Keith and I have an ongoing quest to help each other knock goals off our “life lists.” We call it “Two Guys, One List” and you can find out more about it — plus our tentative lists — if you click on “What’s 2G1L?” at the top of the page.
Ideally, since some of those goals will cost oodles of money and/or time to accomplish, we’d like to leverage our growing fame from this blog into corporate sponsorship opportunities. Yes, I would like to climb a mountain. But I’m perfectly happy to do so wearing only gear from “Mountain, Inc” and blogging about my “PowerDrinkTM Extreme Adventure.”
Anyway, because Keith’s a sucker, he’s signed up to run a marathon with me, as a symbolic first goal to accomplish. We decided to take it slow, to train over the course of a couple of years, and to run the Manitoba Marathon, tentatively, in 2010.
Last year, I ran a 10K for the first time, and I could suddenly grasp that a marathon was actually possible, so Keith and I decided to aim for a half-marathon this spring and the full deal next year. We figured that would allow us to train slowly and consistently. We would be able to recover from any injuries or attacks of laziness, and we could focus on other things rather than just running all the damn day.
On Sunday, we completed the half marathon at the Brandon YMCA Spring Run. I managed to finish in 1h54m40s, which was great — I was aiming for anything under 2h — and I took bronze in my age category (30-34 male). I had to fend off charley horse attacks in my calf for the last couple of miles, and it was galling to watch a 60-something guy who had walked up the last hill breeze by me to finish a minute ahead, but I was pleased as punch to finish at all.
Keith can tell you more about his run in the comments, but I suspect his knee’s hurting today!
My own body seems to have recovered fairly well — except for my left foot, on which I have a blister, a mysterious and searing pain in the metatarsals, a possibly sprained toe, and a very black nail. My right foot feels like I didn’t even run yesterday — if my left foot felt as good as my right, I could go run another half marathon today. (Any podiatrists out there?)
Nonetheless, I am a bit stiff here and there, and I hobbled around yesterday while recovering.
So I got a pretty fun chuckle out of this video, which my brother emailed to me this morning:
My brother, actually, has taken up running, too, and just finished the Ottawa Marathon last week. So I guess he’s a bit ahead of me, but Keith and I are now thinking of moving up our schedule — there’s a fall marathon in a town called Treherne that looks interesting. And, since I’ve become quite the running evangelist, and I got my whole family doing 5K or 10K races in the Spring Run, they can all join us, too!
And next year we can aim for the Voyageur Ultra — 50 miles of trail-running near Duluth.
Grant Hamilton
3 Responses to “Running video tells it like it is”
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A month ago I was ready to burn up the pavement at this year’s half marathon. Then I went and did something to my knee — I jammed it or twisted it or something. It hurt like hell. So I took a couple of weeks off to nurse it until it felt better.
Two weeks ago, my knee feeling fine, I set out on a 12 mile run. Around mile 8 my knee started to twinge, about mile 9 it started to hurt, by mile 10 I was limping and had to quit at about 10.5 miles. I had made good time to that point, too. But my knee REALLY hurt. And didn’t seem to want to get better.
I spent the last two weeks stretching and getting acupunture and chiropractic treatments and taking anti-inflammatory drugs and just about everything else I could think of to fix my knee for yesterday’s run. I woke up yesterday morning with a very sore knee.
The run started off fine, but at mile TWO (! dammit!) my knee completely locked up in the most painful way imaginable. I walked/limped for a mile, tried stretching it out….and decided I would have to drop out. At the next aid station, I was going to ask for a pick-up.
Instead, I said “screw it” and decided to run through the pain. I would run counting backwards from 1000 and if it still hurt, then I would quit. My knee loosened up. When I quit counting I was at mile 9, hurting but still running.
I complete the race. I’m not happy with my time (considering I walked, and poorly at that, for 2 miles), but I did it. Now my knee is getting some time off, then I will ease into the Treherne marathon.
Than it’s time to make Grant do something off my 2G1L list. (I’m thinking the World Record…)
If you haven’t seen a physiotherapist yet, I would highly recommend talking to one about your knee experiences. Pain due to jamming/twisting could signify a ligament strain, or even worse, a tear. And if a tear is the case, you could make the situation a whole lot worse by trying to run through the pain. I know this because I did just that at a soccer match – twisted my knee doing some crazy soccer stunt and then decided that I could immediately run on it (it seemed to loosen up for me), which was a terrible idea. I tore my ACL, MCL, meniscus, and spent the next year in pain and physio, and it’s something I’m going to have to rehabilitate for the rest of my life. I really have no idea if this is the case for you, but throughout my running/training adventures I had to learn through experience about overuse injuries and healthy vs. bad pain, and will rant about erring on the side of caution to anyone who will listen. So if you haven’t seen a physio guy yet, I would highly recommend Steve Dzubinski at the BU gym, he takes student and non-student clients and can answer any question I’ve ever thrown at him. He’ll be able to take a look at your knee and determine whether it’s a ligament/patellar/tendon/etc issue. If it isn’t something that can be fixed by taking a break from running, he will most likely give you some quad/hamstring/calf exercises to take some of the strain off of your knee and your knee should stop bothering you.
The Death Race in 2012. I’ll watch.