We all search for that one reason things happen the way they do, when typically, it's a multitude of little things that add up over time...sort of like compound interest or something. It's natural. We all want one thing to fix and make it better. My dramatic weight loss 5 and a half years ago was successful for many reasons. I had many motivating factors-concern about how my health would affect my family, outright vanity, and honestly, a need to demonstrate that if I wanted to tackle the problem of my weight, I had more intellectual and physical ability to do so than others. And once I discovered racing, there was a competitive instinct that I've seldom possessed in life.
As with my weight loss, my eventual weight gain occurred because of many factors. At what, in hindsight, was the peak of my athletic conditioning, I logged a 21 hour and 41 minute finishing time in the Arkansas Traveller 100. It was good enough for 6th place on a brutal day of severe weather and subsequent freezing temperatures. I was in the top 5 up until the last 5 miles of the race, when a fellow competitor that I am on friendly terms with blew by me like I was standing still. Regardless, I was over the moon with my finish. Furthering my glee, this person (Reid) wrote in the race report that he published in the Arkansas Ultra Running newsletter that one of the motivating factors he had over the course of his training for this race was to beat me! ME!!! The back story is that in a 50 mile race the preceding spring, I had recognized Reid from the same race the year before (when he saved me from making a wrong turn) and made friendly conversation while running about 10-15 miles together. I ended up pulling 30 minutes ahead of him, though, by the end of the race. He related that he knew he was in comparable shape and it gave him a goal. Well, despite the fact that he was successful, the mere fact that I (of all people) had become someone that had become good enough at such an extreme event that others were envious and set goals to beat me...really upped the pride in my accomplishments and inflated my ego to epic proportions.
This pride blinded me to the fact that I had trained for that race like an animal. During week days, I had very strict mileage goals. If I missed a run at lunch time, the running shoes came out as soon as I came home and I got those miles in. I planned my work around my runs, making sure I was never gone far enough away from the office to keep from missing them. I'd kept my diet pretty severe that year, as well. That spring I had logged my lowest adult weight ever, 155 lbs. Some of that weight had come back on by race day but I was still comfortably in the 170's.
But after the race, my confidence in my own abilities led me to up my food indulgences. "I can burn it off," I said. And I HAD been able to do so in the past. But this time was different. What seemed like a minor event that occurred on race day came back to haunt me. It still does to this day. At the beginning of the race, about 4-5 miles in, I stepped into a mud puddle. My right leg slid rapidly forward as I unknowingly planted it into the puddle. Instead of letting myself fall, my instinct kicked in and a braced myself over my leg, stiffening and putting all my weight over it in an effort to stop the slide. I really didn't feel anything bad at the time. But post-race, I did notice a little bit of pain high up on the inside of that leg. The slight pain never really subsided. I felt it every morning when I ran. Sometimes worse than others...but it was ever present. The pain made itself known when I planted and pushed off with my right leg, especially when I was attempting to run with any sort of speed. Foolishly, I entered another 100 mile race early the following year, where I tripped over a root and caught myself in exactly the same manner with the same leg. It only made it worse. This really slowed down my runs and I would speculate the calorie burn I got from them, as well.
But, as I said, there were multiple factors. In the same race where I ran with and beat Reid, I was ultimately unimpressed with my finishing time. Yes, it was about 20 minutes faster than the year before. But I went into the race a LOT better trained, having already run two marathons that calendar year and shedding more holiday weight gain than I had the year before. Twenty minutes was a bit of a letdown.
Minus a couple miles of this race (the Ouachita Trail 50 miler), it's not overly tough, minus ever-present rocks. However, four miles in, there's a 1000 foot climb up Pinnacle Mountain, a prominent point just outside of Little Rock. It's a brutal climb when you're engaged in a competitive race. Pinnacle is literally a giant pile of boulders. So you are going hand over hand and hopping where you can. Well, this is the only part of the race that I really had never simulated in my training. Before my first running of this race, I didn't run a single inch off concrete or the treadmill. I did use a pretty intense incline program on my treadmill, though.
But I reasoned after my disappointing 2012 finish that maybe that wasn't enough. Maybe I needed some real challenging terrain to train on. As luck would have it, I found said terrain right behind my office. My office sits just on the edge of the dam of a manmade lake. The channel of the bayou that it impounds carved some steep terraces out of clay and ironstone. These became my new training ground as I ran up and down the steepest portions I could find. But, like with the injury I had incurred, this change in training slowed down the pace of my runs. I assumed that all the extra "vertical" would pay big dividends. Well, maybe it would have if I had been able to maintain my weight. But the loss of any real fast runs, either in the morning, due to my twitchy groin pain, or during my slow but hilly lunchtime runs really seemed to take its toll.
And it wasn't just my weekday training that plodded along at a slower pace. After a few fits and starts, my wife began to build up her distance in her own running program with the goal of a half marathon finish. I ran the race with her in early 2013. Having achieved this milestone, I encouraged her to aim for a marathon. Now, since training for my second marathon, I had the benefit of being in the weekly marathon group that I spied while training for my first. I made many friends through it and my ultras and almost always had someone to run with. My wife didn't, though. While I was running with friends, she was watching our kids or working. As she pushed forward with longer and longer distances, she and I both wanted to run these weekly runs together.
Over the previous years of running marathons, I had built up to a typical long run pace in the high 8 to low 9 minute mile pace. Obviously with this being Jen's first push into these distances, she covered them nowhere near that fast. 10:30 to 11:00 minute paces were typical. Again I was losing some speed on my runs. But it was so enjoyable to run with her and help her reach her goal that I didn't care.
Ultimately her runs led to another issue-lack of time. To achieve two runs a day, I typically woke up around 4:30-4:45 am to log that morning five miler. But with Jen's schedule at least as busy as mine, we had to compete for that morning time. The fact that we have small children means we can't run together. So...I had to wake up even earlier. And with my groin injury slowing me down, I had to account for typically another five minutes. This led to me sleeping in a few mornings just because I couldn't wake myself or at the very least, it led to me curtailing some runs for fear of making Jen late for her morning run.
But I can't blame it all on running slower. I ate a good bit worse than the years before. I'd become so strict in my dieting that it led to awkward social situations. I didn't eat the cookies people brought to work to share, didn't loiter at office birthday parties, and didn't go out to eat with co-workers on the rare occasion that they did so. It finally made me feel like I was ostracizing myself and that it wasn't good for the longterm health of my career. So...I relented. And not just at work but with my family in similar situations. I'd grown tired of ordering the chicken or tiny steak, tired of not being able to enjoy eating a pizza. I'd used a few bouts of vegetarianism in previous years to strategical avoid overeating. This, too, was out.
All these factors led to me not being able to shed the holiday weight gain I typically dropped like a rock the preceding few late winters/early springs. By April 2013, when I had been at around 165 the previous few years, I struggled to get to 180. As a result, I did NOT get that even better finish at the year's Ouachita 50. Rather, I finished exactly an hour slower than the previous year!
The ensuing two years have seen me hit peaks and troughs in my weight but the trend has been relentlessly upward as the miles have decreased and the calories have increased. After a disappointing Arkansas Traveller this year, where I dropped due to lack of training and really, lack of will to finish, I sought treatment (finally) for the groin pain and some plantar fasciitis that probably popped up due to the extra weight I've been carrying while trying to continue to train for long races. The therapy has been slow and honestly I'm not convinced I'm ever going to recover. But, in the past, I've had these little pains disappear. I'm hoping beyond hope that it might happen this time, eventually. My physical therapist tells me there's no reason it shouldn't, just that my injury is stubborn because I left it untreated for so long.
But thanks to the Christmas holidays and a subsequent rare cold that left me immobile for days, I ended the year exactly 75 pounds higher than that record low of 155 pounds. But a new year brings a new start and I've GOT to make a push. Jen, who's had much more success in keeping in shape, and I have a marathon planned for the end of the month. Though I'm in horrible shape, I still feel as if I can probably pace her through it to a good time. But I've got to get back into my running in a big way between now and then. This week I've already logged more miles than I have in probably the last two. As part of her New Year's goals, Jen has tried to find healthier meals and snacks to make for the family. She's found some surprisingly good and not in anyway bizarre meals to cook. They're just things I never thought to make or was unssuccesful in getting the family to eat in the past. But with her making the push, it makes it a lot easier.
Finally, one more tool has fallen into my lap. While surfing the internet a few days back, I happened upon an advertisement for a juice cleanse at a discounted price. Honestly, I think juice cleanses are pseudo-scientific baloney one step below magical weight loss pills. But I bought into it anyway because of the underlying proposition of trying to adhere to what amounts to a severe calorie restriction plan for five days. Jen's cooking and my return to something resembling a running routine has already allowed me to shed 6 lbs of Christmas weight gain. If the "cleanse" allows me to drop a few more pounds, my sincere hope is that it will snowball from there. We'll see. I've only taken one of the planned juices so far and it's going to be difficult, to say the least. And that particular blend was probably the most appetizing of the six daily concoctions I am supposed to imbibe. But, by golly, if I can run 100 miles, surely I can make myself consume this stuff for 5 days. We'll see. Time for that second juice of the day!
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