Plaguing shinsplints

Back in 1983, my first serious bout of shinsplints sidelined me only weeks before my second Orange Bowl marathon with Roy. Talk about disappointing. I didn't know any better and tried to run through them, big mistake. Anyway, I may have had another bout or two since, but generally, shinsplints have not been a problem. Until the last year.

Now they've popped up twice for extended periods, in the December to February timeframe. I'm assuming my legs are just breaking down after fall marathons, continued hard running and some races. So my problem is probably lack of strength and flexibility, rather than shoes. However, switching to a new shoe is always easier than taking time to strengthen and flex.

Kurt suffered shinsplints last summer, in his first marathon campaign, which coaches say is not unusual for a new runner. It takes a gradual build for the tendons to strengthen along the shin, and that takes time for somebody new to the roads. Strength is probably the issue for Kurt too.

I've found two good exercises to strengthen the lower legs and prevent shinsplints. 1) Get one of those big rehab rubber bands, attach to your toes, and stretch against the resistance while watching late night reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond. 2) Hang your legs over the bed, and raise your toes with a weight attached to your foot.

Other tips: Get a good orthotic. Warm 'em up and stretch 'em out a bit, especially before intervals and time trials. For my current nagging bout, I'm also going to go out and buy a new cushiony shoe....

Your 10K target for sub-4

Bingo! http://www.coachbenson.com/images/8090.pdf This Coach Benson site is great. This particular chart gives you the 10K time (51:00 min/8:14 pace) you need to be running, in order to run a realistic sub-4 marathon, without stopping. It also suggests that 77-78% effort is where you need to be for running 26 miles--that's about a 9:05 to 9:09 pace. With walk breaks and congestion of a big marathon, I think we need to be around 8:40-45. (Roy, tell me different???) So move up the middle "pace" column to 8:45, slide to the left, and you can see that your 10K time needs to be 49:00 min/7:54 pace. Those are probably pretty good targets, assuming all sorts of things on race day: cool weather, no injuries, max 20 second stops per mile average including bottlenecked turns, no excessive pissing, blood on the highway, no stopping for a beer in Wrigleyville, etc.

For pacing (effort) on other runs (like recovery or intervals), see chart in earlier post on Effort Based Training. I really think these charts give you a model to gauge effort without overtraining. Keeps you focused on the gradual build. Yet, it provides goals to hit. I'd really like to see the pacing information above related to 5K times as well.....maybe it's too short of a distance.

Spiffed out in mylar and Breathright. (Kurt, Chi04)

Squeeking orthotics

It's pre-dawn, still dark out, wife's asleep, you put on your shorts, tank, socks, shoes. Squeek! Like you're killing a mouse with each step. Squeek, squeek, squeek. You leave the house. Oh hell, forgot something. Back inside. More squeek, squeek, squeek. Years this has been going on....till this weekend's discovery: Just sprinkle some baby powder, baking soda or, in my case, Gold's powder underneath the orthotics. You can move around again like a burgler.

Effort Based Training

Based on 5K or 10K times, how fast should you run on an easy or recovery run (60-75% effort)? Or a 20-minute tempo run (80% effort)? Or hill repeats (80-95% effort?) Or an interval, like a series of 880s or miles (90-95% effort) Or the recovery jog after (70%)? Here's a handy chart: www.coachbenson.com, then look in Book Forms, Section B. Obviously, as the 5k and 10k time trials get faster, you move along in the chart. Great way to push at a graduated level, without over doing it, and especially easy to monitor with the GPS on your wrist. Full of tips today.....this Running Times mag, which I signed up for at the PB Marathon and got a free jacket, is pretty good.

Rethinking the wall

Hitting the wall may have less to do with running out of glycogen, more to do with damaged muscles that send signals to the brain to slow down. The body, smart as it is, sends that signal in a package of extreme fatigue. New research suggests eating protein on the run to prevent some of that muscle damage. Several times I've wondered why when I've drank a lot and eaten plenty of Gus that I've still bonked. Maybe this is it. Also, plyometric training (jumping drills) helps increase muscles' resistance to damage. (See April's Running Times)

Leftovers, Week 34 (first week)

Germs from traveling left Kurt sick all week, an occupational hazard. As new training gear, he's thinking about wearing a white surgical mask through airports. *** Will Roy's wife Marabelle be running? Is her year-long bout with plantar facitis behind her? She puts us all to shame, perrennial 3:45er *** Overhead lunges suck. Wabbly footing; hurts my knees. Returning to hanging weights at my side. *** Ed says he's walking his first marathon in April, in Nashville. Figure 6-6:30. That's a looooong walk. Unaided by GUs, would you still hit the wall around 18-20, like a typical runner, or would glycogyn stores run out earlier? *** Looking way ahead: Kurt and I applied for the NYC lottery in June; Roy has guaranteed entry. Marabelle? for 06? ***NY has delivered two of my worst ever runs. An ITband painfest in a monsoon (4:25 in '97) and last year's cramped, dehydration shuffle on a humid 75-degree day (5:07). I'd like to do it comfortably just once. *** I caved on managing baseball. Reluctantly took a Junior League (13-14yo) team this spring. So I'll be mixing in running with practices/games twice a week, plus three days of Bandits baseball (13s), plus basketball for another month. I agree, it's too much. Thank God the Vioxx is coming back....

NEWS BLAST: Vioxx coming back?

AP, CNN and others reporting this morning that Vioxx may be coming back out on the market. New science shows the unique benefit of the drug outweigh the risks (I coulda told them that), and Merck may bring it back. I was willing to sign a waiver that I wouldn't sue the company if my heart exploded, in exchange for a handful, but this is too good to be true. Hopefully by spring those golden tabs will be back. I've got just enough left in my stash to get me through the winter.

This news also greatly enhances Roy's chances of getting to the Start, as Vioxx is his drug of choice for all things related to the knee (see below).....

Rabbit Roy?

Imagine a knee so screwed up, pieces of cartilage, about the size of a quarter, float around freely, unattached, in the joint's fluids, occasionally surfacing in the kneecap -- and which need to be excised. This happens about as often as the rest of us get flu shots. A knee permanently bloated with godknowswhat. A knee that hasn't straightened for over a decade. A knee protected from bone-on-bone scraping by the last sliver of cartilage, about the thickness of a ply of Charmin.

That's Roy's knee, and he now tells me this morning that he's in. In for the 26.2 mile lap around Chicago in October. And no, despite having the most deranged knee you've ever seen, he's not in the wheelchair division.

This, of course, may not be the greatest idea. But this is a guy running a nuclear power plant, so hey -- who am I to judge. But still, reasonable people will ask, Why take the risk? Have you lost your mind? Well, I suppose it's a little hard to fathom, unless you've been running for 25 years and now sorely miss the regularity of it all. So, you pick your moments and take your chances. Roy, also 52, after reading this blog yesterday, decided to pick Chicag04 and join Kurt and me. No, his orthopod is probably not onboard. Actually, the orthopod wants to replace the knee, or at least a major section of it. So Roy's thinking is, if it's a throw-away part anyway, well...

Roy believes he can super-strengthen the knee in the gym for the next 16 weeks, run through the summer, and give it a go. He's done it before. Back in '96 (see post Boston '96), the knee was a globe of excess fluids and adrift cartilage chunks, but strong enough to leave me halfway up Heartbreak Hill and squeeze out a 3:59:52. Planning is everything. Since then, he's also finished a hilly San Francisco and a couple Disneys, basically on one good leg.

Okay, so he ain't no bullet-train anymore (PB 3:14, back in the First Boom, in '83). But if I breakdown, damn good chance Roy -- if he can just get to the startline -- will be there to pace my mid-life-crising brother Kurt to his sub-four.

Backup has arrived.....

Kick my butt with (overhead) lunges

My butt feels like somebody poured concrete in my glutes. Or whacked the hell out of it with a two-by-four. Sore sore. Tenderized. I need one of those foamy-thick cushions that look like a toilet seat for my ass, just to sit here. Last week, I'd been doing a not-too-strenuous 100 feet or so of lunges with a pair of handweights hung down by my side. No no no, that's not the way to do it, Kurt tells me. Raise those hand weights overhead, now do your lunges. Now walk up and down what would be the length of a basketball court a couple times. Yeah, okay. Now see what it feels like to literally get your ass kicked.

Neck (and upper back) takes a royal beating too. Definately a runner-specific exercise.

Where's my Vioxx?

Shorter on marathon training specificity

Sounds boring already, and I promised. But it's been bugging me. Do we get faster by training longer at marathon pace? Or should we stick to the old formula of running long a minute or two slower than MP, mixing in an interval once a week, and believing it'll all come together on race day?

So I asked Frank Shorter at the Miami Tropical Marathon Expo in February, what's the deal? Shorter definately came down on the side of the old school formula, of slow slow longs, which he explains in his new book. When I mentioned Kalid (and other elites) endorsed up to 15- or 16-mile MP runs, he either frowned or was genuinely surprised. He must not read RW. Shorter was quick to point out that Kalid surely was not divulging his whole training regimen, which I'm sure is true. Still, Kalid says it's a key component. (Frank frowns again.) I'm assuming Shorter was dismissive of long MPs, because they were contrary to the LSDs he recommends in his new book.

Of value, he did say most people run too long in weekly intervals. He kept his intervals at 3 miles/wk when he trained for Olympic Gold in '72. A surprisingly small percentage of his weekly total of 140 miles. (Before he hit it big, we use to see Shorter logging his mileage around Gainesville with the Florida Track Club when we were undergrads at UF.)

Training for Chicag05, Kurt and I are going with Khalid's longer MPs at mid-distances up to 12-13 miles (somewhat of a compromise) and Shorter's shorter intervals.

I won't be buying Shorter's new book, he said there's nothing really new in it anyway (which I'm sure his publisher loves, if he's saying that at Expos across the country). However, I definately will check it out at Books-A-Million, because he said it had lots of pictures in it, mostly of his girlfriend in running shorts, who was standing in the back of the Expo in skintight jeans and spiked heels, a mid-30ish dropdead strawberry-blond with a gold medal stack.

Thirty-three years after Olympic glory, it's still good to be Frank Shorter....

First day

Three easy miles (8:56 pace), thirty minutes lifting/situps, nine chocolate chip cookies before bed. Two steps forward, one backward. Lance Armstrong says lifting and aeorobic training are like water and oil, they don't mix. Neither does carving off eight pounds and a nightcap of cookies....

3:59 Chicag05

Running under 4 hours? C'mon....what about my age, my limited running abilities (other than I keep going), my history of chronic injuries, training in the South Florida's oppressive heat and humidity through summer, my slow mid-pack times over the last decade (4:25-5:07, save an odd 4:05 in Boston in 1996) and the fact that the last time I slipped into the 3's was 23 years ago (3:38, thank you) -- c'mon, this is nuts.

And not my idea, by the way. It was my brother Kurt's. The guy in the photo above, who ran his inaugural 26.2 in October 2004, and apparently became infatuated. This, despite the usual and grievous distress he experienced with three miles to go. I could see it in his eyes. The what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here look, followed by the this-is-much-much-worse-than-I-imagined grimace. For 23 miles, I was waiting for him to bonk and glazeover and experience the cruel fatigue of the stretch run; he did, and I was satisfied. But then, days later, he shocks me with the 3:59 gauntlet thrown down. Yeah, let's do it again, just faster, he says. Under four. I gotta go under four. Running 26.2 wasn't enough, clearly. He's on the clock. Forget a 26.2-mile tour of the big city marathons -- Chicago, New York, D.C. As he emailed me, "I don't need to sightsee."

Okay. Now, I can appreciate someone wanting a respectable Personal Best, and for some, like my brother, 4:29 (Chicag04's time) isn't it. Not by a long run. Not by 30 minutes, anyway. No, anything with a four in front of it puts you in a category of what? of being somewhat whimpish. Seems a severe judgment, in my opinion, seeing that you've traveled a fairly impressive distance on foot. But there it is. For Kurt, now 47 and over halfway there, deep midpack in a marathon ain't gonna cut it. It's a race, for god sake. Gotta break four.

Now it's true, I've been looking for someone to run with anyway , ever since my 25-year running buddy Roy wore down his cartiledge in his knee to a paper tissue. This whole marathon thing was getting kind of old without him, running off to cities by myself, or dragging my wife Lorraine with me, who tries to spot me running by at some remote corner on the course for, oh, maybe, five seconds and seeya later. She hates it. Running marathons is much more fun doing it with a friend. Your brother. So sure, I'm in. Under four. Against all reason. Freakinuts.

I designed a rather extended program for the both of us that includes a lot of weight lifting, marathon pace runs, intervals, time trials, and so on, all building to a morning's run in October. Today, officially, the training kicks off.

As my brother emailed me this morning, "34 weeks to go. Game on."

Me, 26.2 seconds after finishing Chicag04.

My brother Kurt, marathon virgin no more, unsure about doing a second.

Soaking it up, poolside at Buckingham Fountain