Bad medicine

I should have done lunges today.

I wasn't lazy -- I did the stationary bike for 45 minutes at an intensity I usually save for intervals. But somehow, I couldn't make myself do any kind of strength work. This is despite knowing, after three months of physical therapy, how good -- no, essential -- strength training is for runners.

I'm possibly one of the only people on earth to have a solely positive experience with physical therapy. Each appointment with Jason, who patiently solved the weird mystery of why I couldn't run, was like a session with a personal trainer who just happened to be certified to mess around with my hip joint to put it back in its proper place. And at the end of the three months, I could run again -- bonus!

At the end of my stint with Jason, I asked him which of the exercises in my routine I could drop if I got lazy.

"Um," he said, "they're all pretty basic. I would pretty much make sure you do them all."

A year later, I still faithfully perform the fun ones (shuffling around with a resistance band makes me feel like a linebacker) and the awful ones (leg lifts are the bane of my existence) a few times a week. I'd rather be running, but along with cross-training, this is the preventative medicine that KEEPS me running.

I'll get my butt into gear later this week on the lunges, leg presses, etc., and knock out a set of the dreaded leg-lifts tonight. In the meantime, I'll share my physical therapy workout here. It's a great preventative measure for uninjured runners, as the single-leg business doesn't allow you to rely on your stronger leg (yes, you have one) to get through the reps.

3 X 25 walking lunges
3 X 25 single-leg presses
3X 25 single-leg squats
Hamstring curls
Side shuffle with resistance band
Leg lifts with weights (I do these on each side, on my stomach and on my back. Here's a how-to for the side-lying lifts.)
Clamshells (shown here, along with lots of other interesting-looking running-specific exercises)

Best laid plans turn to ice

I had hoped to run six miles on Sligo Creek Trail today, and to write here about how invigorating it was to run in the cold.

I'm happy to report that I did, at least, run. None of the other plans worked out quite so well.

According to the National Weather Service, whose Web site has been a regular haunt of mine since it's been so frigid here, said it got to 37 degrees in Silver Spring today.

My response: Say WHAT?

I offer this hard evidence that it was not anywhere near 37 degrees: at 11 a.m., when I blew my nose on my glove, it froze in the air, leaving me with a horrible littlesnotsickle on my finger. This was about the point at which I first thought about cutting the run short.

Then, there was the matter of the orange fence between Wheaton Regional Park and Sligo Creek Trail, my intended destination. I've run parts of Sligo Creek Trail before, but I'd never started from Wheaton Regional Park. I tried to pick up the trail from the park this time, but instead, ended up running around the park again and again, thwarted by a fence marking some sort of trail construction. Rather than a simple out-and-back run, I ended up on a weird hill loop through a bunch of botanical gardens.

The good news: The park is really cool! The rolling hills and placid (OK, icy) ponds in the botanical gardens were pretty enough to run by three or four times. And the playground made me want to quit the whole running thing and just zoom down one of the biggest, baddest slides I've ever seen. It also provided some spectacular people-watching, from the guy on a unicycle on my way in to the family of little girls in pink coats playing tag through the gardens.

I'll definitely be back to Sligo Creek Trail for a long run when the weather's warmer. If Wheaton Regional Park doesn't provide enough entertainment, the trail apparently winds through a total of nine parks in Montgomery County.

Hustle and flow

I had planned to try a new running route today, and was so excited about hitting the road, I actually laid out both my route and my toastiest running clothes the night before.

A combination of looming work deadlines and hearing that this morning was the coldest in the past five years in Washington left me indoors for a quick, warm treadmill workout instead.

I've already moaned and groaned about how I don't like working out inside, so I'll move right on to coping mechanisms. I get past the boredom of treadmill time by doing speedwork. My typical workout is three 1-mile repeats at 8-minute mile pace. I usually get through this with a kick-butt playlist of six or seven songs (the best thing about a speed workout, in my mind, is the fact that it's over pretty quickly).

The get-through-it nature of treadmilling makes it a perfect place to try to get into that elusive happy place known as flow. Endurance athlete Christopher Bergland, author of "The Athlete's Way: Sweat and the Biology of Bliss," says this is "a key to making exercise a pleasurable experience, because it allows you to lose yourself in the moment--time flies, and you are totally engaged." Some call it meditation in motion. Former Washington Post writer Walt Harrington writes beautifully about finding flow while hunting with his father-in-law in The Everlasting Stream. And today, on a treadmill that may or may not have been properly calibrated, I found it, too.

This is no easy task for me. My brain is, as Elizabeth Gilbert would put it, a "big, spazzy free-for-all," where thoughts swing from tree to tree like so many monkeys. More often than not, it operates like a never-ending to-do list, always leaping to the next task
before I'm done with my current one.

So I started running to my typical gangsta-rap playlist. But after one Wutang Clan song, I moved on to a more meditative mix. I was sweating like a pig and panting like a dog, but inside, I was chill as I burned through three miles at 7:30-minute mile pace. I felt so good, I even turned it into a tempo run, nixing the jogs in between mile repeats (usually, when the mile is up, I all but punch the "stop" button on the treadmill to get a breather).

I can't say for sure that the treadmill wasn't calibrated incorrectly, like a pair of size-4 jeans you know should really be a size 6. I don't care -- for 21 minutes of the day, I was completely present and grounded, which is more difficult for me than any 7:30-minute mile.

Here's the playlist that helped me find my flow. I especially recommend the last one on the list -- let it wash over you while you're running fast, and see if you don't find energy you didn't know you had.

Wutang Clan, Protect Your Neck
Dear Sergio, Catch 22
Two Step, Dave Matthews Band, Live at Red Rocks
Halleluja, Jeff Buckley
Moving to New York, The Wombats
How it Ends, DeVotchka

Baby, it's cold outside

I have a love-hate relationship with the gym.

It's not working out I dislike. It's the cardio machines. They represent the opposite of one of my favorite things about running, summed up by this Jesse Owens quote: "I always loved running. It was something you could do by yourself, and under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.”

Today, the "blustery" 20-degree weather forecasted earlier this week came to pass (blustery is actually a pretty great adjective to describe today -- nice job, National Weather Service!). After losing the feeling in my fingers during a short bike ride to do some errands, I was driven inside, to the stationary bike in the little fake gym inside our building.

I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that working out on an electrical machine is basically the opposite of exercising by yourself, under your own power. It isn't seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and courage of your lungs so much as burying your nose in a book to forget the fact that you are, in fact, going nowhere on a piece of electrical machinery. UGH.

But here's the positive part of this blog post (I promise there is one!): I did 45 minutes on the bike, and while I didn't get quite the warm fuzzies I do after a good run, I felt doubly proud of myself for doing something healthy when I desperately didn't feel like it. As I got warmed up, I reminded myself that biking today would a) save my joints and muscles from two days of pounding in a row, b) strengthen muscles running doesn't, and c) make some bike ride down the road easier because I trained today. It also let me finish one book I've been working on for a while and start another that will probably end up being the subject of another blog post on another day. It's "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan. The theme: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Brilliant advice for us runners, who are easily wooed by Gatorade G2 and Power Gels (not that I'm giving these up during long runs ... I'm just saying.)

Here's how I powered through a stationary bike workout I didn't wanna do: I did a 45-minute interval workout based on a playlist that alternated Bob Marley songs with hip-hop party anthems. During the Bob Marley songs, I turned the resistance on the bike down to 12 and read my book(s). During the fast songs, I put the book down and cranked the resistance to 14. Despite all the bitching about not wanting to bike inside, I was honestly surprised so much time had passed when I checked the bike's digital readout.

Tomorrow's a swimming day,which I'm looking forward to immensely. Another thing I'm looking forward to immensely: Warmer weather!

Pacing (or failing to pace) with Pacers

As promised yesterday, last night's workout was a 5.1-miler with our running group at Pacers, the super-cool running store near our house. Typically, the party gets started around 7 p.m. by a store employee breaking people up into pace groups. The 6-to-7-minute milers head out the door, then the 8-minute milers, then the 9-minute milers, and so on, with several intervals in between.

Week after week, we watch runners of all speeds declare a pace, then proceed to run exactly that pace. To me, it's like watching people correctly predict tomorrow's lottery numbers.

See, I can't pace correctly for my life. My husband and current running buddy, Steve, isn't much better. We're great at "pacing ourselves" -- i.e., running at a level of difficulty that we can sustain for however long we're planning to run. It's not that we're sprinting out the door and crapping out a mile later. What mystifies us is how people can casually say, "I'm going to do 8:15-minute miles tonight," then proceed to do exactly that. I set time goals for races, but if I'm being honest, when I see the big digital clocks at the mile markers, my time is always kind of a surprise.

When we first started running with Pacers, a store employee asked what pace we typically run. Steve and I were both silent, waiting for the other person to talk. "Somewhere in the 9-ish range," I said. "Nine or, you know, 10-ish." I looked at Steve. "Right?" I said. "Yeah," he said. "Nine-ish, or 8-ish. Or 10-ish. More like 9-ish." It took us a few runs in a row of making people sprint through what they'd hoped would be easy workouts, or slowing down people who were banking on hard workouts, before we found our people. As it turns out, the definition of "our people" is each other, and anyone else willing to put up with our crazy, sporadic asses.We usually end up tailing people a bit faster than us and hanging on for dear life (yet another motivator: Running with someone faster than you, then having to stick with them because you don't know the way home).

We got to Pacers a couple minutes late last night, taking the pace declaration out of the equation. It was a great run, though. We did a new route, and it was pretty fabulous. The goes from Pacers in downtown Silver Spring, down quiet, residential Seminary Road and then past the looming craziness of the National Park Seminary, a complex that includes a Japanese pagoda, an English castle and the remains of a resort hotel. It's being refurbished and turned into apartments and condos. For now, it's a nice, if bizarre, diversion at the halfway point of the run. The run also provides a glimpse of the Mormon Temple, my friend from my Rock Creek Trail adventure last week.

Hopefully, Laura Cloher, who devises the Pacers fun-run routes, won't mind me sharing the Seminary Road route here. Enjoy it -- it's a great run at any pace.

Partners in crime, part deux

According to the National Weather Service, tonight will be 20 degrees and "blustery." I feel silly bitching about this since I spent four years bitching about running in the sticky, swampy heat in Florida (in the summer, it's like trying to breathe through a hot, wet washcloth), but this is NOT my preferred running weather. I have a few resources to help me cope, and I'll share them here.

First, check out an awesome compilation of Runner's World stories and tips for cold weather running here. The stories have all been incredibly helpful. The best tip I've culled so far: Draw a hot bath before you leave for a short run. It provides double motivation: You'll look forward to the hot, steamy bath waiting for you at home, and you'll wanna run quickly to avoid that hot, steamy bath turning lukewarm.

Another tip: Mizuno Breath Thermo gloves, made from some fancy material that actually heats up when you sweat. If you're a sweaty little dude like me, the effect is truly magical. Our friends at Pacers, our local running store, recommended them a month or so ago, and I've been borderline obsessed with them ever since.

Which brings me to my third secret weapon in fighting the cold: Pacers' "fun runs" on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7 p.m. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I get an e-mail with a brand-new running route in the Silver Spring area. We then meet half a dozen (or more in warmer weather) or so runners at the Pacers in downtown Silver Spring, and head out for a great big group run.

In the past, I've talked myself out of running with partners because I'm afraid I'll either slow down my training buddy or vice versa. This is partially because I'm totally spoiled from running with my best friend, Jen, in high school. We were almost exactly the same pace, which was awesome. More importantly, we had run together for so long, we could communicate solely by grunting and spitting (we try to only do this when we run -- it can really make things awkward at the dinner table). My only real running partner since then has been my husband. He's faster than me, which makes even casual runs kind of like tempo runs for me. The key is, I can make him slow down without guilt or shame on account of the fact of us being married.

Pacers has been great in breaking me of my fear of running with new people. We break up into pace groups ranging from the insane 6-7-ish minute miles all the way to 10-11 minute miles. Steve and I usually fall somewhere in between. We've met some great people doing it, and it takes SO much of the guesswork out of running. Where should I run? When? With whom? These questions are all answered for me. And since it's in the evening, I have something to look forward to all day long.

What's motivating you to get out and train in the cold? Share your tips by posting a comment below.

A partner in crime

In half-marathon-training and in life, it helps to have a partner who shares your goals. It's even more helpful if that partner is more experienced and more ambitious than you are.

For me, that's my friend Whitney, who's training for the National Marathon (note that the "Half" is missing — she's going for the full 26.2). She is both experienced (this is her fifth marathon) and down-to-earth, a rare and awesome combination I'll be counting on frequently throughout my training.

Best of all, you can rely on her expertise and support, too, 'cause she's gonna be blogging, too! I'll be hosting her blog on my Web site. Check back often for progress updates from both of us.