Boldly running where I've never gone before

In the Star Trek original series episode called “Bread and Circuses”, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are captured on a planet that resembles a Roman Empire with 20th-century technology. They are set to die at the hands of gladiators for the sake of public spectacle.  One of the gladiators named Achilles was assigned to fight Spock.

Spock holds his own against Achilles, but McCoy is severely outmatched and Spock overpowers both opponents, saving the day for our Starfleet heroes.

Once again, for maybe the third time in the past six years, I find myself in a battle with my own enemy called Achilles and I could really use a Vulcan hero to come swooping in and save me from this dreaded combatant.  However rather than an extraterrestrial opponent to contend with, my Achilles lies between my left heel and calf.

My first run-in with this Achilles tendon was in 2006 when I had the misfortune of prescribing myself a course of Levaquin for an infection.  My reason for choosing the drug was mere expediency because the clinic where I was working happened to have a supply of samples in the closet.  About the fourth day into the course, I was doing step aerobics when I suddenly felt left Achilles tendon pain.  I thought I must have tied my shoes too tight so I loosened them and kept stepping.  No change.  A few minutes later, I abandoned my workout and began what would become five months of intermittent pain and limping.  I knew from the med school mnemonic that “quinolones hurt the attachments to the bones”, but I never thought it would happen to me so easily and last so long.  I have continued to have 1-2 out of 10 pain on a daily basis ever since but have lived with it and worked out in spite of it, including running three half-marathons.

Flash forward four years and a bad left ankle sprain (with inevitable scar tissue) later to August of 2010 when I began to experience twinges during speedwork while training for the Rock and Roll Las Vegas half marathon.  Naturally, I ignored the pain at first but it persisted.  And then it worsened.  And then I was sidelined for another five months.  I never did get to Vegas that December, and didn’t even start running again until February of 2011.

Moving yet ahead in time we come to the present day whereupon I recently advanced my Long Run mileage from 6 to 8 to 10 miles within a matter of 15 days, with two of the occasions being races rather than leisurely Long Slow Distance runs.  Even still….I was okay after that 10 mile race and the Achilles didn’t bother me any more than usual.  It was after last Saturday’s Lake Bloomington 12k (7.44 miles), done on a day I likely should have rested or severely cut back mileage instead of racing, that I heard the familiar short sharp shriek of the left Achilles tendon piercing the pleasant soundtrack of my life.

And so here I am again locked in battle with Achilles, and trying to strategize my way to victory.

I have registered and paid entry for a 10 mile race this Saturday in Lemont which I will not be running.  In fact, I will not even be walking.  There is a 5k portion still tempting me, but we’ll see about that later.  I didn’t run a step after Saturday.  Instead I rested and stretched, finally venturing out this morning for a quick 3-miler of walk/run intervals (75% of which I walked) just to see what I could do.  The pain is not horrible but it’s there.  I’ve been wearing a plantar fasciitis night splint to bed every night to keep the tendon lengthened and massaging the living daylights out of in between sporadic stretching throughout the day.  I REFUSE to let this get the better of me!

I know an Achilles injury is one of the few that you just don’t “run through.  Thus I have respect for the healing process required to ensure I make it to the start line of the half marathon in good enough shape to rock the damn thing.  But I want to run.  I really really really want to run.  Even though I know I shouldn’t and can’t.  And it’s killing me.

I was thinking today during my outing that if I lost my legs, I’d get a wheelchair and race by pedaling it with my arms.  If I lost my arms, I’d find a device that I could power by blowing through a straw.  And if I lose my whole body, it will because I won’t need it anymore and will be able to leap like a gazelle in the realm of the spirits.  Nothing short of death will keep me from running.  But it’s driving me CRAZY to have to take this break and heal.

I could really use Mr. Spock right about now to come beaming down, Deus Ex-Machina, with a solution to my quandary that would fit neatly within a 42-minute episode of my life.  Ah, if only…

…just like Kirk, Spock, Bones, Chekhov and Scotty at the O.K. Corral.  Only not as
the result of a Melkotian death sentence, even if some of my abs videos might feel like it sometimes.

The second full week back into training  has been enlightening as well as encouraging.  The elephant in the room (“how the hell am I going to go from 6 miles to 10 in a month without losing more speed AND without injuring myself”) is a little less scary.  The amount of fitness which has slipped away in the past 6 weeks is a little more obvious.  And the determination to move forward over the next four weeks – regardless – is a lot more deeply entrenched and will serve to shake off the mantle of laziness that sometimes settles on my shoulders.

Races planned for this month are the Rockdale Ramble 10k on April 14 and the Lakefront 10 Miler on April 28.   I have no major travel or social plans.  The weather is generally good for running in April.  I am in a reasonable state of good health, despite the recent flu.  So it’s time for an all out push which, given my age and weight, means longer and higher quality runs rather than more days of running.

After the fairly difficult but confidence-building five miler on Sunday the 25th (on the day I would have done the Shamrock Shuffle in Chicago had I not cancelled the weekend trip there due to the events of the previous month), I had a fairly decent week.

Monday — I did a cardio video with lots of lateral motion which serves to balance out the constant forward motion of running and helps prevent overuse injuries.
Tuesday — I walked about a mile and a half with the dogs, then went out for a sumptuous lunch with a friend.
Wednesday — I ran 2.7 miles.
Thursday — A day off; I worked 12 hours.
Friday — Another day off; I was just too tired, having slept badly the night before.
Saturday —  I ran 6 miles at an average of 14:14 pace per mile.  After starting off slow, I picked up a lot of energy over the course of the run and ended up doing really well.
Sunday — I had a hangover.  Big mistake to drink with friends on Saturday night, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.  :-)

So, the goal for the next week will be to work out 5 days instead of 4 and to give a strong effort no matter how I feel.  Sleep is often the determining factor, so getting good sleep will be Job One.

As if life hadn’t already held enough distraction, I ended up with the flu two weeks ago.  On Friday, March 10, I started coughing around midday.  By the evening, body aches and fatigue had set in.  At nightfall chills and fever followed, and then it went downhill from there.  Man, did that shit suck!  Despite having gotten a flu shot in October, illness ate up the next ten days of my life and I ended up not being able to run the St. Paddy’s race I had planned.  Having spent more than another week recuperating, I now find myself set back more than a bit in my training plan (which has now been completely scrapped and retooled).  As a result, I am behind where I hoped the unseasonably warm winter would have allowed me to go and have started over once again as of this past week.

But what the hell.  C’est la vie.  At least I finally feel like I am back to health and freed from the clutches of Sick Bay.

St. Patrick’s Day races always kick off the spring running season, the culminating event of which will be (for me anyway) the Mayor’s Half Marathon on June 24 in Anchorage, Alaska.   My original plan was to try to finally finish a Half in less than 3 hours.  This would have mandated achieving a distance goal early in the season to ensure stamina while working on speed throughout.  Accordingly, my original training calendar had the distance of my weekly Long Run topping out at 7 miles to end this month and 10 miles by the end of April.

After the layoff due to my Dad’s death followed by my 10 days of flu, I have now modified the plan to play catch up on miles and pretty much forego the speed goal.   Having been knocked back to practically Square One, I will do 6 miles next weekend and jump up to 10 miles by April 28 when I run the Lakefront 10 Miler in downtown Chicago.  I can’t remember the last time I did any speedwork.  I think it might have been January.

In any event, today’s run was 5 fairly tough miles that reminded me how much further I still have to go, while providing plenty of fun and entertainment along the way.  It was a beautifully sunny 67 degree day, and my iPod was programmed with my favorite 80s dance tunes to add extra energy to my step.  Birds were singing everywhere and there was a cool breeze.  Even when I was tired (which happened about halfway through) and it was hard to keep pace, I was glad to be out there.  It was sweet.  Nothing clears the mind like a challenging run.  And I saw this gigantic rat that probably weighed as much as my husband’s cat!  I actually tried to chase it but it ran away.

Workouts this past week included:
Saturday — segments of Cathe Friedrich’s Push Pull DVD interspersed with Gilad’s Express (and I’m still sore because she kills me every time)
Friday — 2 miles   (would have done more but ran out of time before work)
Thursday — about 15 minutes of upper body weights while watching the morning news
Wednesday — 4 miles ridiculously slow, mostly walking (crappy sleep, really tired)
Tuesday — nothing; I watched a lot of TV
Monday — 2 and 1/2 miles (nice pace, abundant energy…I was so happy with this run)

For several of the weeks before that, I didn’t really do much of anything due to life’s events.  I managed a decent four mile run in L.A. when I was there for my Dad’s funeral, but I can’t even remember what else might have gone into my training journal if I had been keeping track.  However it’s forward we go now and on to the next goal, no matter where the hell it is I’m starting from today.

Seen here in a 2007 photo from my wedding on the bridge of the Enterprise at the Star Trek Experience (formerly located at the Las Vegas Hilton) is my father, Red Holloway, wearing Starfleet Admiral’s garb as he gives my hand over to my husband.  It was a wonderful day for all of us and nobody had more of a blast than my Dad.  He was not even a Trekkie and had no idea what he was getting himself into, but cheerfully joined in the craziness without so much as a second thought.

My 84-year-old father passed away on February 25 after several years of renal failure requiring thrice-weekly dialysis, most recently complicated by a series of strokes that occurred over the previous three months.  Despite valiant initial efforts at rehab and recovery, he left us in his sleep after a mere two days on hospice care.  Over his final weeks, he had faded away slowly — gradually spending more hours asleep than awake and finally not eating enough to sustain himself (while steadfastly refusing offers of tube-feedings and other extreme interventions) — and I believe his passing was peaceful.

Like a Starfleet Admiral or any other thrilling fictional character, my Dad always seemed larger than life to me.  He was a professional musician whose career kept him on the road hobnobbing with famous people and visiting exciting places around the world for over 60 years.  I wrote in his funeral program that he “came and went through my life like a comet, leaving a trail of stardust on my ordinary existence” because that was how I saw him in my early years:  always dashing off to the next adventure, doing things a kid like me could only dream of.  Then came a period of resentment as I sought to understand why it was necessary to give so much of himself to strangers instead of to me.  But finally there was acceptance after I began to carve out my own place in the world and came to understand what it meant to create an identity and goals, then bust your ass and sacrifice anything-and-everything to achieve them.

Eventually we developed a friendship that both of us found special for probably the last 30 years, one which saw us exchange confidences, give advice, gossip, share laughter and even occasionally travel together.  After having seemed the absentee father who I thought too busy to give me my due, he later showed up for every important occasion of my adult life — my college graduation, my medical school graduation, my wedding — which more than made up for the misperceptions of the past.  And we found similarities in ourselves which could only have come from nature rather than nurture, and we realized how these qualities bound us together as family:  our passion for new experiences, dedication to achievement, fierce independence, levelheaded “no bullshit” approach to life, outspokenness (perhaps too much sometimes) and relentlessly optimistic joie de vivre.   I realized over time that these were my inheritance, my Dad’s greatest gifts to me.   As much as oxygen, they have sustained me over the years and will continue to be my life force forever.

So instead of writing about my training plan and how well I did (or did not) adhere to it in the past few weeks surrounding my Dad’s passing I wanted to put forth just a few words about him, since this has been the main focus of my existence in the last month or so.  Next narrative I’ll get back to mileage counts and cross-training efforts and angsty tirades about my old body refusing to keep pace with my childlike mind.  For now, I will just bid The Admiral farewell and let the world know how I will miss him for easily the next million years.  But I will continue to forge onward in the fashion which would make him proud:  attentively, dedicatedly, and with gusto.

In an episode of Star Trek: the Original Series, the crew of the Enterprise encounters a planet in the Omicron Delta area of space upon which they take shore leave and discover that anything they can imagine is now coming true.  Of course, this becomes a huge problem when their imaginations run amok and it takes Kirk and Spock no end of suspenseful machinations to right the situation.  Fortunately, my recent days in Louisiana have not been nearly as dramatic.

I travelled to New Orleans with my husband last weekend to spend a few days actually relaxing (rather than checking on an ill parent or doing a snowshoe race like the previous two weekends).  And a relaxing time it was — eating delicious food, enjoying music, sightseeing for a whole four days — with very little exercise.  Here’s how it broke down: