Back Up And Running

Managed a 55 minute run on Monday morning (2 mins run/3 mins walk). That's a decent speed and with no pain although it was run in my old "normal" shoes rather than the Vibrams.

This time before I ran I did a lunge matrix warm-up. What is a lunge matrix warm-up I hear you ask? Well ask no more, just click on the video below.


Lunge Warm-Up from CoachJayJohnson on Vimeo.

I also bought a new torture implement. It's called The Stick and is great at a) freeing up my calf muscles and b) causing huge amounts of pain in equal measure. Here's a photo of the cruel implement:

New instrument of torture

Tomorrow I will run a 45 minute session in the Vibrams again. Hopefully the mixture of warm-ups and The Stick will keep any pain at bay. Fingers crossed.

On another note, I found this link that shows the marathon times of famous runners (including celebrities and politicians). Good to see I've run faster than George W Bush and Sarah Palin.

Famous Marathon Runners

Here's my Monday morning run:

Setback!

Went out for a run on Monday morning, increasing my running section to 1 minute 30 seconds. All was going well for the first few repeats until about a mile into the run. I felt a twinge in my right upper calf. As I continued my run I could feel the twinge more and more. Thoughts quickly came to me of the pulled calf that I've been trying to recover from for the past four months. Doom and gloom!
The pain wasn't so bad that I couldn't continue my run but I am concerned that if I continue running as I am then it will make the pain worse and I'll be back at square one. The good news is that although the pain is in my right leg it is not in the same place as before so I think it's just a slight strain caused by overworking it too soon. Ever the optimist!
I spent the evening icing my calf with a bag of frozen peas that I always keep just in case of injuries and using my Omni massage roller ball that is excellent at causing the maximum amount of pain with the tiniest bit of effort!!

Instrument of torture

It's supposed to help break down scar tissue and I don't know if it does but it bloody hurts like hell!
I'll probably miss my next scheduled run or two until the pain subsides and start back again using my normal running shoes until my calf feels strong enough again to use my Vibrams.
To help strengthen my calves and once the pain has gone I will need to do regular stretches (which I've never done enough of!) as well as use my wobble board that should help improve my calf muscles and core strength. I bought it a couple of months ago and became rather good at it. To start with I felt like Bambi on ice but once I got to grips with it then I could stand on it for about 30 seconds at a time and even managed to do it on one foot only. Here's a fuzzy photo of my board:

Wobble board

I've noticed that the blossom is coming out nicely in the trees now and took a photo on one of my regular routes:

Blossom!

Anyway, enough rambling I need to get back to icing and painful massage. Here's my run from Monday, I hope to update another post as soon as my calf pain eases up.

Spring is almost here

I love this time of year for running. Everything starts to take on a new colour and it becomes both lighter and warmer in the morning.
I've always been a morning runner, I find it starts off the day in the right way. It's quieter and gives me a chance to get my head right before going to work. My absolute favourite run is an early morning long run on a Sunday. When I trained for the Brighton marathon last year I had to regularly run 19, 20 and 22 miles. From where I live this meant that I was able to run into central London and past all the tourist spots. On a Sunday morning there would hardly be anyone around and it was a bit like that scene at the start of 28 Days Later where the guy is just wandering aimlessly across the Thames. I would run through Hyde Park, down past Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, across the Thames, past the London Eye and back again via the Royal Albert Hall. I'd be back in the house by 9am when most "normal" people were just about getting up. I can't wait until marathon training starts again later this year so I can do some of my favourite routes that take me further afield than the local area.
That is one of the joys I get from running. Finding new routes. I've managed to discover pretty much all the canal paths, parks and general trails around where I live. I spend hours on mapmyrun.com just trying to find a new area that I've never explored before. The great thing about such sites as mapmyrun is seeing routes defined by other people that you've never thought of doing. Maybe I'm just sad!!
Anyway, back to how my "barefoot" running is going. I've increased the run part of the run/walk schedule to 1 minute of running. I have noticed that my calfs and ankles are doing a bit more work as well as the arches and balls of my feet. I'm presuming this is all to be expected as the muscles strengthen. Two more runs later this week on Wednesday and Friday. On the 5th June there's a 10k at Clapham Common so I think I'll enter that as it occurs just at the end of this training schedule. That will then give me two weeks before my marathon training starts.
Here's my first training run of the week:



I'm thinking of taking a camera on my training runs so I can take pictures as I go around and post them on here. Will have to find a decent camera that is lightweight and can take a bit of a battering should I drop it (which I will). Any suggestions welcome!

Finger Feet!

Finished my first week of run/walk with my Vibram Five Fingers.
I could kiss the ground with joy that I haven't had any recurrence of my pulled calf muscle.
My running style has had to change competely in order to run without smacking my heel on the floor. My turnover is quicker and I've noticed that I'm running slightly faster than I used to but this may be because of the fact that I'm only running for 30 seconds at a time. This could change as the running section of the training becomes longer, I'll have to wait a few weeks to find out.
After running in the Bikilas my feet feel like they've been stretched and massaged, especially on the balls of my feet. I guess this is due to the muscles and tendons in my feet becoming used to working more than they were previously in my running shoes. My calf muscle is holding up well. I've not felt any twinge at all which is promising since every time I've previously tried to start running since pulling my calf muscle I've only managed a couple of hundred yards before I had to turn around and perform the sad walk home thinking that my running days were over.
On a slightly more depressing point I've stood on the weighing scales for the first time in four months! Hoping against hope I thought I had somehow managed to maintain my racing weight of 12 stone 9lbs (177lbs for American readers or 81kg for those who deal in metric) even though I hadn't changed my eating habits one bit. Nature has a way of dealing with people like this and the scales showed that I had managed to put on exactly one stone (14lbs or 6kg)!! This works out at about 1lb of weight for each week I wasn't running. Since it takes an extra 3500 calories to gain 1lb of weight this works out as an extra 500 calories per day which would pretty much have been negated by the running that I should have been doing. The pulled calf muscle strikes again!
Anyway, here's a photo of my Vibram Five Fingers Bikilas. They do look odd and feel odd and certainly draw attention from passers-by but if they improve my running and reduce my injuries then they can look as odd as they want.


Here's my third and final run of the week. This was done in Chester which is my girlfriend's home town. There's some great routes around here, taking in the old city as well as the canals and country lanes surrounding it. For this run I just went up the nearby canal and back down the road because my schedule doesn't currently allow me to go further afield.



Next week I will be upping my run/walk to 1 minute running and 4 minutes walking!

First post! Not the last.

Hello. I'm a forty year old runner living in Ealing in West London. I'm hoping that by keeping this blog it will give me both a useful journal of my running activities and general thoughts about the world at large.
I've never kept a blog or even a diary before so will have to see how this goes. I've been reading other runners' blogs and thought how hard can it be? Well, pretty hard since it's taken me months to get from idea to reality. I think the problem is what to write.
Let's start at the beginning. I've been running "properly" for the last three years. Before that I would train for a couple of months for a 10k race and then do nothing else for the rest of the year before the next 10k race the next year. This all stopped in August 2008. I had signed up for the Nike 10k race in London and had trained for three months. Finally crossing the line in 65 minutes my usual pattern would mean hanging up my running shoes for another nine months and digging them out for the next Nike 10k. I have no idea why but this time I decided to carry on running two or three times a week. Before I knew it it was Spring and there were a plethora of races to enter. 10k race times came down and within a few months I was going sub-50 minutes. Progress! After 10k races came the half-marathon which whetted my appetite and I decided to go for the big one. So it came that on April 18th 2010 I found myself lining up for the inaugural Brighton Marathon. All the training came together and 3 hours, 44 minutes and 46 seconds later I found myself crossing the line. I vowed never to run another marathon again. I kept this promise for six weeks and then ran the Chester marathon! In October 2010 I ran the Cardiff Half-Marathon in 1 hour, 35 minutes and 6 seconds.
Then disaster struck.
While on a training run with my girlfriend I pulled my calf muscle. Nothing much I thought! How wrong could I be. Four months later and too many physio sessions to mention I am now able to run again. That's when I thought I could keep a blog to track my road to recovery as well as the road to my next marathon in Chester in October 2011.
The added twist to this is that I am going to change my running style completely and run wearing Vibram Five Fingers Bikila shoes. More on this in a future post but for now let me say that in order to do this I will have to start my training as though I have never run before. From running 6 days a week and averaging about 30 miles I am going to be following a run/walk training programme so my feet, calves and joints all condition themselves slowly. It may get frustrating but I'm hoping that slowly, slowly will indeed catchy monkey.
To that end here's my first training run using the run/walk method in my "finger feet" as my girlfriend calls them:



As you can see I'm not exactly smashing records yet!
That just about wraps up this post. I'm hoping that I'll find more of a style as I write more and more of these posts so if this one feels a little dry then give it time and before you know it I'll be a regular PG Wodehouse!