Back from vacation

I’m always a little paranoid about announcing online that I’m going on vacation—you never know if one of your 25 followers is also a burglar who lives near the Billings area and covets your crappy secondhand furniture—but anyway, I’m back! Can’t talk now, Dopey crisis, but there are a whole bunch of anecdotes and photos from the national parks of southern Utah forthcoming.

And, hey, it feels like my calf is really healed this time, so I’m going to try running again after the work disaster subsides.

In pursuit of a non-humiliating run

Urgh. I guess if I’m claiming to be training for a race then I should actually tell you how it’s going.

So I put a run on the schedule yesterday. The plan was to walk five minutes/jog five minutes as a warm-up, then run at a steady, easy pace for 10 minutes. I walked my five minutes and then jogged exactly three steps before realizing that my left calf was having none of it. I didn't reinjure it or anything; it’s just not healed yet. And it also hates me.

But it still doesn't hurt to walk at an incline, so that’s what I’ve been continuing to do. So boring. So sweaty. So—and just prepare yourself right now for the very definition of First World whining—painful because there is a blister on my pinky toe. I keep reminding myself that I’m doing this so I don’t let my awesome teammates down. (Think of the children!) It would also be nice to have a non-humiliating run for my own sake, though. But because of all my injuries and lack of commitment to a good diet—I think I’ll leave the details to your imagination—this race is coinciding with a huge trough of out-of-shapeness. Even when I was 40 pounds heavier, at least I could run for 30 minutes straight.

I’m going to assume this is the low point of my eight-week training adventure and buck up now.

Injury report

I completed my first week of training for my 5K—three total workouts of walking steeply uphill for 20 minutes. My calf and hip feel fine again. I think I’ll do one more walking-only workout tomorrow just to be extra cautious, and then I’ll try to run some. AFTER warming up really well. The walking sounds kind of lame, but it really is hard enough to count as real training, based on my heart rate and perceived exertion.

See me throwing the fancy training terms about!

I am also very happy that my shoulder is significantly better. I can stretch my arm overhead now in ways that were causing me huge pain a month ago, but I occasionally still find arm positions (usually in yoga, or while trying to sleep) that hurt. It also snaps and crackles in all sorts of exciting new ways. And it is so weak. It wasn’t that long ago I could do between 10 and 20 (I forget) push-ups with my feet elevated on a stair. Now I can’t do a single regular push-up, and it’s darned hard to even do one from my knees. But I don’t think I’m going to put too much effort into that until I’m fully healed.

I guess I’m glad I’ve already been to physical therapy for all these injuries at one time or another—I actually know what to do to fix them on my own. Can’t really say whether vitamin D is also helping, but it’s nice to have an excuse to get outside and just bask in it.

Officially in training

OK, I looked at a calendar, and I have exactly 7½ weeks until the triathlon. On the upside, that should be enough time to train myself into respectable shape for it. On the downside, it means nothing else can go wrong, because there’s not a lot of cushion in that time frame.

I realized that what I need to be doing while my calf is still a bit twitchy (it’s healing, though) is to train on a treadmill, walking only, but at a huge incline so that I can get my heart rate up. I did that for 20 minutes last night after yoga. It was hard, my heart rate went way up, and I got all sweaty! And I thought, wait, getting all sweaty is a notable event now? How long has it been since I actually worked out hard?  Huh.

The next seven weeks could be interesting.

Something to try

I just Googled “easily injured muscles vitamin deficiency”—and by the way, I can hear my kids saying “Oh, Mom, that’s your answer to everything now, isn’t it?” And the answer is yes. Sue me.

But the first thing that popped up is a study correlating muscle injuries with vitamin D deficiency. And it has been a LONG dark winter, and I haven’t been that great lately about taking (or passing out like they are candy) vitamin D pills. So I’m hoping that explains why my calf would pop after less than half a mile of easy running—and now I hear my husband and parents saying, “Or it could just be that you’re OLD.” Yes, I am also old. But I would like to be a healthy old person who can run around doing what she wants without fear of crippling injury.

And I would also like to be able to run this triathlon relay 5K (a) at all, and (b) fast enough that I don’t let my kids down. Because I have a feeling their legs of the race are going to be fast. Like, we’re going to be in the top 10 percent of the field when the baton gets passed to me, and it would be nice if I didn’t get passed by 300 people on my way to the finish line.

Doing the wrong right thing

It has been a while since I have blogged, but I had a very good reason: I have a New Life Plan wherein I always do the things I know I should be doing (instead of the fun, easy, lazy things that keep me from achieving my full potential), and I’ve been so swamped with work that meeting my deadlines, going to yoga once in a while, and paying attention to my loved ones were the only things I have had any business doing.

That philosophy served me pretty well last week, since I logged a ton of hours and met two huge deadlines. Then last night I decided that having fun with my family was what I needed to be doing, so I proposed that we go out to a late dinner, a later movie, and then stay up to try to see the meteor shower. Our older teen already had older-teen plans, but we took Mik out for pizza, Godzilla, and kind of a dud of a meteor shower.

(Oh, Godzilla? Soooo awful, but slightly fun, too. And some very drunk guy walked into the nearly-empty theater, chose a seat almost right next to me, and proceeded to make loud comments in my general direction throughout the previews and the first few minutes of the movie, before falling soundly asleep. He was still unconscious when we left.)

This morning I slept in as long as I could, cleaned up the mess that had formed in the wake of my work crisis, and then went out for a short run—since the kids and I have this plan to do a relay triathlon in a matter of weeks (July 20) and I am expected to do the 5K. Except a muscle in my calf went twang while I was running, and the hip pain that had been kind of dormant flared up again. I dutifully iced them both (because that is the right thing to do)—but I have to say that perhaps, in retrospect, running was not the right thing to do after being up until 2 a.m. the night before.

In my head I am a stud distance runner who can handle a 5K on next to no training, but this isn’t going to work if I get injured every time I step out the door.

The only plastics waste home

Last year I read Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson. It was interesting enough that I blogged about it, but I really didn’t like it a whole lot overall. I gave it three stars on Goodreads and wrote this:

I definitely admire a woman on a mission. And it's always nice to read a missive by someone with even more crazy-out-there ideas than my own. … But I had problems with maybe half of her suggestions. And of the half that didn't frustrate or annoy me in some way, I can see myself actually implementing maybe half of those. …

The things is, my subconscious has been chewing on that darn book for the past seven months. We bought a composter recently — and, yes, I know that buying a big plastic composter as opposed to making one out of twine and discarded planks sort of defeats the purpose, but M.H. refused to have one of those, so stick with me here. With all the organic waste now removed from the trash, and all the recyclables already pulled out as usual, it became really easy to see what our trash problem is. Plastic containers, plastic wrappers, plastic mesh thingies, plastic-coated floss, plastic bags, plastic bags, and more plastic bags — that’s basically all the can has in it right now.

Well, Zero Waste Home had like a million ideas for getting rid of plastics! Most of them involved buying stuff that wasn’t packaged in it (** cough COSTCO **), but it’s nearly farmer’s market season, and I think I’m ready to make more of an effort.

My suggestion is that you read the book, get annoyed for a while, and then see what happens.