocks before turning left today. When I got to the end today, I was pretty much at the same point that I ended on Monday. Which means that I ran just a bit further today than Monday, which I think is a good thing. I’m not about to go out and run the route a second time, but I’m begining to feel like I could possibly go a bit longer, perhaps run one more 3 or 4 min portion. In other words, I’m feeling OK at this point.

I got in and immediately walked the dogs, then fed them.Yesterday I took each of them out for a walk around the block. The one that people immediately think of as likely to be a good running companion, my lab, probably never will run very well again. She was hit by a car as a pup, and tends to drag her left front foot. She’s also 11 years old, which puts her pretty close to the end of her expected lifespan. She’s still bouncy when she gets excited, and the foot dragging really only happens when she’s tired, so I’m hoping to get her in a bit better shape by walking her on my off days. We only went around one of the neighborhood blocks, and she was pretty much worn out for the next couple of hours. Not to say she wasn’t willing, but I knew that she needed to get some rest.

My other dog is an American Eskimo. We took a longer walk, for a number of reasons. He’s smaller, so while he is 2 years older than my lab, he’s still in better shape age wise. Mostly though he was nearly always running the retractable lead out to it’s full length. We ended up walking about a mile, and he was still ready for more. Once I’ve finished the 9 week course, I’m thinking of adding a couple of build up days into the mix for me to bring him up to possibly being a running companion. During his walk before he ate this morning, he did something I haven’t seen either of them do in a long time. He took off running pretty much the length of the dog run, looped at the end and ran nearly half the way back then walked back up to the end to wait for us to get there to go in. It’s pretty good to see him get excited like that. Perhaps the walk did them both some good.

One difference about today’s run, vs. Monday’s, is that I didn’t think much about next week during the run. When I started the workout, there was a very light rain. I wouldn’t even call it a drizzel. The rain drops were larger, but very infrequent. Lot’s of dry spots where tree leaves had caught the rain, and no pooling at all. As I was approaching the General Mills preserve, even that died off, and by the time I got to my turn around, I was running on dry pavement. As I got to the end of the workout it was doing the light rain thing again, and I was wondering how things are going to work out weather wise on Friday. I guess I am at the point of saying that Next week will take care of itself.

Ok, after playing around with things, here is the map with my route for today. Ignore the first 4 points, I assure you I never got up to 45 miles per hour. WordPress apparently does not like iframes, so feel free to follow the link, or not. If you would rather, you can paste the kml url from my sebsite to maps.google.com’s search field, and will get pretty much the same thing. http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c25k/April29.kml
View Larger Map

Very late start today. Most Mondays I like to get out and run either before sunrise, or along with the sun rise. However I didn’t really even wake up much before 9 today because of my weekend. (I worked Saturday night, 7 pm to 7 am, then after a quick run home to put radio batteries on the carger, feed and walk the dogs, throw together an extension cable for a radio in the car, and grab a few things I drove down to Montgomery and worked to provide radio assistance for the Iron Man Bike Ride 100 mile leg from 11 am to 3 pm. I may blog more on that later, but not right now. I got to sleep around 9 pm last night and apparently needed it.)

Last Friday I felt like I was fighting to run the entire way, so I was a bit concerned that I would have some of that this morning, but after feeding and walking the dogs, I decided that there was no sense in putting the running off any further. I am glad I did the walking the dogs first however as it was much cooler than I was expecting, and the experience suggested changing to something a bit warmer than a t-shirt and running shorts. I do need to pick up some sweat pants this week though.

I could feel that my body wasn’t fully stretched out when I started. I had to cross a couple of intersections at a light jog to reduce my impact on traffic, and my legs did protest. However after the first 5 min warmup walk when the cue happened to switch to jogging, I pushed and away I went. Of course today’s ‘route’ had me running up hill for this first run of the day. No, the ‘rest’ of the run was not all down hill, but most of the warmup walk had been. About the time the cue came to switch back to walking, I had gotten almost all the way to the top of the hill, and my first ‘turn’. I don’t quite run a square, but running mostly on streets, you kind of go where the roads are.

A short walk to catch my breath and realize that the jog hadn’t put me out of my misery, and that I would probably be OK, and the second cue to run came up and I was jogging down that hill and into the General Mills nature preserve. I’m not entirely sure how much ‘nature’ is preserved with paved walkways, but it may be a lower impact to the environment than having people walking through the mud and so on.

Just about the time I got out of the nature preseve, the second jog ended, and I was back to walking. I could hear traffic ahead of me, and thinking I was pretty sure I hadn’t gone far enough to be hearing Winnetka traffic, I started looking for landmarks. I spotted a tower, and thought, “I don’t recall anything like that being over there” looked around a bit more, and finally spoted the water tower close to home. “Ah, well, we’re too early in this run to be heading for home yet today.” So I back tracked a short distance, and took a right from the path I had been traveling. At the same time I was cued to go back to running.

This time I was going up a much more gentle hill, and to tell the truth, other than seeing a couple of people with dogs, or being followed by a dog, I have to admit that I don’t remember anything specifically memorable about this jog. About the time the jog ended, I made the turn that pointed me back at my route home. So for a short walk to catch my breath again.

Finally the last jog started, and within a block I was on the sidewalk on the road home. I would not say that I ‘felt good’ on this block, I could definately feel that I had been running, and there were quite a few instances where I would have been more than happy to stop and end it, but I have to admit that the fight about running that I felt last Friday wasn’t there. I could go on during this portion of the run. And while there was no ‘cheering’ related to the end of the running portion, and the walk out, I felt pretty good.

I have not run ‘competitively’ since high school. Even then I would not consider my running to be very competitive. I know I never ‘won’ an event, and dead last was not exatly an unusual experience for me.

For the 10 years or so that I was in the army, I went through various experiences related to running. However as far as the army is concerned, you really don’t compete. Oh there are track and field events that the Acadamy has, but I didn’t go to the Point, so those didn’t apply.

That said, the aftermath of Desert Storm did give me the opportunity to get into running a bit more than otherwise. I was stationed at Kobar Towers for about 3 months while they figured out what our priority was for getting back to the states. And there I got into a habit of jogging every morning and night, around the compound. There was an impromptu race held, but I had decided some time back that ‘races’ really were not something I was interested in participating in. I was doing my running, mostly because I didn’t like the idea of sitting around doing nothing but reading, and I wasn’t particularily interested in sitting on top of the towers getting a tan and working with weights.

I’ve never run in an event longer than 3 miles. 5k may only be .16 miles longer, or another 800 feet or so, but from a competition point of view, it is ‘longer’ than 3 miles. And to tell the truth, from my perspective, I don’t need to compete with anyone. I’m already reaping rewards from the workout. Aches and pains I’ve had for several months have been going away. Clothing that has been too tight to wear, is beginning to fit again. (It’s still to tight, but not quite as tight as a month ago.)

And catching the bus last week was only ‘bad’ in that it was definately too cold to be standing around as long as I did.

More on Wednesday.

This past winter, I’ve dealt with an arm that wouldn’t function properly, and a back that got sore shortly after I had to chase down one of my dogs. For about a month and a half, getting out of bed in the morning has involved rolling over on my side, and pushing myself up.

“Oh, that’s all part of aging.” I can hear some people saying. And while those are some things that do happen as on gets older, it’s not strictly aging as I see it. A little over 8 years ago I made a commitment to loose weight. And I went from over 250 lb, down to 180 lb and possibly lower. I did so through a regime of walking 4 times a week and taing an over the counter ephedrin supplement. One of the reasons I chose to loose the weight was that two uncles and an aunt on my dad’s side, all suffered from and may be considered to have died from, the side effects of type II diabetes. I was hoping to avoid that.It didn’t quite work out that way. After I lost the weight, I noticed some vision problems, and knowing that it had been several years since I had last had a physical, I made an appointment to see a doctor, and one of the outcomes of that visit was a diagnosis of diabetes. Along the way I also was diagnosed with heart problems, and elevated (if not high) blood preasure.

Since I was diagnosed with Diabetes, my weight has gone up again. I’m up over 220 now, and that is where I consider the source of my pains and displeasures of late to be. I would love to say that wasn’t the case, but I’m a bit more realistic than that.

While there is not a defined link between Ephedra and heart problems, as was the case with PhenPhen, there is enough of a correlation that even though it is now legal to be sold over the counter, I won’t even consider it today. Especially as I have had a reduced function in my heart.

I’ve tried to get back into the walking, without much in the way of a positive outcome. I have to admit that I’ve usually thought of it as a way of loosing weight though, not as a way of just getting into better shape. The reality is that it is a great way to get into shape. And I encourage anyone who is concerned about their lifestyle to start walking. You’ll find it to be a great way to find out what’s going on in your neighborhood, what’s happening at the mall, or wherever you choose to walk. The reality is that it’s one of the few aerobic exercise routines that you can do pretty much any time of the year, in almost any weather. I’d advocate not walking during huricaine and blizard events, but you get the idea.

A week or so ago, one of the people I follow through one of the RSS feeds I monitor, anounced that he had just met his goal of 100 kg. For those of us in the US with the unfortunate side effect of not using the global standard metric measurement system, that turns into 220 lb. He has just started going to the gym, but had already gone from 110 kg to 100 kg following the c25k program. For a more detailed explanation of c25k, go to http://www.c25k.com and look into the program. As an overview the idea is to go from being a couch potato to being able to run 5 kilometers. (About 3.1 miles.) The general principle is very much like what I was doing when I was walking, though there are differences.

The process I used for walking was to break my routine up across a week, with each week being a little bit more strenuous. My work schedule at the time was 8 am to 6 pm on Wed, Thur, Fri and Sat. I would ride the bus in to work, then ride out to a local shopping mall after work, and walk, followed by going home. I started on New Years Eve the year after my mom died, and because I was very much out of shape, that day I walked around the mall once on one floor. It turns out the distance is about .4 miles. (.64 km.) The next day I walked around each floor once, and did that for the next two days, and the first day of the following week. The second day of that week I added a second trip around the first floor, going in the opposite direction. The third day of that week I went up to 4 trips around, then back to 3 on the final day. Three trips around the first day of the third week, a fourth on the second, a fifth on the third, then back to 4 on the fourth. And so on. Ever week on Wednesday I would start with the number of trips around that I had done the Saturday before, then add one on Thursday, another on Friday, then back down a lap on Saturday. This continued until I was doing 10 laps around, or 5 turns per floor. At that point I switched to 10 laps on Wed and Saturday, and 12 laps on Thursday and Friday, and stayed there for a while. That’s about 4 miles on Wed and Saturday, and almost 5 on Thursday and Friday. I could have added more, at least on Wed through Friday, but the mall closed at 7 on Saturdays then, and I was walking around an empty mall by the time I was done on Saturday. Which gets a bit old.

Along with the Ephedra, I lost 70 lb. to get some perspective on that, the largest bag of dog food I can get at the grocery store I shop at is 17 lb. I lost the equivalent of more than 4 bags of dog food. I also ended up having to spend entirely too much money on new clothing that  now doesn’t fit.

But that’s not why I am starting a workout regime at this time. Yes, I do weigh more than I want to. By a lot larger margine than I like. However my real concern right now is that through all the walking, and in the years since then, I’ve never regained my ability to run or jog.

Over the years I’ve ridden public transit from time to time, as noted by how I got to and from work above. Oddly enough, I’ve noticed that the areas I have lived in have always had a mixed reputation for having usable bus schedules. Shortly after I bought my first house, the bus route that I was riding which picked up litterally 3 blocks from work, moved 2 blocks over, to being 5 blocks from work. Where I live now has no Saturday/Sunday service, so while it pics up a block from work and drops off a block from home, I really can only ride it to and from work twice a week. (I work a different schedule now.) I’ve tried a few alternatives, but at best, I’m looking at an hour (or more) between rides that will take me home, so when I see a bus that I need to catch, it seems reasonable to me that I may have to move quickly to catch it.

Only, during all this time, I haven’t been able to. I get about half a block into chasing a bus, and I’m winded. Note that reduced functionality of my heart. It has had a lot to do with that. As has my excess weight at other times. I want to change that. So now I’m following the c25k program. I strongly suspect that I will make some changes to it for my own benifit. Specifically if I see myself not progressing as I would like, I may double up on some weeks.

The c25k program starts out as a 9 week program. You start by walking 5 min to limber up a bit, then jog a minute, and walk a minute and a half, alternating that for 20 min. You do this three times the first week. Preferably Mon, Wed, Fri, to give your body a  day to recover between exertions. That said, if week 2 ends up being too much preasure on Monday, I’ll happily revert to repeating week 1. What happens in Week 2 is a reversal in the times for jogging and wallking after the 5 min warm up walk.

My real goal is not to be able to compete in a 5 km race. In fact I have to admit that I’ve already seen some of the benifits this first week.

Remember how I described how I have been getting up in the morning? Well for the first time in well over a month, when I got up today, I pretty much just sat up. No rolling over on my side, and looking for purchase to push my way out of bed.

It’s nice to be able to get up and go.