Hackweight’s BodyBlog

With ten weeks until my half-marathon, I decided to check my level of fitness by running a 5k race this morning. I had two reasons for this: first, I wanted to know if all of the increased mileage I had been piling on was paying dividends with improved endurance and better racing times, and second, for the hell of it, I was hoping to get over with this nagging goal of cracking 20 minutes in a 5k. I was under no illusions, however, that my priority was with the first goal and if I accomplished the second…whatever.

I started out by giving myself 20 weeks to prepare for the half, which is a considerably greater distance than I had either raced in the past or run during any point in my training. I did cover the distance on New Year’s Eve, however, there was no attempt to make it under any time other than the same day I started. Two and a half hours through the snow was good enough, but now I am seriously looking at a sub-1:30 time before I move on to the full marathon distance sometime next year.

Anyway, back to the 5k. I spent all of yesterday worried about a nagging cough and stuff in my lungs that would cause me to wheeze from time to time. I remained focused, however, telling myself, "you are going to run tomorrow and you will stick to a plan: run the first km fast  then ease into a comfortable but hard pace until the final km and then kick hard and finish all out."  "Don’t worry too much about the time," I said to myself, "you’ve been doing mostly long and slow miles and not much interval work and don’t expect any record breaking speed. Besides, you’re sick and should probably stay home anyway."

Well, I was sick and still am, but no, I didn’t stay home. With roughly fourty minutes before the start, I got into the huge line to the port-o-potties and stayed there until 10 minutes before the gun went off. I am partly to blame for this one, since I have a tendency to over drink before any exercise (my body doesn’t hold water very well and dehydraton is always a fear). Although I should have relieved myself earlier, I don’t think that there were enough facilities for the roughly 1500 runners there. Regardless, I was left with a few minutes to jog around and run a few strides before finding my spot near the front of the group. No sooner had I wedged myself into the crowd did I hear the airhorn. Crap! Not ready or warmed up I was off.

I ran the first kilometer hard and was aiming for 3:45 pace but was a little too fast, passing the 1km marker at 3:30. I knew that starting out too hard would cause problems and quickly slowed down to a 4 min pace. Once I hit the 3km mark, however, things went downhill fast. My lungs began to burn and my chest was hurting. I wasn’t having a heart attack but, there was no way I was going to maintain this pace today. I slowed down even more and by the time I got to the 4km mark I was slightly under 17 minutes and dying. I though, "how embarrassing this is, I’m going to have to walk or crawl the final 500m of a 5k, and I’m supposed to be training for a half-marathon!"

I think that being able to see the finish line and the sense of shame I would feel as a quiter in a distance I had done several times a week for over seven months gave me the drive to sprint the last 500 or so meters and finish in not just a personal best time of 20:02, but also third in my age group. I swear, that after it was over, I thought I was going to barf. That being done and over with, I have to make a few adjustments to my training,  but more importantly, I’m going to get some rest and get myself in condition to do some serious running.

There is an isssue being put before the courts on Monday in which 15 female ski jumpers from Canada, Austria, Norway, Slovenia and the U.S. will challenge the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Winter Olympics on the issue that they are entitled to comptete in the upcoming winter games in accordance with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Currently, ski jumping is the only sport at the Winter Olympics that exclusively allows male athletes to participate while shutting out female competitors.

Fingers are pointing in all directions as VANOC says it is the International Olympic Committee that is discriminating, the IOC blames the Federation Internationale de Ski and the FSI says look to the IOC for answers. While the red tape is hacked through the women ski jumpers sit waiting, and waiting…

Sad to say, but there still seems to be resistance to the idea that strength, athleticism and feminitity can co-exist in one body. Although there is ample evidence of positive role models for women athletes to be found in the pages of fitness magazines and on websites such as this one, there is also persists a shocking amount of media images supporting football wives and cheerleader babes as the closest any girl should aspire to in sport.

There is some reasoning, however, behind the argument against awarding women a chance at ski jumping gold. Much like there are no male rhythmic gymnasts, synchronized swimmers, or female sumo wrestlers at the Olympics, there does not appear to be enough athletes from enough countries with the requsite skill level to compete in the winter games to justify -for the time being- to include female ski jumping as an Olympic sport. In fact, in certain sports, of which women’s hockey is a glaring example, there is a danger of these events being dropped due to two or three countries continually dominating while the rest of the field lags far behind in skill and funding in their home countries.

I believe that the issue of equality in sport needs to take a more important role within the IOC but it can only succeed with the support of individual countries putting the funding and support for encouraging and developing girls and women to take up and excel in athletics. While the boys sort this issue out the girls wait for a chance to play. 

I got up yesterday morning to begin my 2009 racing season in the cold and wet of downtown Hamilton, Ontario. The Bay and Back 5k was initially going to be my opportunity to claim a sub-20 min 5k milestone that I narrowly missed the previous Fall by 32 seconds. Since that race in October, I kept assuring myself that this was my very first race and that I has not been running for more than six months prior to the event and that I should be proud of my accomplishment.  Perhaps I’m too much of a perfectionist, because somehow I felt that I could have ran a little bit harder and trained a little bit smarter. There were far too many ‘little mistakes’ that I swore I wouldn’t be making this time around.

Beginning on Monday, January 5th of this year I jumped head first into a 12 week training program with the will and determination to overcome those 32 seconds. From the first few weeks I was feeling fast and strong and was seriously thinking about the 19 min barrier as a possibilty. "Just stick to the program and you’ll do it," I told myself.

I’ve heard that the easiest way to make the Gods laugh is to make a plan. In my case things began to unravel about 6 weeks to go before the race with work and personal issues getting in the way of training, sleep and trying to fit in half-decent eating habits. Then came the injuries, and the colds, and more injuries. On top of all that, when the weather a few days ago began to look promising I found out that the only rain all weekend would be on the morning I had to race -not that weather is an excuse, but I felt that fate was not on my side and this simply added to the frustration.

So at 9:45 on Sunday I limped into the middle of the pack of 1588 other runners (repeating my earlier mistake of not getting to the start line early enough) and went all out with only the lowered expectation of just finishing a distance I run several days a week without issue.

I wheezed across the finish line at a time of 20:07 placing 63rd overall.

I should have left feeling thankful that I wasn’t scraped off the road by a paramedic, and managed to set a personal record in the process. Instead I left feeling, "now, if I had only taken that one corner sharper and tackled the second hill a little harder, I could have finished in under…"

For some reason I decided to do away with 2008 by running a half-marathon. Well, actually it wasn’t a race per se, I just wanted to go the distance because I had never really run beyond 10k and I wanted to end the year with a bang. So in the snow and wind chill of -22C, I ventured out yesterday afternoon and did it.

Now, I’m spending New Year’s Day on the couch watching football and nursing a right knee and left foot, but I feel a hell of a lot better than if I told myself, "Well, it would be nice to run 22k by the end of the year, but…" I’ll feel fine by the weekend and now I can spend some time getting ready for getting back to eating right and training hard in 2009.

The Globe and Mail newspaper reported on Thursday Oct. 30th that there are plans by Canada’s Conservative government to reintroduce legislation giving the federal government more regulative authority concerning the "quality and safety of supplements, vitamins and other natural health products".  This was expected, as when Bill C-51 died when Parliament was disolved this fall before the recent election, there was a strong indication that this bill would be revived. And so it has.

Basically, the argument for increased regulation is that the rules in place have no teeth and products that are known to be harmful can only be met with consumer advisories rather than being removed from the shelves. One example cited was a Health Canada advisory released this week regarding the products New Roots Herbal Vitamin C8 and Vitazan Professional Vitamin C Advanced Ascorbate. Health Canada stated that the companies "inadvertently sold a product labelled as containing vitamin C that was improperly manufactured using vitamin A instead". This is just one of a long list of advisories that have shown several products to contain substances that were not identified on the label and/or have proven to be dangerous to the user.

I do not think that anyone could make a convincing argument that products that may or may not contain what they say they do is a case of buyer beware. In some instances, one needs to be knowledgable about what he/she is taking when it comes to health supplements. Why am I taking this? What does it do? What is a safe and effective dosage? Too often I see people walk into a nutrition store and are talked into buying a product which the retailer (usually someone in extremely good shape) explains that they "take every day before and after training"  and that’s the key to how they were able to develop that physique. Next thing you know you paid a lot of money for garlic pills.

This situation is very different from someone who knows they want to take glutamine, why they should be taking it and expects that the bottle labelled glutamine is indeed just that. Currently (in Canada at least) it’s a bit of a crap shoot and one has only reputable and trusted companies to rely on providing a consistent product that is what it says it is. 

I have no objection to developing industry wide testing standards of nutritional supplements. I don’t believe that anyone who has an interest in their physical health and safety would object either.  My biggest concern is that this has not become a greater issue amongst those who advocate and practice physical fitness and that this action had not taken place sooner. 

I have read many articles in magazines in the past few years that have advocated a high-fat, high-protein, low-carb diet as a means of shedding bodyfat while gaining muscle. The Atkins Diet (along with others promoting the same low-carb idea) has been one of the most successfully marketed dietary approaches in recent memory, and is backed with some legitimate scientific evidence to support it. I currently do not follow any carb-cycling program and I am not going to debate whether or not low-carbs/high-protein is a good or bad nutritional approach. I honestly haven’t put that much effort into finding out. I am not a nutritionist. I do, however, take a commonsense approach to my diet. I do not think that I could be easily convinced that someone who is committed to looking and feeling healthy can claim that meals consisting of chicken wings or bunless hamburgers have any place in such a person’s diet.

Those of you who are more knowledgeable on the subject will say that Atkins is not about eating hotdogs and skipping vegetables. Unfortunately, this is not how it was marketed by large resturant chains and pre-packaged food producers to individuals jumping on the latest health fad. Low-carb went from reasonable (thiner crust pizza) to ridiculous (low-carb beer?). Low-carb has since given way to a variety of new trends that to anyone wandering down a grocery asile can’t miss: organic, 0 trans fat, less sugar, probiotics, omega-3, etc… In and of itself, these are signs of a positive shift towards a more health conscious society, however, they are also signs of consumers being misled by products claiming to be ‘healthy’ while distracting from an ingredient list that could only be explained by a chemist. Sure Twizzlers are low in fat (as is clearly labelled on the package), but what else is in it… I mean besides sugar.

Cereal advertised and high in fiber (no mention of loads of sugar), cheese packed with omega-3 (and saturated fat) and pretzels that have no trans fat (but tons of sodium) may give someone the impression that they are making healthy choices when they are obviously not. My fear is that someone who is serious about making a lifestyle change and wants to take care of their body will become discouraged when they make no progress in becoming leaner and healther due to being conned into swaping one diet trap for another.

Most of the people on bodyspace.com appear to be discerning and informed about what they eat and probably like myself, attempt to stick to foods in their most basic form (unprocessed, no-additives, etc). I’m as guilty as anyone of purchasing packaged food because of convienience but I’ve also stopped to ask, is my orange juice better if I add, I dunno, fish oil? 

After years of being reluctant to do anything resembling "impact cardio" due to a belief that my knees could not handle it, I decided in mid-May to take up running as an addition to my overall health and well-being program. I discoverd two things very quickly: first, my body is much more resilient to the pounding on concrete than I had thought, and second, I am more stubborn (or stupid) than I am willing to admit.

The running itself posed no problems and I felt that I was capable to complete and possibly compete in a sanctioned race. On May 31 I committed myself to a 5k run that was far enough off in advance (Oct. 19) that I could prepare myself. One problem was that I did not know anything about training for a race as up until now all I had basically done in terms of fitness was based in a gym. I knew about weights (I have some muscle), I knew about cardio (I had managed to burn off some of my fat), and I had some vague ideas about nutrition, but I did not have a clue about what runners do other than get from point A to point B as fast as possible.

This is where I made my first mistake. Rather than actually seek out someone to help me -and there are plently on qualified and accessible individuals in my city- I thought it would be enough to print off a training program from Runner’s World.com. On top of that, I thought the beginner’s program was not challenging enough and chose a rather difficult 14 week intermediate program. Things went well until two weeks later I ended up in physio after blowing out my left knee.

I got over that obstacle fairly quickly and scaled down my weekly miles. This is where I made my second mistake. I had eight weeks to go and convinced myself that I had to make up for lost time so I increased the intensity of my training and made adjustments to the program where I decided they were necessary. Ten days later I was back in physio with a blown right knee.

With three weeks left to race my training consisted of one day of speed work (3×1200m repeats for example) and one day of running at an easy pace for 6-7 km. All other work was done on a stationary bike to keep my heart rate high enough so I could be in some kind of condition to race.

This is when I made my third mistake. I figured out that the speed I could maintain during repeats could, in theory, enable me to complete a 20 minute 5k. Now, these repeats have rest period in between which one jogs in order to recover for the next sprint. Totally irrelevant, I thought. I proceeded to shoot my mouth off to anyone that would listen that I would be finishing in under 20 minutes. It is one thing to have the encouragement of others and setting a standard as a motivator to meet those expectations. It is quite something else to assure that you will accomplish something without having the faintest idea of whether you can reasonably reach that goal or you are an idiot for even suggesting it.

I’ll admit that I was nervous several days before the race and that I had gotten myself in a jam and I would never heard the end of it if I came up short. I was calm the day of the race and inspite of problems that arose I had trained hard and regardless of the result I would walk away knowing much more about myself and the sport of running. I finished  40th out of 2073 runners at a time 20:32. 

I’ve decided to make a serious attempt at a personal record for a race in March and looking back I don’t think 32 sec is insurmountable, but this time I won’t say what time I think I’m capable of.     

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