48 Hours of Olympic Glory

On By poolsprintIn My Sport History, News and politics, Travel, Winter FunLeave a comment

“Wait a minute—what if I could qualify for the Olympics?”

There I was, sitting in my office chair reading a story about Pita Taufatofua, the so-called “shirtless Tongan” cross-country skier who’d represented his nation in an unprecedented fashion at the Pyeongchang Olympics, when I got a call from someone with an accent that clearly hailed from the South Pacific.

“Where are you from?” I asked, hoping to avoid offending the caller with my question. When she responded, “New Zealand,” I told her my mother is a native Kiwi, so I’m technically a New Zealand citizen as well—by descent. We wrapped up our business, and I hung up the phone. And that’s when I put two and two together: I could represent New Zealand at the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Right away, I realized how crazy that idea sounded, but then I checked to see how many cross country skiers hailed from the Land of the Long White Cloud (aka New Zealand). The answer: zero. “Hey,” I thought, “maybe this isn’t so crazy.”

To my surprise, every time I blurted the idea out—to my family members, to my coworkers, to the college students working with me—they responded with encouragement. “You should do it,” they’d say. And every time they said that, I’d find myself thinking, “Do you understand the magnitude of what I’m saying here? This is the OLYMPICS. I might as well have said I was going to don a cape and save Gotham City or something.”

IMG_3574
That’s not to say I didn’t go try my hand at classic cross-country skiing, because I did. And it was fun. Like WAY fun.

But after mulling it over for a few days, I started thinking it wasn’t all that absurd. I mean, I’m in okay shape for a guy in his late 30s. I run, cycle, swim, and sometimes snowshoe. I can drop a sub-20 5k and crank out 17 pull-ups on any given day. But, as my wife was quick to point out, I hadn’t done much cross country skiing. That’s not to say it had never happened. I’d been cross country skiing in the Canadian wilderness as a Boy Scout, and I was one of the few boys who returned with both skis and even intact poles—so I felt pretty good about that. And after all, Pita Taufatofua had been skiing for only 12 weeks when he made the 2018 Olympics.

How hard could it be?

Well, actually, pretty hard—that much I was certain of. Google quickly taught me that qualifying to cross country ski at the Olympics was a question of points from the Fédération Internacionale de Ski. And it wasn’t about how MANY points you earned, but how few. Basically, the higher your points, the farther behind the race winner you were. When it comes to Olympic qualification, you have to be within a certain number of points to be eligible to go. Pita, for example, had to dedicate himself to cross country skiing for a couple of months and then drive for hours through a hellacious blizzard to an obscure town in northern Iceland to earn his place. “Okay,” I told myself, “it might involve living in Norway for a month or two. That’s fine—I have plenty of vacation time saved up.”

Cross country skiing, which Outside magazine named the toughest outdoor sport on planet Earth, involves probably the most difficult training a human being can possibly endure. If you don’t believe me, study up. Running up mountains, doing pull-ups with 45 pounds strapped to your waist, bouncing medicine balls off the ground until your arms feel like they’re going to fall off. It brings together the endurance of a marathoner or Tour de France cyclist and the upper body power of an NFL linebacker—or perhaps even Spiderman himself.

But I also knew what it meant to get there. I was in elementary school in Calgary, Canada, when my home city hosted the Winter Olympics in 1988. I can still remember fogging up my bedroom window as I watched the distant Olympic fireworks. Then, I was in college in the intermountain west when Salt Lake City hosted the Winter Olympics. To my regret, I never attended a single event, but I watched the Jamaican bobsledders crash on local TV in 1988 and read about the cross country skiers busted for doping in 2002. How cool would it be to actually be a part of it this time?

“Aren’t you getting a little old?” my mother asked when I texted her about my newfound Olympic fantasy.

“Nah—the guy who came in last in the 15km individual race this year was 43,” I responded. “I’ll be younger than that when the Beijing Olympics come in four years.”

But I understood that if I was going to pull this off, I would need some serious help.

Fantasyland

I’ve heard the sentiment over and over again: “They should have one normal person in the Olympics so we can see how hard it is to do what they’re doing—a reference point.” Those people got their wish in the 2018 Olympics, in the cross country event anyway. Excepting Pita Taufatofua, who had previously competed as an Olympian in Tae Kwon Do, the final handful of finishers of the 15km individual cross country race were all what you might call normal people—on the athletic end of normal anyway. Sebastian, for example, works with his own translation firm right here in Salt Lake City and has four children. German was the 43-year-old, an Ironman triathlete prior to his Olympic life, who’d finished in last place. He’d had an off day, but he still grabbed a Mexican flag as he came to the finish line. And when he got there, his fellow finishers hoisted him on their shoulders—making international headlines.

I knew I needed to have a conversation with one of these guys at some point, so I sent a Twitter DM to Pita (no response), left a comment or two for Sebastian on Strava, and followed all of them on Instagram and Twitter. Then one day, German posted a picture on Instagram of himself crossing the finish line at the Olympics and the Ironman World Championship, and I left a comment: “How can I do this?”

“Start training,” he responded. “Or do you mean cross country ski?”

“Cross country ski!!! I have citizenship in a country that sent no cross country skiers in 2018.”

Next thing I knew, I had a private message with a phone number. “Send me a message,” it read. “Please.”

“So tell me,” he asked via text. “Which country?”

I said New Zealand, and he was baffled: “There were no Kiwis?????? You sure?”

“That I could see,” I said.

He did his own investigation before coming back and telling me that there had been a fast New Zealander on the racing circuit—a nice guy who’d met the Olympic qualifying criteria. But sure enough, that athlete wasn’t in Korea in February. “Look this guy had the points,” German told me. “And this one looks super friking fast.”

“I wonder why he didn’t go,” I contemplated via text message.

German was at once generous and encouraging—”Let’s do this!” He spelled out for me everything I’d need to do: “Step one is to contact NZ ski to find out if there is some hidden rule that would prevent you from going,” he texted. “Next up would be to get some roller skis and learn how to use them. The technique part will take about 2.5 years. And if you work the fitness along the way, the third year should be focused on making you ski faster and getting the points.”

I could tell I’d found a kindred spirit—someone who knew how crazy this was but also knew it would take some serious crazy if it was actually going to happen. He laughed at me when I said I’d get right to work on my double-poling. “Lol nooooo you need diagonal stride!!!” But he also assured me that it was possible: “Don’t worry just the basics is better than nothing,” he said. “I mean I started with a big 18 ironman engine but no ski ever.”

Holy cow. Maybe this could really happen. I went to bed that night giddy.

The Hollowest of Pipe Dreams

The next morning, I set out to find an email address for New Zealand Snowsports. For some reason, their website wouldn’t load, so I found their Facebook page and started typing a message. But then I stopped. I couldn’t stop thinking about this guy who was probably quite a bit stronger than I am—or ever could be—and didn’t go to the Olympics. Something wasn’t quite right about that story. I tracked down his name, Andrew, and then found him on Twitter. But then I discovered that Andrew is a graduate student in, of all places, Calgary, Canada—and that got my attention. I poked around a little more until I found his grad school email.

“Is there some reason you chose not to go?” I asked after explaining who I was and why I was looking for him. “Is there some bizarre rule in the New Zealand selection criteria?”

To my surprise, he actually responded: “I was aiming for the Sochi games and was tracking well,” he told me. “I achieved the A qualifying standard as set out by the FIS (sub 70 FIS points at that time), however New Zealand sets its own qualification criteria over and above the FIS criteria. The NZ criteria is set around the potential to finish within the top 16 in the world. Unfortunately, despite some strong performances, I was never going to achieve that and thus unsuccessful in qualifying for the Sochi games. I ended up racing for another year or so after my qualification push … but then stepped away from racing and training full time to focus on school and work.

“I don’t want to discourage you for aiming at the 2022 games but I will warn you that the NZ standard is very high and, at least a few years ago, there was little intention of the NZOC and/or Snow Sports NZ to consider nominating athletes who were not in their eyes ‘medal potential’.”

Hitting the B standard might’ve been—in a far-off, distant fantasyland where everything comes together perfectly and my body magically transforms over the course of three years—a possibility. (Okay, probably not even then.) But top 16 in the world? I’m naive, but not that naive.

So that was the end of that.

“They don’t get it!” German texted back when I told him. “Plus they did send a delegation and they didn’t come back with many medals!”

He was right. New Zealand, for all their hyper-focus on performance, had brought back a silver and a bronze from a pair of talented youngsters at Pyeongchang. Granted, sporting federations often have their funding based on medals, and I can understand a desire to get a return on your investment. But as German himself had proved in 2018, that return can be high even without a shiny medal around your athlete’s neck. He and Pita and Sebastian and a few others had gotten their faces, flags, and race finishes into the international airwaves for completing a task that most would’ve called impossible.

Who Was I Kidding?

I’ll concede/admit: I don’t belong at the Olympics—except maybe as a volunteer. I’m just a regular joe schmoe amateur endurance addict/weekend warrior-type athlete. For me, it was just a pipe dream/midlife crisis. But Andrew—who’d been skiing since he was 5 years old, dreaming about the Olympics, and had even reached the top 50 in the world in the 50km distance—probably DOES belong there. He met the Olympic qualifying criteria, after all. And days after my Olympic dream evaporated, I couldn’t stop feeling that I wasn’t the one who’d been robbed.

It reminded me of a tweet I’d seen weeks earlier from Lauren Fleshman, an almost-Olympian herself, who was lamenting the hyper-focus on medal count: “In an era of doping, TUE’s, eating disorders, abusive coaches of children striving for the holy podium, maybe we should broaden our view of what the Olympics is about to…oh I don’t know…just spitballing here…taking part, cultural exchange, fighting well? The Olympic Creed?”

The Olympics, in case you didn’t know, actually gives each participant a medal. Seriously: The Olympics awards participation medals. And before you jump on Twitter to complain to the IOC about the indignity of participation medals, think about what it means for an athlete to go to the Olympics. For many if not most, just being there is the pinnacle of achievement, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream—just as it was for Pita, German, and heaven knows how many other athletes in Pyeongchang. As Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, wrote in the Olympic Creed that Lauren cited, “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”

Now if only the New Zealand Olympic Committee felt the same way.

That time I (briefly) crashed the BYU Eggnog Challenge

On By poolsprintIn My Sport History, Nutrition, Ruminations on Running, Running, Winter FunLeave a comment

When I was a kid, my favorite movie was Top Gun. I didn’t understand any of the lowbrow locker-room innuendo; I just loved the idea of flying through the sky at 300mph on my way to go dogfight with some anonymous bad guy fighter jets. What can I say—that Kenny Loggins music won me over. I wanted to be a fighter pilot.

Alas, it wasn’t to be. Just a few years ago, I realized something: I hate planes. Why? They make me sick. Yes, I’m the reason they have barf bags on planes—and I once proved it. There are witnesses. It’s a long story that involves wind shear and Denver International Airport, but we’ll save that for another time.

But in fairness to the planes, the real problem—if I’m going to be honest with you—is that I have a weak stomach.

So why in heck would I jump into an event where you’re supposed to throw up? Where pretty much every participant is guaranteed to be heaving by the end? I mean, isn’t that an incredibly stupid idea? Yeah, that’s what my wife said too. But hey, I’m a guy. We do stupid stuff. And the BYU cross country boys were talking it up. So what the heck—why not?

Saturday morning, I drove by Walmart, picked up a carton of eggnog, hopped on the freeway, and headed to the track where All-American athlete Rory was already setting up … in a very Christmasy onesie that may have been a bit small for him. He greeted me by my Twitter handle and asked if I was doing it or watching. I said, with some trepidation, that I was doing it.

Soon the group got bigger and bigger and bigger. And when Alex showed up in a tiger outfit with the word “NOG” written across the backside of his half-tights … and Jon showed up in his ugly Christmas sweater with some split shorts … and some guy came in a full-on unitard … I realized I was extremely underdressed.

I dutifully got my cup of eggnog and stood waiting for the first lap just in time to bump into a couple of friends from the women’s XC team. Now, all of a sudden, the pressure was on. Whit and AC are both faster than I am and probably already know that, but still—I didn’t want to prove it to them …

The running

The challenge works as follows: you drink a cup of eggnog in under 90 seconds. You run 400m in under 90 seconds. You drink another cup of eggnog in under 90 seconds and run another lap in under 90 seconds. And repeat until you puke. The last pukeless competitor wins. The first to upchuck gets a spot in the official Eggnog Challenge Hall of Shame.

Each lap’s supposed to start off with a chant of, “NOG! NOG! NOG! NOG!” And that’s how lap number one kicked off. We all guzzled the nog and then took off. And for the first 200m, I was hanging with the group. But then I had this thought: “If I’m only going to be in this thing for a few laps, I might as well make them count.” So I ran up to the guys in the front (for whom this 6-minute-per-mile pace is really just a relaxed jog) and told Rory, “You’re going down!” as I took off in a stupid kick to the nog table.

I got there panting and quickly refilled my cup as the rest of the pack surrounded the nog refill station. I took my time sipping the nog just in time for the chanting to resume and the second lap to start. On the second one, I decided to tuck into the pack and take it easy. But to my chagrin, running with the group felt just as awful, and you had to listen to the others talking about how awful they felt—which made things just a little worse.

So on the third lap, I again worked my way up the group, sharing the thought with Rory that, “I’m not sure it’s any easier to go slower” to which he agreed. As an older, mustachioed guy moved to the front, I tried to move with him just in time for Clayton to call us out: “Hey, how many miles did you run this morning?” I made a zero with my hand. Not only was I rested—heck, tapered—for this thing, but I’d actually downed a little baking soda a few hours before this. I mean, this was my entire cross country season—I couldn’t just let it slide.

Surrender

Things had been going, well, swimmingly up until that point. On the fifth cup, the fillers had even graciously filled it only to three-fourths, and I wasn’t about to point that out to anyone. But as we started going around for lap number five, I could feel something unusual going on in my mid-section. I eased off the gas—metaphorically speaking—and even accidentally tripped up some other guy as I lost contact with the group.

By this point, I’d seen Coach T, the women’s coach, watching from the sidelines with a look of bewildered incredulity on her face, and I was starting to understand why. As we came into the transition, my stomach sloshing with all of the corn syrup and dairy I’d inhaled, I tossed my cup—not my cookies—into the trash and found a cozy spot on the sidelines. Before the next lap started, Clayton gestured in my general direction as having dropped, and technically, I guess I really was the first to quit—but I still hadn’t puked. (It wasn’t until later that I realized I’d completely breached protocol and that puking was a prerequisite to quitting.)

Moments after they took off running, a kid from the local high school team—who’d said, “I’ll run with you then” when I told him I was going to be the slowest guy—pulled over to the side of the grass and became the first casualty. And what followed can only be described as a cascade of vomit as, one by one, the dominoes fell. Some made it seven laps, some eight, some even 10 or 12. Two iron-stomached guys went all the way to 15 before the reigning champ bent over a trash can and both literally and figuratively lost it all. It was a thing of both beauty and tragedy.

The winner was a completely underestimated member of the BYU Running Club (who’s actually a pretty darn good runner in his own right). His reward? Having all of the leftover eggnog poured over his head. Luck guy!

Weeks earlier, I’d bumped into a member of the women’s team who was studying for some kind of family science test, and one of the study topics said something about how guys do stupid things to impress one another and belong—and how that sometimes gets them killed. “I don’t get it,” she told me. “Why do guys do that?”

“Yeah,” I’d agreed, “I don’t get it either.”

P.S. Next year, I’m going for that Hall of Shame spot.

P.P.S. If you want to watch the full proceedings, someone posted a video of the entire thing:

Have a Healthy New Year

On By poolsprintIn Cycling, Health and wellness, Injury, Mountain Biking, My Sport History, Racing, Relays, RunningLeave a comment

Forgetting perhaps that I also run, my brother sent me a link to one of those clickbait Active.com articles the other day entitled, “15 Reasons Running is Better Than Cycling.” A listicle, even! His message said simply, “Uh oh …”

Without hesitation, I messaged back that at least cyclists don’t spend half the year injured, and he responded with, “Unless they crash.”

Touché.

Fortunately, this blog isn’t about bicycle crashes—but unfortunately, it is about spending half the year with a running injury. Second year in a row, I might add. Different injury.

I think the thing that’s most infuriating about running injuries is that they seem to creep up without a lot of warning. There’s no shotgun blast as your achilles tendon rolls up into a ball in your calf or sudden sharp pain as your ligaments pull loose from the ankle bones. No, you just wake up one morning going, “What exactly is that little ache?”

This time, however, I feel like I can sort of pinpoint when it all went down.

I was running up a mountain a couple of weeks after doing Ragnar Wasatch Back. My calves felt tight, and I hadn’t done much running after Ragnar. But, I thought, that would constitute a normal taper before a race. Oddly, I remember feeling a tingling sensation and even a little numbness in the bottoms of my feet.

I can’t say for certain, but not long after that, I started waking up with a dull ache toward the rear of my arches. It took me probably a month and a half to self-diagnose plantar fasciitis, but here I am, five months later, still waking up with a slightly less extreme version of that dull ache every morning.

Now, granted, it’s 100% my fault that I’m still dealing with it. I should’ve quit running right away. But instead, I went and did my favorite event, the Grand Teton Relay, just a month later. Then I ran up the very same mountain as part of the Hidden Peak Challenge. And then, even after taking it mostly easy, I went and ran the stupid Turkey Trot at Thanksgiving.

Finally, I’ve decided to take a little time off running. And I’m convinced that, if I play my cards right, I can actually make this time off count for something. For starters, I came across a video from famed Canuck triathlete Kirsten Sweetland about making the offseason count:

And then I came across this fascinating podcast from a running researcher who says you basically can’t improve your running stride just by thinking about it—and that if you want to improve your running economy, you either have to do that by running tons of miles or through gym work.

So yeah, needless to say, I’m spending plenty of time in my home gym, and I’m riding the mountain bike every chance I get. I keep telling myself that if I end up racing the bike next year instead of running, that that’s okay.

I just have to make sure I don’t crash. 🙂

Don’t Call it a Running Injury

On By poolsprintIn Cycling, Injury, Ruminations on Running, RunningLeave a comment

I still remember the first time I got iliotibial band syndrome. I was maybe a mile into my first triathlon when I got this dull, aching, stabbing pain in the side of my knee — pure agony. But I’d just completely destroyed the bike course, so I wasn’t about to DNF midway through the run. So instead I gutted my way through two of the most awful miles of my life.

I remember telling my aunt about it and having her respond, “So why don’t you just hit the weights and rehab your knee?” I thought, “Good point — I come from a strength training background, so I can figure this out.” I hit the weights, and it seemed to go away. Of course, I went to another triathlon and had the lousiest run of my illustrious endurance career. But small victories count for something, right?

Later, I realized that if I just run uphill — up a steep hill that left my glutes miserably sore the next day — it would stave off that miserable injury. At first, I didn’t really understand the mechanisms at work. I just knew that it did the job.

Turns out that it’s all about what’s called your “posterior chain” — or the muscles that run up your backside. Yes, your bum. And also your lower back, hamstrings, even gastrocs, etc. etc. When you spend all day sat down in a chair like I do, those muscles get awfully weak. Your tensor fascia latae and your psoas, meanwhile, get really short and tight.

If anyone at Running Times or Runner's World objects to me posting this, please just contact me and I'll be happy to take it down.
Still, if anyone at Running Times or Runner’s World objects to me posting this, please just contact me and I’ll be happy to take it down.

When you pick up running or cycling hoping to counteract the effects of all of that sitting, people with shorter strides often strengthen their quads without doing much about their buns. It just makes sense that your body’s going to reach for its strengths and avoid its weaknesses when you put it in a physically demanding situation. Trouble is, stronger quads don’t really fix your problem — they exacerbate it. And all of that movement in your knee and your hip tends to bring out the pain from your iliotibial band.

So what do you do if you find yourself with a nasty case of ITBS? For one, start including a regular uphill run at least once a week. And don’t just run a moderate slope — go find something steep and challenging and then do hill repeats on it. You’ll know you succeeded if the outsides of your bum are really sore the next day.

You might also try adding a couple of strength moves to your regular routine. Everyone recommends clamshells, etc., but I’m a fan of stuff that’s actually running-applicable, like these two. (I figure Running Times is out of print now, so I’m probably safe to post this.) Personally, I’ve had more success with the second one, the runner touch, than with the first. But maybe you’ll be different from me.

Taken

On By poolsprintIn Health and wellness, My Sport History, Racing, Ruminations on Running, Running2 Comments

A friend of mine posted something on Facebook today about running and how uncomfortable it was. It got me thinking …

Okay, I just stuck this in here because I didn't want you to get bored with the nonstop text. Keep reading.
Okay, I just stuck this in here because I didn’t want you to get bored with the nonstop text. Keep reading.

There’s something really unique about running fast. There’s a certain threshold that you cross when you give everything you are over to it. Suddenly, every movement, every conscious ounce of your body is engaged in the deliberate action of running. Every muscle, every bone, every organ, and every drop of blood pumping through your arteries — it all comes together for one purpose.

You see this in professional runners when they go hard enough. You see Paula Radcliffe nodding her head like a donkey as she chases a marathon world record no one else has touched. You see the muscles in Genzebe Dibaba’s face tense up as she hurls herself toward the finish line. You watch Bernard Lagat’s eyes grow wide as he kicks out those long strides down the final stretch.

And in that moment, running is no longer something you’re doing; it’s what you are.

Of course, it feels terrible. But all at once it’s both delicately aesthetic, uniquely beautiful, and devastatingly intense. It’s a sublime and yet viscerally awful experience. Moments like those, you realize, have killed men and women — blowing the gaskets on their vascular cylinders, so to speak.

I don’t think any other sport is quite like that — not the same way, anyway. Not cycling, not swimming, not snowshoeing or football. So it makes sense that runners hampered by injury or age find themselves longing for another time, a time when the movement itself swallowed them whole — before spitting them out on the beach past the finish line.

Listen to Your Body

On By poolsprintIn Cycling, Family fitness, Health and wellness, My Sport History, SnowshoeingLeave a comment

In my world, exercise is this balance between doing enough to get a fitness boost but not so much that I end up injured or sick. When you’re talking about achieving that balance of doing enough without doing too much, you’ll inevitably come across the advice “listen to your body.”

What’s funny about “listen to your body” are the people who use this phrase to give themselves a pass to stay on the couch and eat donuts. “That’s what my body’s telling me to do,” they say with a wry smile.

When you start out with an exercise regimen, you have to push yourself out the door. It takes some serious mental calisthenics. Sometimes, it’s not fun, and it’s rarely easy. So you start out by ignoring the voices in your head.

But after a while, you start to realize that when you thought your body was saying “stop, stop, stop,” it was actually saying, “Whoa, haven’t done this in a while.” And after a little warmup, it starts saying, “Okay, this isn’t so bad.” And then one day, you’re sitting at your desk and work and your legs just scream at you, “Let’s GO already! I’m so sick of sitting still!!”

You get out there in nature and you notice how gorgeous the sky is, how fresh the air is, and how beautiful the birds and trees and mountains are. You get hooked on the feeling of exercise, and you want more.

And that’s part of the problem. Once you really start paying attention to what your body is telling you, you want to keep going all the time. You sign up for an Ironman Triathlon or an ultra marathon or a double century bicycle ride because, hey, your body seems to be asking for it. The workouts get longer, harder, and faster. And your body gets healthier and healthier …

And then one day, your body says, “Uh, not right now” or “Okay, that’s enough.” And instead of listening you say, “I got where I am by ignoring those voices — why should I start listening now?”

The next thing you know, you’re at the doctor’s office going, “Why hasn’t my calf stopped hurting in the last six months, Doc?”

You see, fatigue is an interesting fire to play with. You have to push the limits of your fatigue to see improvement. But if you push too much too soon, you’re well, playing with fire.

Take last week. I started the day by going snowshoe running for about an hour and a half. It beat me up pretty good, and I came back with sore legs. But I’d planned to crank out an hourlong bike ride later in the day. I needed to push the limits, or so I thought.

As I sat there staring at the wall while I put on my wool socks and neoprene shoe covers, I imagined the workout I was about to do, but there was no excitement about it. I donned my facemask and helmet, mounted my bike and started riding.

Now, I’ve read the studies that say going long makes your immune system weaker than going hard. But it shouldn’t have taken a study to help me realize I shouldn’t have been so greedy with my time. My body wasn’t feeling it, and I should’ve known that just from the way I was feeling.

Lo and behold, a few days later, I woke up with a head cold and a sore calf.

Wherein I attempt to share useful advice

On By poolsprintIn Health and wellness, Injury, My Sport History, Nutrition, Ruminations on Running, Running, Travel, Winter FunLeave a comment

So needless to say, being injured has been an interesting (albeit unpleasant) experience. This bizarre cycle of losing tons of fitness through excessive resting and then re-injuring myself as soon as I try to start back up again — that has gotten very old very quickly.

I’ve run into three problems:

1. Diagnosis — I really don’t have the problem figured out completely. I wasn’t sure if I just strained a muscle (I was thinking soleus) or if I straight-up tore something (like a vertical tear in the achilles or something).

2. Re-injury prevention — Because I didn’t know what I did, I’m not clear on how I can avoid re-injuring myself. That’s the thing: for the first few weeks, I wasn’t sure if it was a result of running and cycling, running and swimming, just plain running, or even just plain cycling. I’m still not 100% certain how I did it in the first place, and that makes it pretty tough to avoid doing it again.

3. Rehab — It’s really easy for you to play armchair physiotherapist and say, “Duh—stop running, moron!” But newsflash: it’s an injury in a largely tendinous region of the body. That means it’s difficult to get a lot of blood flow in there, and when it’s hard to get blood flow, it’s hard to heal. So to some degree, I need aerobic exercise to keep a higher rate of blood flow. The other question is, do I put heat on it (like I would a muscle strain) or do I ice it (like I would a tendon injury)?

Fortunately, in the middle of all of this, the world’s finest exercise science and sports nutrition minds were convening a conference in Spain. And since it’s 2015, that meant I got to follow along via Twitter. Asker Jeukendrup had to make things one step simpler when he took all of the cool info I saw in 140-character tweets and summarized it like this:

Graphic summarizing how to get over an achilles tendon injury.
Holy simple, right?

Being the self-diagnosing hypochondriac that I am, and since I couldn’t get an appointment with a running doctor until December, I decided to start treating it like a tendon injury. I’m downing gelatin and vitamin c, and I’m trying to avoid impactful exercise.

So I had a recovery regimen to commit to. Then I read Born to Run (which, I should mention, was a brutal hatchet job on Ann Trason — but that’s a different story), and I started wondering about whether the new pair of Nike Pegasus shoes I got last Christmas are playing a role. Christopher McDougall, of course, hangs out with Jon Krakauer and therefore doesn’t have a lot of credibility in my book. But he’s not the only one out there who has suggested running shoes might play a role in the high rate of injury among North American runners.

The other day, I found myself in the mountains with a group of people leaving on a little nature hike. I’d talked them into doing it on the lower elevations of the Aspen Grove-Mt Timpanogos trail. After moseying along for the first mile with the group, I got an itch, poked my way to the front and took off on a little jog up the trail. When I got to the turnaround point, I didn’t feel like turning around—so I didn’t. I kept going.

It wasn’t until I’d gotten about three miles and 1,800 feet up the trail that I decided to call it a hike. By then, I could see the summit far above, with the clouds hovering, brooding over the snow-covered dampness of the mountain. So I bounded back down, fully expecting to have worsened my injury.

To my surprise, the next day my calf felt pretty good. I’d even felt some tightness while I was headed up, but that was all gone when I woke up the next morning. The familiar soreness in my gluteal and vastus muscles was back—and that just plain felt awesome.

But it got me wondering about trails. Maybe there’s still something I can do on trails. Maybe snowshoe season will be nicer to me than I expect. We’ll see.

Torture

On By poolsprintIn Health and wellness, Injury, Ruminations on RunningLeave a comment

I had about 10 days to go before my planned road 5k, so I moseyed on over to the track near my office and resolved to do something I’d never done before: Run a mile as fast as I could on the track. I was hoping for around a 5:30, but after a handful of 1:23-ish laps, I realized that was a little too ambitious. I crumbled in the last lap and finished up with what felt like a respectable 5:51.

Then came race day. I employed my normal positive split strategy and took off way too fast in the first mile. Then I melted in the third mile and brought it home with a 20:35 — good enough for an age group win.

And sometime after that is when my troubles began …

Back in 2009, I’d experienced some calf pain when I was training for Bone n’ Back. I stopped running, had a really lousy time, but got healed. Then, in 2012, I got it again when I was training for Robie Creek (which is part of the reason I backed out). Both times I left my leg alone for a couple of weeks and it got better. The end.

This time not so much.

I kept trying to squeeze in a run … and then I did my favorite running hill climb … and then I got recruited to do Grand Teton Relay … and then Rivalry Relay … and then Widow Maker … and then Snowbird …

In the middle of all of that, I was at a very important work event one afternoon when a coworker told me he wanted to go hike Table Rock that night, and my ears perked up. Besides, I told myself, he needs someone to help him avoid getting killed — someone who knows the trail.

Why did I do it? Imagine this view … but in the dark with more snow … I'm a sucker for scenery!
Why did I do it? Imagine this view … but in the dark with more snow … I’m a sucker for scenery!

So we started out way too late, and by the time we reached the summit, the sun was setting. We hadn’t yanked out our headlamps by the time we got back to the talus field beneath the rock, and somewhere in there, I nastily sprained my ankle. Voila — built-in rest time.

I stopped running completely for two or three weeks non-stop. Oh sure, I kept riding the bike, but my legs felt great. After a few weeks, I went out for a slow jog with my wife in the early morning, and my legs felt … fine, actually. A full week later, I went and jogged a mile with the legs still feeling good. So I came home that night and jogged another.

Then I woke up in the morning, and the pain was back.

So essentially, what this all means is that I moved to the base of a bunch of glorious, trail-filled mountain peaks … and the entire time I’ve been here, I’ve been too injured to actually enjoy them.

You know that commercial where the guy shows up in what he thinks is heaven and then eats a big chocolate chip cookie before he discovers that all of the milk cartons are empty and that it’s not really heaven? Yeah, welcome to my world.

At the same time, I see people who have it way worse than me, and I think how grateful I am that I’ve been able to enjoy the mountains as much as I have. I really have had some serious adventures, and for that, I am sincerely appreciative.

So here’s what I’m theorizing:

Plyometrics have always been a staple of my road 5k training. But I’m starting to realize that plyometrics and uphill training don’t mix. One makes the achilles tendon stiffer, and the other requires the achilles and gastrocnemius to have a little pliability. Ta-da — injury. (Learn from my example here, people.) And I’m sure the additional stress of changing careers and addresses didn’t help.

Now I’m thinking I need some time completely off of running, and I need it ASAP. I’m following the nutritional protocol for tendon injuries, even though I’m not sure I have one. After a few days off, I think I’ll be able to get back into cycling and swimming. But for now, it’s nothing at all …

At least, until I get to go hiking for work later this week …

Want to Get Skinnier? Get Faster

On By poolsprintIn Cycling, Family fitness, Health and wellness, Running, Training, Weight Loss1 Comment

You probably won’t think this study is as interesting as I do, but it’s really interesting — I think, anyway.

What’s the difference between well-trained athletes and recreational athletes? For one, well-trained folks have done a lot more cumulative exercise than us schmoes. They have more muscle as a percentage of their body composition. And they typically have less fat.

Here’s another difference: they burn more fat than we do — even at higher intensities. See, usually, the more intensely you workout, the less fat you burn. But as it turns out, even when they’re exercising at high intensities, well-trained athletes burn three times as much fat as recreationally trained athletes.Graph answering the question, "Are you or aren't you a fat burner?"

Furthermore, the rate of fat burn seems to correlate with VO2max. What is VO2max? It’s a measurement of how much oxygen you have per liter of blood, and it’s a performance predictor for endurance sport success. How do you increase your VO2max? With a lot of endurance training and with occasional high-intensity intervals. In fact, according to one article from Alex Hutchinson’s Runner’s World blog, the best intervals for improving VO2max are around 3–5 minutes.

Improving your VO2max will make you a better athlete. And as it turns out, it will also make you a skinnier person. So if you want to get skinnier, focus on getting faster. And if you’re focused on getting faster, expect to get skinnier.

(Image borrowed from Asker Jeukendrup’s blog. Asker, if you want me to remove it, please just ask instead of filing a lawsuit or sending a cease-and-desist letter. Thanks.)

A Thousand Words

On By poolsprintIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
NEWS&GUIDE PHOTO / TRAVIS J. GARNER
NEWS&GUIDE PHOTO / TRAVIS J. GARNER

Years ago, a newspaper photographer snapped this photo of me making my way up the road to the summit of Rendezvous Mountain, the peak of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. They say a picture speaks a thousand words. Sometimes, it speaks in ways or languages that don’t make sense with mere words.

For me, this photo is a memory of an absolutely surreal moment. My daughter, the one who got stuck with more of my genetic material than any of my other kids, had kept me up for most of the night before. Finally, at about 7 a.m., my wife and I had what is still today the most awful argument of our marriage. We were exhausted and drained, emotionally, physically — every way imaginable.

Rendezvous Mountain had been on my bucket list for a lot of years. Sure, I’d done plenty of road bike hill climbs before, but I’d never done a mountain bike hill climb. I always wanted to give this one a shot. So when I looked up at the clock and realized there was still time to make the race, I looked back at my wife and said, “Can we go?”

For reasons beyond my comprehension, she said yes.

Now, a little background: I’d been having trouble with my position on the bike. Really, I’d just been swindled by some goofball on the internet who talked me into messing around with my clipless pedal setup. So I’d decided, “Forget it — I’m just going with platform pedals for this one.” If you’re not a cyclist, that probably doesn’t sound like a big deal. If you know anything about climbing steep gradients on a mountain bike, you understand that was a mistake of epic proportions.

But a few hours later, we arrived at the event. It was a hot day with a bright, blue sky. I paid my $20, collected my number and went to warm up … as if anyone needs to warm up when it’s already 90 degrees out. At some point in my warm up, my front tire skidded out from under me and I went down hard on my knee. It was bloodied and sore, but I’d just drug my wife and children on a two-hour drive and paid the $20 to enter the event, so I wasn’t about to abandon.

I lined up with the other racers — the smallest field I’ve ever seen at a cycling race. The race organizers told us to go, and I worked my way up the group. I caught one gal just as the trail got steep, and suddenly, my rear wheel slid out from underneath me. I was walking.

I threw my leg over the saddle, rode past some trees, and there was a wall of radiating dirt in front of me — the steepest quarter-mile pitch of fire road I’d ever set eyes on.

“It’s not possible to ride a bicycle up that,” I thought to myself … just as I watched the rest of the pack ride up it … and then disappear around a switchback.

I pushed and hiked just as another cyclist came up behind me — the only one left. He and I chatted for a minute. Because of work, he hadn’t ridden a bicycle more than once in the past few months, but his wife was in the race, so he felt obligated to do it — but just for fun.

I climbed back on and rode away from him. Eventually, I got to where I could see another rider up ahead of me. Again and again, I’d reach a hot, dusty switchback, lose traction, get off, and start hiking. I’d remount and go again. Switchback after switchback.

By the time I reached the photographer, I was in a state of utter delirium — microwaved from above by the sun and below from the reflection off the bright mountain soil. I managed to keep the pedals turning as the photog caught me in a moment of barefaced agony. Before I got out of sight, I was walking again.

Toward the summit, I finally remounted just in time to ride past my wife as my daughter ran out to see me — and then tripped and fell on her face. But instead of crying, she just stood up, stopped and stared, listening to my fragile breathing.

As I looked closely at her dirtied face, I thought of all of the jerk things I’d said to her mother. And I regretted them, soulfully — viscerally. This little girl deserved better, I told myself.

“I love you,” I said, looking deeply into her eyes as I rode past and meaning it more than I’d ever meant it before.

Moments later, I crossed the finish line. Jill Damman, the racer I’d been chasing, who was just ahead of me, and whose husband I’d ridden with at the beginning of the race, would go on to win the women’s division of LOTOJA just weeks later. The picture at the top of this post, which I requested from the photographer, would end up on the front page of the sports section in the Jackson Hole News & Guide. And although one rider finished behind me, I would be listed as the race’s “maglia nera” or “lantern rouge” — the last finisher — the only time I’ve ever had that distinction, ever.

But for me, when I look at that picture, I think of how deeply I’d scraped and clawed into my soul that day. I think of the version of me who was completely exposed on that mountain that morning, the me who loves his wife and daughters so much that he’ll do anything to be better for them. And I think that maybe the person on that bicycle on that mountain telling his daughter he loves her — the person in that picture — was the real, genuine me.