The Upside of Injury: Getting Faster

Most triathletes will have to deal with an injury at some point in their training and racing lives. It can be demoralizing, debilitating, frustrating, and of course painful. But there can be an upside to injury too: Speed. All too often as Type A triathletes, we fixate on mileage, intensity, heart-rate, wattage, and other easily measurable and trackable outputs, sometimes at the expense of the less-quantifyable but important aspects of sport like technique, flexibility, and core strength.

An injury is a setback, sure. But it can also be a benefit when you use your injured time to focus on these overlooked areas of training to make yourself stronger, more flexible, and more efficient (not to mention more injury-proof for the future, since poor technique, lack of flexibility and low core strength are big contributors to most training injuries)

Unfortunately, I speak from all too much experience with injury, especially in the last few years. But as much as it has upset my training, my injuries have had some unexpectedly positive consequences. Coming back from three years in which I broke my hand, my arm, and my arm again (at the elbow), you would think that my swimming would be far worse than it was, say 5 years ago. But instead, I'm faster now than I've been at any time since college. I used the last few years to work steadily on the things that truly matter to speed in swimming: technique, flexibility, and utilizing my core more in my stroke instead of my arms and shoulders.

 The result was evident the other day when I swam a series of 200s in 2:20, a training time that I haven't hit since my days of swimming two workouts a day, six days a week (I'm only swimming 3x a week currently). I can't pile on the yardage that I used to, but I can make every yard count.

This year with a knee injury from a biking incident, I faced much the same problem with running. From last April, two months before Ironman Coeur d'Alene until now, I haven't been able to run more than a couple miles at a time, and until the last few weeks I've been holding my mileage down to 1 - 3 three mile runs a week, hardly an inspiring amount of mileage. Also, no speed work, no track workouts and no tempo runs. Those are three-mile jogs, not anything with intensity or difficulty.

So how is it that on a run with my sister yesterday, she came to comment "You're a lot faster than you used to be!"? I simply applied the same principle to my running that I have to my swimming over the last few years: work on the things that you can, instead of focusing on what you can't do. With running, this has meant a focus on holding good Chi Running form, working on a light and quick turnover of over 90 per minute, and putting a big emphasis on body composition. I've been tracking calories using an Android app called LoseIt, and have very gradually dropped over 10 pounds in the last year. I figure this makes it easier on my injured knee, as well as making me a little bit faster.

So if you find yourself staring an injury in the face this training season, you might think of it as a bonus, not a drawback. Use the time to work on the things you can: core strength, flexibility, technique, body composition, and see if you just don't come back stronger!

Countdown to Ironman, Week 35: Getting the Ugly Womanly Stuff Out of the Way

Gentlemen, you can avert your eyes now. You have been forewarned. This is the IronMOM blog after all.

I remember in 6th grade, when we had "The Talk". You know, the one where the boys went to one room and the girls went to another. Mrs. Brown was in charge of the girls, a five foot tall fireplug of a woman from Corpus Christi, Texas. I can remember this scene vividly: at one point in her little speech about "The Change" that was coming for us, she was holding up a Maxi Pad in front of the room, and Scott Whitely came barging in the classroom door at the back, clutching a message from the office. Mrs. Brown turned white as a sheet, Scott Whitely turned beet red. She hissed at him to get out and get out he did, double-time.

The message was clear: Maxi pads were scary and embarrassing things that men must never, ever see.

That message persists into adulthood. Just take a man on a basketball court who gets hit with the ball. He gets a bloody nose, mops it up with his shirt, and goes over to the sidelines holding a towel against his nose. You'd think the bloody towel was a badge of honor by how he treats it.

The same amount of blood coming out of a woman's coochie is like the scarlet fucking letter, right? Shameful, to be hidden, not even mentioned. Not even when he's your husband. If he sees a tiny bit of blood on the toilet seat, he might go faint, meanwhile the same man farts with abandon during episodes of The Family Guy, never thinking that gasses emitting from his butt should be equally...well... concealed.

Which is all to say that writing a blog post about what it means to be a woman and a triathlete, what it REALLY means on one of "those days", is culturally embarrassing. Yet, because we don't talk about it, none of us knows how anyone else deals with it. No one knows that the reason I didn't have a bigger PR in my half-Iron distance race last year is that I spent all those precious minutes in a porta-potty line that I couldn't avoid. What does a guy do? He pees on the bike. Changing your womanly supplies on a bike would require the skills of a circus acrobat and be a good deal more messy. And no ones knows that I went on the pill for four months the last time I did an Ironman just so I'd know for sure I wouldn't have my period that day.

Wouldn't it suck to train for a year, spend $500 plus travel expenses, and not be able to do the race due to your @#!%! period??

So, what happens when you're signed up for an Ironman at age 46 and you're a woman? Women's bodies at 46 are not the same as they are at 36 or 26 or 16. To put it bluntly, they're starting to do weird things. Periods come at odd times when they're not expected. They're either really light or so heavy you might as well pitch a tent in the bathroom for a day or two. Sometimes you end up wondering whether you got pregnant without knowing it and are miscarrying something that looks like Eraserhead. Don't go squeamish on me, I told you I was going to be blunt. So doing an Ironman in the middle of that? It can be difficult.

Luckily, a couple of my women friends clued me in to this procedure called a Uterine Ablation. Yes, that's about as Un-Fun as it sounds. Actually it's way, way less fun that it sounds, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Basically, they burn the shit out of your uterine lining and it never comes back. A few days of painful recovery and you're free of The Curse for evermore. Or at least semi-free of it, or probably free of the worst of it. There's no guarantees of course, but it sounds better than the current uncertainty and mess. Sign me up Scotty!

So that's what I had done this week. Of course, me being me, nothing ever goes quite according to plan. I have this really weird body that has a pretty high pain tolerance (good) coupled with the fact that anesthesia and medications don't work all that well on me (bad). Novocaine has so little effect that my dentist always wants to pull his hair out when he has to work on me. Given all of that, I maybe should've chosen to use general anesthesia for this procedure, but that freaks me the heck out. I keep remembering people like Olivia Goldsmith, who died during general anesthesia for plastic surgery (one more reason I won't ever do THAT for sure!) Thinking about my kids being motherless, the answer for me and general is NO WAY. But then again, I've never had experience with anything like this (even my babies were not born in a hospital) so how would I know what would happen?

So it was some Valium and some Percocet, some injection of an ibuprofen-like NSAID, and we were off. I wish I could tell you that my experience was like all of my friends who have had it done. For most women it's pretty much a walk in the park, for me it was not. I won't scare you with the gory details but it hurt. A lot. Like if it was a mob movie and a torture scene, I would've told them anything. I would've sold my mother upriver just to make it stop. My doctor (and probably the entire waiting room) got to hear every curse word in my personal arsenal, and then some. It was like The Sopranos in there.

Luckily, I'm now on the other side of the River Styx, after the first day of agony with some upchucking thrown in just for kicks and grins. Several days later, I'm just taking ibuprofen and will hopefully be back to training sometime in the near future. I'm hoping this bet pays off, the pain and suffering were worth it, and I have an Ironman to look forward to where I don't have to worry about taking Aunt Flo along on my bike with me.

And because I'm not Mrs. Brown, and this is not 1976, I'll let you know how it goes.

Countdown to Ironman, Week 38: Rest and Regroup

There are millions of people who struggle to motivate themselves to get off the couch and go out to exercise.

Then there are triathletes.

We have the opposite problem: getting ourselves to stop. This week hit me from both sides:

On the one hand we had some of the last of the warm weather: gorgeous 85 degree days, but with rain coming in the forecast. Who would not want to get out and ride or run as many miles as possible knowing that the drizzly grey days will soon be here?

On the other hand, I had done a triathlon two weeks ago, and the 24-mile trail run two weeks before that. As soon as I got home from those events, I dove back into karate with a vengeance, training myself into some serious muscle soreness. I was fatigued, not sleeping, clearly needing to back off and catch up. I needed to rest, not ride.

Since I'm not quite as stupid as I was a couple of decades ago, when I would often manage to over-train myself out of any kind of decent race day performance, this week I managed to placate my sun-loving self with a trip to the outdoor pool for some last sun-soaked relaxing yards, and I did go out on the bike, though not for as long as I would've liked. Throw a nice trail run into the mix in a sunny forest that still smelled of rain-soaked fir needles, and I made a good week of it.

I can feel that I'm anxious to get on with it, to get started on the Ironman preparation. But I also need to let myself relax a bit and continue to heal up. My arm got sore this week from the contact in karate and I have to be careful not to push it too hard there or in the pool. The off-season might only be a few weeks long this year before I dive back in, but I need to take it nonetheless.

It's too bad I couldn't just hand all this motivation to someone out there on a couch who really needs it right now, and swap it for the ability to just sit still for awhile, something I find darned hard to do. But I can hear the rain starting to patter down on the trees outside, and that might just make it easier.

Incredible Post-Marathon Recovery

I can still recall the last time I ran a marathon what my legs felt like the next day. Going down stairs was an agony, I wished for handrails on any chair I had to sit down in. I moved like a geriatric, shuffling around (isn't it called the "post-marathon shuffle?"), and the idea of moving fast, squatting, or jumping would be enough to make me cringe. Talking with other endurance athlete friends, it seems like this is the norm.


This time is different. I hate to keep beating the Paleo drum, but I've been doing endurance sports for over 25 years and my body has never recovered better than during this year of Paleo eating. Let's just say I felt so good the day after my trail marathon that I literally was jumping for joy, and I had to make a little video to share it with you:

Recovery and Some Inspiration

Asa drew me this little pic this morning, I think it sums up everything pretty well. The arm isn't fully healed, but overall I feel pretty great and I can do enough training now that I'm not going nuts.

I've been cleared to run, and I took my dog Sophie for a nice one hour jaunt on the Ridgeline trail this morning in the cool of the day. I can bike on my trainer, which is a good plan in the basement during the hot afternoons, and I can swim... well I can sort of limp along with a one-armed stroke, plus kicking and the dreaded aquajogging, but my SwiMP3 is keeping me company through the dull slogging swim workouts.

I even did my first karate workout yesterday, which consisted of doing kata so slowly that it felt more like Tai Chi, and I taught the Karate Conditioning class which was kettlebell swings, V-sits, jumping lunges, and a running loop - all of which I could do (kettlebells were one-armed, but still).

I'm still trying to fully process my decision to sign up for IM CdA in 2012, and what that will mean for my training in the coming 11.5 months. I think my kids are going to have to get used to waking up without me in the house, since this time the early morning workouts will prove crucial to fitting it all in.

One thing I love about the internet triathlon community is the incredible people out there. I don't always get as much time as I'd like to read through the blogs (and I keep meaning to update my blog roll) but when I can, I always find inspiration, community, advice, and support.

The posts that have really stuck in my mind and heart this week have been these:


Anton says "Everything I know about endurance sports I learned from Les Paul"
in this must-read post about what is REALLY important in endurance sports.

Marv shows us how to get it done, even if it's a hot hard 10 mile run, with Grace in his post "How Great Thou Art" (coincidentally, that's the hymn my mind goes to when I'm out running or biking in this amazing world we live in)

and IronMom Julie tells us about her Ironman Coeur d'Alene race day in the funniest and most inspiring Ironman race report around!

Aquajogging Hell Mitigated By SwiMP3?

Aquajogging. The word itself is anathema to runners and triathletes everywhere. It's like a special level of hell that you get banished to upon injuring yourself, and you can't get out of until you do the appropriate weeks of penance.

Since swimming is currently out of the question, and any water exercise is better than no water exercise, I knew I was going to have to relegate myself to this torture session. So I did the only sensible thing: I ordered a SwiMP3 to make myself feel better. However, I read on the packaging that I'll only be able to hear the music if my head is submerged since the SwiMP3 delivers the sound through bone conduction, not through your ears.

That submersion thing might make aquajogging a bit more challenging.

Alternatively, I can wear earplugs. We'll see if that works tomorrow. Hubby is already salivating over my SwiMP3. You see, he's one of those incomprehensible (to me) humans who does not like swimming up and down and up and down a lap lane over and over and over. Huh. He thinks my new toy will make swimming more fun FOR HIM.

I don't think he's going to get to find out until I'm cleared for the lap lanes myself. Until then, I've loaded everything from Motorhead and X to Flogging Molly and Girlyman and I'm ready to jog my way to oblivion.

All's Well That Heals Well

My 3rd and final X-ray today showed my arm to be (finally) totally healed up! I have the green light to do anything that feels comfortable with it, and now I don't have to worry that if I crashed my bike or (heaven forbid) tripped again while running I would require surgery and pins, metal plates and all sorts of nastiness like that.

I've never split a bone like this before, I've only cracked them across the center. And I've never broken the bone at the joint either, so this is all new for me healing-wise.

The Report Card:

Running: 95%
You'd think a broken arm wouldn't affect running at all, but I was watching some video of myself running from today and guess what, my left arm swings out and away from my body instead of tracking straight backwards. It's not huge, but it's there, and it makes my torso twist more than it should when I run.

Biking:80%
I haven't really started climbing hills yet where I'll have to stand on the pedals and put a lot of stress on my arms and elbows but I can bike the flats to rolling hills with no problems now. Thinking of doing some flat time trials in May. Wheee!

Swimming: 70%
My arm straightens almost all the way out to a full glide, but I still can't keep my left elbow high to catch and pull much water, so my right arm starts to really fatigue about 2500 yards into my workouts as it's taking the lion's share of the workload.

Karate: 25%
I haven't done any contact at all since the accident, but that can start to change this week. Yeah!

Crossfit: 35%
I've had to substitute so many of the exercises in Crossfit, but I'm starting to work them back in with lighter weights now.

All in all, I'm on track to get myself all back in action. My doctor said that by 8- 10 months, I'll have all of the mobility back out of this arm that I'll ever have, so that's good incentive to listen to my physical therapist and be good about doing my exercises!

Nervous Nellie Rides Again

My bike and I are like two halves of a titanium/human fusion that were separated at birth. Normally, that is. Now we've been apart for two months while my arm recuperated, and just today we've been reunited again. The scene was set, the sun was out, the bike path beckoned... and I've lost my cycling nerve. I felt like a six-year-old whose mom had just let go of the back of the seat and has discovered they're now pedaling on their own. Every little thing on my two-wheeled journey appeared as a gigantic hazard, from little Fifi on her extendo-leash coming perilously close to my wheels to the bits of gravel on the path to the lady who scatters cracked corn for the ducks on her back porch, enticing them to a dangerous bike path crossing to the homeless people in the underpass who could at any moment swerve into my way. I wanted a jersey with foot-tall neon letters saying to all "STAY AWAY FROM ME". Whoa, talk about your Nervous Nellie. I am definitely afraid of tipping over, which makes me a far worse cyclist than when I didn't think about it much.

It has definitely reminded me of what it's like to be a newer cyclist, my tires haven't felt this teeny and skinny and barely-balanced in decades. I put my foot down at every stoplight, braked at every corner, and gave everything a wide berth. I know the comfort level will come back, and for today I was just more than grateful to be out there on the bike, especially with that almost-spring sunshine bearing down. The wetlands are full of birds right now and the bike path meanders through them with the sounds of meadowlarks, kingfishers, and red-wing blackbirds all around. So I got a great big happy smile on my face to go with my now sore back, neck, and quads!

The Plans, They Are A'Changing

It's so hard to step away from a dream once you start down the path to fulfilling it. The longer and the farther you go down that road, the more difficult it is to divert onto another. Yet I know from experience that just because you must take another path right now doesn't mean that you can't revisit your goals in the future. Sometimes it's better to postpone what you once thought was immediate and come back to it when the time is right.

That's the conclusion I've come to this week with my goal to test for my black belt in June. It's just not going to happen. My arm is actually healing up very nicely, but it's nowhere near the point where I can even straighten it without pain, let alone move it in a fast or aggressive manner. And if I even think about someone else touching it, I cringe. So I'm not going to be making it to any of the intense brown belt/black belt classes any time soon, not going to be doing any two-person contact at all, and I don't know how long it will be before I can even throw a proper punch or block.

Although it's probably been painfully obvious to others that this wasn't going to happen, I was stubbornly sticking to the plan for awhile. But now I know it will just have to wait. The upside is that by the time I do test I should be extremely well prepared. Also, my son is excited that perhaps we will test together, since he has a year to go until he would be ready. I don't know yet if it will take me that long or if I'll wait for him and test together or what.

On the plus side of things, I've been able to run now totally pain-free, and even did a semi-long run today of 8 miles without the arm hurting at all. I also swam on Saturday!!!! 1000 yards of swimming and 1000 yards of kicking. The swimming is ridiculous, I look like a wounded albatross flapping my way through the water, but I'm ecstatic that I can do it at all, and it doesn't hurt. I think it will help my arm rehab too, as long as I don't push it.

Little Things We Take For Granted

Opening Jars
Putting hair in a ponytail
Using a rolling pin
Buttoning jeans
Scratching an itch in the middle of your back
Wiping crumbs off a counter into your open palm
Opening a door when you're carrying something in your other hand
Shampooing your hair
Putting on a sweatshirt
Moving a heavy pot from one burner to the other
Two hands on the handlebars

It's almost harder to have my arm out of the cast. Hubby keeps saying things like "can't you just pick that up?" Um, no. It's still broken. It still doesn't work. It might not work for awhile. I have to tell myself this too so I don't do anything stupid and delay healing.

Broken But Still Strong

You know it's funny to consider, but once you've been bit hard by the exercise bug it is like torture to be taken away from it. While the rest of the population tries to see how little exercise they can get by with (Bikini Body in 5 Minutes A Day!!! screams the advertisement flashing in the sidebar of a web page I was on recently. Yeah. Right. And I've got a beachfront property in Arizona to sell you after you buy that one), those of us who are athletes scramble to find ways to move our body even when it's difficult to do so.

One of the things I like best about Crossfit workouts is that they're scalable. At any point, a group of people can be doing the same workout but at different intensities with different weights or subbing different exercises to still get a good workout. This makes it ideal for me at this time since I'm obviously unable to do many of the basic exercises (like anything involving my left arm of course).

Today's workout was one of the Heros, Crossfit's workouts that are named after fallen warriors. This one was Daniel, for Daniel Crabtree, killed in Iraq on 6/8/2006:

50 Pull-ups
400 meter run
95 pound Thruster, 21 reps
800 meter run
95 pound Thruster, 21 reps
400 meter run
50 Pull-ups

One of our members was having knee trouble, so she subbed rowing for running. I had to get creative for my workout, so I subbed 50 situps + 50 back extensions for the 50 pullups each time, and I did one-armed thrusters with a kettlebell instead of two-armed with a bar (a thruster is like a full squat and then you thrust the weight overhead). But just the same, it was a tough workout (especially since you consider that all of our runs here are hill runs!). Nice thing was, the arm doesn't bother me when running (as long as I take it easy and don't fall on it) and I felt strong throughout the workout.

Yesterday I was able to bike on the trainer with my left arm propped on a pillow. I think I'm gaining core strength since essentially I have to support myself on one arm right now. A few days ago I could only bike for 30 minutes with the one arm and yesterday I made it an hour. I tried swimming a bit on Saturday, I figured I would just keep my arm by my side and kick, but that didn't work out at all. It turns out that the water would move my arm in unpredictable directions, causing it to hurt. So water (even water running) is probably not going to be possible for another week or two. Luckily it seems like I can find enough that I can do to keep myself busy.

One of the reasons that I chose a Hero workout for our WOD (workout of the day) was to remind myself how precious these moments are that we're given. I don't know anything about Daniel Crabtree, other than what his friend wrote about him on this blog but I'm pretty sure if he could choose, he'd be somewhere running around enjoying life. Life's too short to whine about what we can't do, we're better off embracing what we can. Today's workout was a great reminder that though part of me might be a bit broken, the rest of me can still be strong.

It's Just Not the Same

My house is missing one big and important thing these days: my husband's laugh. Now let me preface that by saying that of all the laughs on the planet, his is absolutely the best. You can't hear Wayne laugh and not at least smile. He's got this great big infectious laugh. Any funny movie you might see is ten times funnier if he's sitting next to you, the theatres ought to pay him to come to their comedies, I swear. As you can see, he's quite the joker around our house.

But the poor guy had hernia surgery last week and he's still not anywhere near being able to laugh (hurts too much). It's horrible to see someone you love in pain, and recovering from surgery is all kinds of pain. Add on to the fact that he's a very active guy, and recovering just isn't easy psychologically for us active types. And he's had this great running group this year that he loves to run with, can't do that. He started swimming with the Masters group at the club this Fall (and by all the accounts I hear, he's kicking some booty in the lanes and getting faster by the workout) and can't do that either right now.

I was able to share with him my post-partum workout secrets, which considering that I tore all of my abdominal muscles apart at the seams (there is a downside to having tight abs after all) I can remember both the pain and how hard it was to get those muscles back in action again. I had to start my sit-up routine by lying on my back, holding both sides of my stomach muscles together, and lifting my head a scant inch off of the floor.

So for anyone who goes through abdominal muscle issues, be they pregnancy-related, hernia-related, or injury-related, there is definitely a path to getting those muscles functioning again, it just takes time and patience and an ability to take it very slowly at first.

As for my hubby, he's sleeping right now and I'm hoping for those muscles to heal up fast. Not just because I want to see him happy and active again, but because I miss that laugh.