Getting the Tweet for the KT on the ITB!

Alternative title; A Handful of Halfs! Neither of which are great but it’s been a long week! So after last Sunday’s disappointing run I took Monday off and iced, stretched and rolled my legs. Tuesday I hit the streets on my bike for a reasonably easy 30 mile ride, later in the day while on Twitter I saw a post referring to KT Tape, I followed the post, checked out who they are and before I knew it I was in Sports Authority purchasing two rolls, what the hell I thought! I tweeted thm on Twitter and they sent me instructions on how to tape my ITB by email.

I’ve taped in the past on the suggestion of my physio therapist but with medical bandage and not with sports specific tape. Wednesday morning I was on the West side of LA (by the beaches) and I had thrown my running kit in the car to see if the tape would hold up; that is prevent the pain. I followed the instructions in the box and actually taped for Runners Knee not ITB and set off, a little over two hours later I was back with 14.5 miles on my Forerunner and no pain…ok I thought, let’s see;

* Thursday 13 miles in 1:59, pain free; felt a bit tired and under fueled
* Friday 13.1 miles in 1:46, pain free; felt great and just enjoyed the run
* Saturday 13.1 miles in 1:56, pain free; another good run, deliberately at a slower pace

That’s 54 miles in 4 days and a smidge over 74 miles for the week, my second highest week ever! OK so now I am convinced!

The tape is really easy to apply although guys may want to consider getting the razor out for a cleaner “sticking” area. The packaging says it will last up to 5 days; mine is pretty shot after 4 days (6 showers, 8 foam rolling sessions and 6 stretching sessions) it comes in four colors and more are on the way and it’s pre-measured so you don’t need scissors. They have videos on their website on how to apply it and oh yeah and it looks pretty cool as well!

Quite possibly the cheapest thing you may ever buy for running at $12.99 a roll you can get it from Sports Authority or click on the Amazon Widget to the right, below my race reports and order yourself some!!

Shut up and listen!

This is the message that my body has been telling me since Sunday. My response; "must complete workout", "must complete workout"! 15.25 miles Friday, 27.75 miles Saturday, Endless running round after children Sunday, 15.01 miles Monday, 11.2 miles; should have been 25 miles bike Tuesday, (to clarify all the rest was running), left knee/quad – FAIL! Stopped after one lap and climbed back into bed; it was only 5:45am. Achy, tweaky on/off soreish…grr - body fail! Time for RICE and I ain’t talking carbs!

Unscheduled rest today, lets see what tomorrow brings!

Uh oh!

Not the best of starts to my training plan, 10 miles into a 16 mile run and my ITB decides to rear it’s ugly head! As an improvisation I knotted off an arm warmer to try and immobilize it which worked to a point, sorta kinda! It worked enough at least for me to finish off the remaining 6 miles. I have no idea why this has sprung from, there has been no hint of it for months in fact almost a year, but now I have to deal with it, fortunately that’s something I do know how to do; foam roller, stretching and a liberally smacking of the offending tissue with the Stick. This morning at least it had eased off sufficiently to let me put in another 5 miles. That being said Sunday's run was not quite the route I had planned but conditions were perfect, I altered my plans and managed a circuit through Cheeseboro Canyon up along the Ridge Trail to close the loop and then a simple out and back along the canyon floor.

My next long run, 18 miles, is in two weeks time, for the first eight weeks I am alternating long runs and long rides, I have not been on my bike in any real seriousness since October; this has probably contributed to the ITB issue! So next weekend I’ll be in the saddle for a nice canyon ride through to the coast and back for a round trip of 50 miles or so.

I also picked a tweak in my calf swimming on Saturday afternoon, I am not counting this as training as Saturday is my rest day and I am not swimming non stop as it's a lesson so there is some instruction in between laps, of which I am guessing I bluffed my way through 20 or so. Actually I am pretty pleased as I actually managed a whole length freestyle; I have never been taught freestyle, ever and apparently my breast stroke is pretty good...go figure!

There are some photos here, blogger is loading them all sideways(?!?) and here is the MotionBased data from Sunday:

T(P) minus 10 minutes

Ten days till Twin Peaks. In an attempt to get there in some state of rest (our 1 year old is working the night shift!) I am instigating the 10 minute rule; 10 minutes to bed earlier than the night before. The baseline is 11:00pm the end result should be that the night before the race I’ll be hitting the hay around 9:20pm, which is a good thing seeing as I am in the 5:00am start group, it could be worse I could be in the 4:00am group! The race is on a Saturday so I am heading there Friday night straight from work, I have booked my hotel, one less thing to worry about.

The Race Director is still looking for volunteers so if you’re in or near Orange County on the 14th and want to hang out with some ultra runners you can contact her here.

I am having some minor knee issues, I think I over-extended it last Thursday so I have been taking things easy, I biked Saturday morning with no issues but then spent all day at LegoLand topped and tailed with a four hour round trip driving probably didn’t do it any favors, so I am on a rest and ice regimen with runs every other day through to the weekend. Sunday I am running with my wife, a nice easy beach path run and again on Tuesday then I’ll be T(P) minus 3 days! Oh look at the time; nighty night!

100 hours in 1000 words!

A quick round up from over the weekend. Friday my wife and I headed to the local Four Seasons Hotel for a his'n'her massage, some pool time and a general catch up without the kids, it was actually our Wedding Anniversary, well a day late, ten years! And although we had gone away earlier in the year while my in-laws were in town, under the heading of “we’ll never manage it on the actual day” well, we did. After a great massage, lunch by the indoor pool I headed off to the gym, I was scheduled for a 10 miler but after 5 I was dieing, the gym was so hot I looked and felt like I had run a marathon through Kuala Lumpur! The only downside to the day was the weather and having had the previous weekend well over 100 today it was grey and wet with the temperature getting to all of 65!

The weather continued in the same vein the next day and I set out on my bike early to try and beat the rain, not a chance. Fortunately I had switched out my windjacket for some Goretex but my legs and butt where well exposed (not in the biblical sense) but hey when you're wet; you're wet. I changed up the scenery this weekend and took a slightly different route, out through Kanan, gingerly crossing the bridge where I had buckled my wheel and then back up though Malibu Canyon, which is usually the down outbound leg, it made for an interesting ride seeing everything backwards as such, but by mile 35 I was feeling it, there seemed to be a disproportionate amount of up (ok and one really big down!), a light dinner the night before and a bagel for breakfast hadn’t really topped off my tank and in spite of having four Hammer gels, a bar and a couple of bottles of fluid (Perpetuem/Amino Vital) by the time I got home ten miles later I was done in. Here's the MotionBased data. My bike was filthy and so I gave it a wash down and wax up and was finishing up just as my wife arrived back with the boys and so with the help of the eldest we went on to wash and wax both cars as, of course, by this time the sun had come out! Saturday night we had friends over for a BBQ, eaten inside as it really wasn’t that warm and the steak and beer slipped down a treat, although by 11pm I was so tired I was actually slipping down the chair myself!

Sunday day drifted by as they do and Sunday night I headed out for a 13 mile run, my legs were feeling a little tired and by mile 6 they were nagging, by mile 8 it was painful and by mile 11 I was stopping every quarter mile to give them some massage and generally swear at them, I would have kicked them in frustration but that would only be a really short term remedy! I dropped two ibuprofen en route but it was too little too late to make any real difference, I cut the run short by a quarter mile and went off into the corner to stretch and sulk. This knee business is really starting to get my goat and despite the cross and core (which I admit slipped a little last week) I am still having knee issues, not ITB, just knee.

Monday was a rest day. I hung out with the boys all day, they're a little under the weather so having some quiet time was a good thing for everyone. My wife was out all day hiking up Mt Baldy, she was ambushed by the snow and was grateful to have worn her boots rather than hiking shoes! She didn’t get back to late, and in the evening I hit the foam roller for a session; pummeling quads, hams, calves and the like into some form of submission and compliance.

Tuesday night I headed out, unusually for me, I managed to get out before it was dark and I had a great 7.5 mile run, at an easy pace, but I focused a lot on listening to my knees; they're very chatty you know. I was concentrating on staying on the right pace and in the right heart rate zone and thinking about my form and footstrike, I am not a heavy heel striker, I think somewhere between heel and forefoot would be a good description, maybe if I have time (yeah right) I'll check out the chi or pose running methods. Of course my knee pain on Sunday could have been caused by just the cycling the day before…maybe? And that brings us up today. My other knee, not Sunday night's one is a little achy, see how annoying is that that they get together and change it up overnight, it's a conspiracy I tell you!

This week I have to mix up the training a bit, I have an organized bike ride on Saturday, I hope this picture was taken from a plane as either way if it is to top on a climb or decent it’s already giving me the heeby-jeebies. I am definitely up for the metric century (62 miles) and may do the 100 mile ride; maybe. So that means I’ll rest on Friday and combine Friday and Saturday’s cross training into one session; see that's nice and tidy.

Like Zanne I am really enjoying my cycling at the moment, it's pain free so there's a bargain for you, although I wouldn't go so far as to say I am being adulterous at the moment, it's more like dating twins!

Ok that’s it for now, catch (in deference to Frayed Laces) y'all later.

Everybody's doing it so why can't I?

It seems that everywhere you turn in the blogosphere there are pictures of blossom, well not one to miss the band wagon and now that we have had the first day of spring, here are a couple of snaps from our back yard. The first is on the bank behind us, it's open land that leads up to a State Park, not possessing green fingers in fact I have to admit they are downright brown, I have no idea what the plant is but it is over every hillside at the moment giving everything a gold hue.

The second photo is off one of the many varmints to be found in our yard, he's actually standing on a regular sized brick so he's not quite as man eating as he seems, along with the gecko populous we have million or so rabbits, there are days when it's like living on the film set of Watership Down, and squirrels, but it's not too bad between the owls, coyotes and rattlesnakes, all of which have been in the yard at one time or another, the animal population is self regulating...such is the nature of things.

On a running note, I hopped on the treadmill for a 20 minutes session this morning, I was certainly not setting the world alight but it's a start, my knees took a mile of so to remember running but seemed ok after that, I hope to repeat it again tonight for another 3 miles or so.

My mileage nemesis!

I have been taking it easy since my run last Saturday. I was trying to link up two trail runs and navigate cross country across two canyons from Las Virgenes through to Cheesboro. If you click on the picture you can see the route in Google Earth. From all the rain we had earlier in the year the landscape is so green and lush and that day my feet took a good soaking from the early morning dew, this of course means it'll all turn to tinder come the summer!

Here are the photos from the run and some video from the northern point along the Cheeseboro Ridge Trail, it sounds a lot windier than it was and the wind provided a welcome drop in temperatures, even though I had started at 7:30am it was up into the high 70's by the time I finished and this week we've seen the temperature in the high 80's, although this weekend it's forecast to rain again!

The good news was that I managed to make the link and had an awesome trail run through to about mile 11, from there I started to feel some twinges in my left knee, my mile 14 it was a definite nag and by mile 16 I was done in, I spent the last four miles run/walking it in and managed to get tiger stripes sunburn where I had missed bits with the factor 50 on my shoulder!

This knee business seems to be contagious at the moment with both Doug and Robin suffering from it, maybe I need to look at my firewall settings, is it like a computer virus; I can see it now you get an email attachment "Click here for great legs" and you end up launching the "GammyKnee" virus, ok it's late and I digress, however maybe we should all get together for a three legged race, we could just about muster up the three good legs needed between us!

With hindsight I probably maxed it out for the week, 65 miles in a week seems to be my nemesis and it gets me every time. It feels like it’s my IT Band flaring up again and I have been concentrating on my stretches and some foam rolling I have also been spending some quality miles on the trainer with over 65 miles in 40 days, I am striving for that 20miles/1hr ride average and the best I can manage is a 10 miles/31:55 or 20miles/1:12:05, so any tips from cyclists/triathletes are welcome. I am going to stick with the bike for the next 10 days and avoid the call of my new and shiny Kayano 14s that are tempting me with their new shoe smell and extra large gel insert from my closet.

Check in for my next post; it's all about socks...yes my life is that exciting!

Here's the Garmin data, it's a figure of eight starting from the rights going bottom right to top left, along the out'n'back and then bottom left to top right:

Taper week

Well it’s taper week for next Sunday’s LA Marathon, the past week has been very low key with only one run; not quite what was planned but after tweaking my knee last Monday I wanted to take things easier. I managed a nine miler on Thursday which felt ok at the time but subsequently my knee was still twitchy. Over the weekend my wife and I headed off for a relaxing spa weekend at La Costa spa just north of San Diego, this year is our 10 year wedding anniversary and although we are a little early we thought we would take advantage of my in laws, who are visiting at the moment, and leave the boys with them. I had a great massage which freed off a lot of tension and so far things are feeling pretty good, of course two uninterrupted nights sleep didn’t go amiss! I intend to cut right back on the mileage this week, I ran the PCTR 50k without having run anything the preceding two weeks so I am not too phased by this. I am off to my ever friendly chiropractor later this week and my FIL who is a retired osteopath will give my legs a massage on Friday so I should be in as good a shape as possible. All things considered the marathon is really a training run and although I have a couple of goals in mind I am not going out all guns blazing; I am looking to finish sub 4:00.

Following up the trip to the movies last week I was inspired to order from Amazon; The Runner, the story of David Horton’s record breaking 66 day run of the 2700 mile long Pacific Coast Trail which runs from Mexico to Canada, it by the same film maker JB Benna so it should be good, I’ll let you know once I have watched it.

The hunt for shoes has drawn to a close, at least for now, the last pair I tried; Vasque Mercurys were too tight, so for now out of sheer boredom and the advice I received via The List from people who have completed LD, that the trail version of Asics' 2120s or 2130s as they will be now will be more than robust enough for the run. I expect to have to revisit this later but for now it’s a suitable solution.

On a final note I signed up for The Great Race half, it’s two weeks before LD and will be a good run to end the training phase and start the taper.