Doing the Running Thing

Boring race recap…and a few more things.

• By rejean
• 27 December, 2012
• 2 Comments

I hope everyone is having great holidays. We couldn’t go to New Brunswick this year because of too many things going on, getting ready for 2 training camps, looking for an apartment and having people look at ours. So I can’t say it made for a very festive Christmas and Christmas eve, but at least I didn’t have any excuse to slack off in training.

A while ago I registered for the Boxing Day 10 miler(16.x km) in Hamilton. When I registered for it this was suppose to be a tune up race for the Houston Marathon, as you know my plans changed, and with training not going well I was debating if there was any point on still racing it.

One of the things I love about road races is the atmosphere, meeting new people, and saying hi to the usual suspects that I see at most races. And wether I’m in good shape or not this doesn’t change, so I decided to run it anyway. Of course I knew I’d have to leave my ego at home. I usually go into races of this level with just one goal, to win. Winning wasn’t even in the cards this time, I just wanted to get a good effort in and change the routine a bit.

I made my way to Hamilton with a few of my teammates. The weather was ok in Toronto, but when we got in Hamilton there was some of that white stuff on the ground…yes, I’m scared of snow! It was also very windy, but I was actually happy about this. Not being in shape to race I figured this could maybe give me a chance to draft behind the lead group, let them do the work, and cheat my way to a closer finish. That’s how desperate I was…a marathoner hoping for a close finish so I can unleash my Flash like kick!

The gun goes off! Like expected because of the wind and slippery conditions the pace was fairly relax, somewhere between 3.10-15/km. After about 1km our pack of 5-6 runners detached from the group. I was happy to stay behind and hang out, I felt ok, but it’s definitely not something I’m use to…I usually like pushing the pace from the start to make it into a grinders race, but that wasn’t an option today.

The pace felt ok, but I could tell that this was as fast as my body would let me go today, so when the group started pushing the pace at about 4km I had to let them go. So early on this turned into a solo effort. I was trying to keep the lead group in sight in case someone would start coming back to me, and managed that until about 10km. But at that point I completely blew up and was down to a jog. This is the kind of feeling I’ve had in training for the last while, so I knew there was no point on forcing things, and turned the last 5-6km into a cool down. I got passed by a few runners in the last 5km and finished 11th in a little over 56mins. That’s about my usual long run pace, haha…far from my best performance. But overall I’m ok with the effort, a decent 10km workout I guess.

Congrats to my teammate Peter for taking the win…enjoy it…I’ll be back in full strength soon and kicking your ass!

Sorry…I hope you guys weren’t expecting an exiting race recap.

*****

I thinks I might of found what caused my training to go down hill like that. Last week I counted my daily caloric intake for the first time, and to my surprise it looks like I wasn’t eating enough.

A few months ago I changed my diet and started eating the Paleo/Primal way. I won’t go in details about the diet itself. But for those not familiar with it, the biggest change is that you have to cut out all grains…pasta, rice, bread. Being on this diet or I should say lifestyle, was easier than I though it would be. We substituted the usual endurance athlete staples(pasta and rice), for quinoa, sweet potatoes, and wild rice. But from the start I could tell that the biggest challenge was going to be eating enough. This way of eating is higher in good fats and protein, which also makes you feel fuller faster and longer. A great thing if you want to lose weigh, but as a fairly high mileage runner having to eat 4000 + calories each day, this can be a challenge. So I’ve been forcing food down my troth to make sure I was eating enough. Early into this way of eating I lost 2-3 pounds, not that much, but I can’t say I have much to lose to start with. Loosing weigh wasn’t the reason I started eating this way, but was kind of happy about it since the reality of running is the lighter the better…as long as you’re still heathy, which I felt like I was.

But I think that maybe since my caloric intake wasn’t that much lower than what I needed, it took a while before I started feeling the effects of it, and possibly made me deficient in something even if I haven’t been loosing anymore weigh? Not sure if this makes sense…let me know if any of you had a similar experience or know about this.

So right now I brought my volume down and been over eating a bit so that hopefully if this is the issue I’ll restock whatever stupid nutrient I’m deficient in, and I’ll feel like a rockstar soon!

******

I’m leaving to Clermont Florida tomorrow for 2 weeks. The goal of this training camp was suppose to be to acclimatize to the warm weather for Houston, but instead will be a good way to kick start my training before I leave to Ethiopia on January 26th. I’ll keep you posted and try to take some photos of our training group getting to work.