Just Another Data Point For Runners

Did you hear this crazy story about the 81-year-old guy winning his age group at the Twin City Marathon last weekend after borrowing a catheter...? If you haven't, I know this information takes a little time to digest, but when you got over that, you can read up on it here!

Of course, this makes a great news story, especially because there was some discussion to disqualify him for receiving outside assistance (which they eventually decided not to do), but I felt like that this is a little too much information than I care for... And then I stopped and reflected on my experiences since I started running and racing last year... *

*Oh wow, is it really just since last year that I am doing this running thing... It sometimes feels like a lifetime.

When you talk to other runners about training or racing, you will talk about distances, paces, workouts, drills and at one point what works for you and what doesn't in the nutrition department.

There will be the mention about stomach problems in every possible direction and this is not a case of TMI, but valued as important exchange of experiences and information. When I started out running and logged my first longer distances, I started to have these stomach problems myself and a couple of times, I got so messed up and as a result of it so dehydrated that I passed out. That was scary. Terry runs for 20 years already, but he never experience something to the extent that I displayed. At my next physical, I talked to the doctor who is a runner too and he simply called it "Runner's Stomach" and told me to read up on some stuff in order to adjust my eating behavior in a way that will prevent those harsh attacks in the future. And yes, that worked. I still have my stomach problems as does everyone else, but it hasn't gotten really bad in a long time. And while you are out there with your running buddies, you are talking about this... Every non-runner would probably blankly stare at you and close their ears, but for us it's just another data point in the training log.

On other news:

Tomorrow is the biggest day in the triathlon community of the year. The 31st Ironman World Championships take place in Kona. And according to this, the event even gets televised on Universal Sports, which is not available over our cable... CRAP... Might try to find a live stream tomorrow, but between my race and a wedding that I will attend in the afternoon, there will be most likely little time to sit down and watch anyways...

I have to say, that I have the biggest respect and admiration for Ironman athletes on the professional and age group level. The thought of doing an Ironman race alone is mind boggling to me. In case you didn't know... An Ironman race consists of 2.4 miles (3.86 km) swim, 112 miles (180.25 km) bike and a marathon (26.2 miles, 42.195 km) run. This is crazy!!! The one triathlon that I did was a sprint distance over 10.36% of the Ironman swim (400 meters), 12.5% of the Ironman bike (14 miles) and 15.26% of the Ironman run (4 miles). Even though I am planning on participating in an Olympic Distance Triathlon (1.5 km swim, 40 km bike, 10 km run) as soon as next year, it's hard to imagine right now to go any further than this for me. But I kinda trust in myself that when I accomplished the Olympic Distance that I will reevaluate what I think I am capable of.

So who am I rooting for tomorrow?? Of course Chrissie Wellington (GBR) for the pro women. Not only because she seems to be the obvious choice for the title, but because she is a very impressive person to me when it comes to her athletic accomplishments/ carrier as well as in her involvement in international development. Sure thing as well is that I wish Sandra Wallenhorst (GER) to do well in the competition. For the pro men, I am going with my citizenship completely and therefore hope for Andreas Raelert (GER) to snatch the title away from everyone!

Have a great weekend everyone, whatever you do! ;-)

I'm A Marathon Widow

On my commute back from work tonight I had Terry on the phone. I asked him, if he was still planning on doing a run straight after work and he said yes. I was sooooooo close to start complaining about the speed work Monday night, the Basketball game with the kid yesterday and now another late night??? I bit my tongue and told myself that I don't want to be THAT woman and then it clicked... I am a marathon widow... Where can I sign up for the club membership??

Given that I did a run myself tonight, but I was basically done by the time he got off from work. His work schedule makes marathon training tough enough and so I will spare him the bickering about how much time it consumes.... Who knows, I may need the brownie points later when I plan to venture out into a long distance event myself! ;-)

Tonight, I did my last run before the Ache Around The Lake on Saturday. Since I don't expect to be posting a PR anyways, I played with the idea to take the puppy with me to the race. But before I did that, I wanted to try out how she is doing these days with running on the leash. Since we are using the "Gentle Leader Headcollar", things have improved a lot. We did 5 miles with a 10 minute per mile pace... Pretty good, but it sure was a fight at times. She gets tangled up in the leash a lot or when she starts to get bored starts jumping around... I have the scratches on my legs to prove it. So I guess she didn't pass the test and we'll try again later and practice in the meantime. Pace-wise she and I are a pretty good fit, but when she sees other runners in front of her, she just speeds up a lot to try to catch up and then starts pulling me along. Since I don't have the illusion that I won't have any runners in front of me during the race, this would be a real problem.

Other than the puppy stuff, this was a good run. The race is going to have four major hills, so we'll see how things are going. But after the "Trail of Tears" leg of the Blue Ridge Relay, I kinda doubt that anything can shock me anymore. My goal for the run is to post a decent time and enjoy the route which is supposed to be beautiful!

I Don't Have A Sweet Tooth...

… I DO have a whole SET OF SWEET TEETH!


This is not good news, besides it is not really NEW but rather a development that I have noticed for a while now. Fortunately, this development hasn't shown any influence on the scale so far. I am still hoovering between my usual 125lbs and 128lbs. Which basically tells me, that I still work out enough to balance it out and cut calories somewhere else. So instead of fueling my body with good nutrition, I go the junk calorie route. No wonder, I felt like crap 20 minutes into yesterday morning's spin class. Even though my total daily calories might not change a lot, the quality of the food really impacts my workouts…. Crap in, crap out…


In my head, I have all the nutrition know-how one needs. I know that I have to hydrate properly, to eat my five servings of fruits and veggies a day etc. I do make conscious decisions every day to cut out easy calories in meals (no condiments) or substitute them with better quality calories (white bread vs whole grain pita). But some days I am just constantly hungry and on some days, I am constantly hungry and do have easy access to donuts and cake… The evil combination… I told you before, sometimes we go a little overboard around here. So this morning, I got up at 5 AM and was in the pool by 6.15 AM… I did a nice one hour swim and covered 2,500 yards and was really pleased with this. The downside though, early morning swims just seem to set me up for a whole day of being hungry (I blame the cold water for it), even though I had a small breakfast (whole grain pita, couple of slices of roasted turkey breast, one slice of fat free cheese and two slices of tomato) on my way to the pool. After the workout I had an apple and a banana and by the time my co-worker got in the office bearing the gifts to celebrate his son's birth, my stomach was hungry and my brain was yelling SUGAR, SUGAR, SUGAR. If I don't have easy access to junk then, I fool my brain by consuming a diet soda (I know, not good for you… There will be a post sometime in the future about that), but if I have access to donuts and homemade black forest cherry cake…. Guess what is going to win?? ;-)




TA-DAH!


Source: Mishmash!

Yup… You guessed right and yes, it was worth it! :-)

Tomorrow is another day and with the 5-miler coming up on Saturday, I have to get more diligent for the rest of the week in order to prevent nasty stomach upsets that I am prone to on runs… Which proves once again, that racing really is my top motivation for not falling of the healthy-lifestyle-bandwagon for too long.

From 5th Ave to the Col-Du-Sac

Is it just me or are radio commercials irritating to you as well? I find TV commercials just as annoying, but when the commercials come on, I'll do all kinds of stuff e.g. changing over clothes from the washer to the dryer and other fabulous activities. I can't do that in the car and if I am not fast enough to switch channels, it just takes a locally produced radio commercial to make me want to scream! You know, I really support locally grown produce and the local shops and I understand that producing a commercial costs money and all that, but I am sure there are ways to make it less obnoxious. Really, there is more to selling than yelling! I didn't come up with this sentence... It was that TV show about infomericals... You know what I am talking about?



This morning on my way to work, I once more got the pleasure to listen to the spot of Deja-Vu Consignment in Mauldin since there are the shop of the week (at least the 2nd week in a row) from a local radio station. I have never been to this store, so I cannot make any judgement on the quality of there merchandise, but after listening to their commercial, I kinda doubt that I will make it there ever, because I don't want to be in a dead end... Who would want that?? One line in there 3 minute (felt time) radio spot says something like "Deja-Vu brings 5th Ave to the Col-Du-Sac". I understand that they where playing off the whole French name theme and they wanted to express that they have NYC runway worthy fashion in the store, but please don't use foreign words because they sound good... The meaning of the word should support your message no matter what language you use. Or am I misunderstanding something and they really wanted to call Greenville and/or their store a dead end?? Should I feel offended? ;-)



If you have been reading this blog for a little you might tell me now, that I shouldn't throw stones while sitting in a glass house, since I previously stated to sometimes use words that I am not completely sure of the meaning. Well, I guess I am guilty of this, but be assured that I double check things that I am not sure about, whenever I put something in writing and triple check it, if my writing is about to be published. That's why I checked the word "obnoxious" just a couple of minutes ago. And I know, that there are going to be mistakes in this blog, but these are all foreign words to me... Besides, you would think that in commercial production, there are people proof-reading the lines right??

B-Day Hiking Trip Report

Day One (Friday): Running Errands and Returning to the Scene of the "Crime"

The day started off early. We are so used to getting up early, that we even wake up early on weekends and days off. But that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, since we had a couple of errands to run before heading out of town. I also still had to pack, because I just couldn't get myself to do it the night before. After that we headed out to our chiropractor appointment and then grabbed some breakfast. I didn't have a good backpack for hiking day trips, so we also stopped by a couple of stores and now I am the owner of a brand new Camelbak Mule. Looking at the watch, it was almost 11AM by then and we decided, that we will stop by the Hincapie Sportsware Warehouse Sale. I was hoping to go there, but we originally thought that we would be already gone by the time the Sale started. It was certainly worth it... I wanted to get some winter gear and left the store with a winter bib, winter jacket, base layer, knickers and socks. NICE! :-) So there are no excuses this winter, not to ride the bike!

By 1PM we were finally on the road to Mount Mitchell State Park. We got on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Asheville NC and for Terry it was a trip down memory lane. Just three weeks prior, he was running exactly this piece of road as his last (glorious) leg in the Blue Ridge Relay. Now I know, where he passed who and so on and so forth. Here, we also discovered that Karma gets motion sick... This time we were able to stop in time, the next time, we wouldn't get that lucky. We followed the Blue Ridge Parkway and made a couple of stops at overlook points. At milepost 364.5 Craggy Gardens we made a longer break for taking pictures and a little bit of walking.



We saw big clouds rolling in and it got worse each mile we travelled. By the time we finally reached the Mount Mitchell State Park, the visibility was basically zero. We parked at the visitor center and decided to take the two mile trail up to the summit. Right from the get-go the trail was rough, but was also a lot of fun and interesting to hike on. When we reached the intersection to the Mountain-To-Sea-Trail (MST) we somehow lost the trail and ended up hiking straight up the mountain through the woods until we finally hit another trail. We had the choice of following the trail to the left or to the right, we chose the left and 20 minutes later ended up on a camp site. Good thing was, that we finally knew where we were again, the bad thing was, that we were walking in the wrong direction away from the summit. On the camp site we ran into a ranger and he confirmed that the signs on the Old Mount Mitchell Trail are pretty confusing and gave us the shortest way back to the visitor center. Visibility has gotten even worse in the meantime and there wasn't really a point of going up to the summit anymore. In the Mount Mitchell State Park, there are signs posted everywhere that they have frequent black bear sightings... In this context, Terry made the quote of the day: "Karma, if Mr Bear comes, you are on your own!" ;-)

On our way to the hotel in Marion NC, we rode along the Blue Ridge Parkway and then switchbacks down the mountain. I assume that this is the last 25 miles the cyclist have to do when riding the Assault of Mount Mitchell... Tons of respect for these guys!

Day Two (Saturday): BEAR! and a lot of Hiking

We started Saturday out with breakfast and then made our way to Grandfather Mountain. We have been joking before about the bear advisory signs that are posted everywhere. While driving along a four lane highway, we all of a sudden saw a black bear sprinting across the road in front of us. Fortunately so far ahead, that there was never any danger of actually hitting the bear. So my first live and in color viewing of a bear happened out of the security of the car and I am not unhappy about that. Unfortunately, the cameras were tucked away in our backpacks on the back seat of the car, so we don't even have a picture to proof it. The speed the bear was sprinting was really impressive... There goes the illusion that you would be able to outrun a bear! :-) We kept on going and soon enough hit switchbacks again up the mountain. My stomach felt queasy and so it was no surprise that Karma got sick too... This time, she was a little too fast for us. But we learned and didn't give her food before arriving at Grandfather, so the mess didn't get too bad.



At Grandfather Mountain, we made a quick pit stop at the Nature Museum and then parked the car on the Hiking Parking Lot. From there we did the short hike up to the Mile High Swinging Bridge.



The bridge was shorter than I thought it would be, but it was still impressive. The wind was blowing like crazy up there, but we made our way across and walked over to the peak. Nice views all around... Clear blue skies and everything. Unfortunately, the Grandfather Trail access from the bridge was closed and therefore we had to hike back to the parking lot and go on the Grandfather Extension Trail, that leads to the same peaks. Our plan was to hike to Calloway Peak that would have been 2.7 miles one way. The trails where beautiful, but also very crowded, which was not surprising on such a beautiful day. It was leading through rhododendron bushes which makes me think that this might be worth paying the USD 15.- entrance fee again and come back when those bushes are blooming in the spring. The dirt trail became a rock trail and we went from hiking to mountain climbing in the matter of a couple of steps. The first obstacles, we were able to easily navigate and Karma showed her mountain goat potential. Once we hit the base of McCrae, things got a little more complicated. There were steal ropes fastened to the mountain on which we had to pull ourselves up and then came the first ladder.



Terry carried Karma up that one, but then we hit the next ladder and we had to give up right there... Maybe one mile into our hike and over an hour on the trail already. We looked at a series of wooden ladders up to the peak of McCrae. These ladders where basically fastened on the side of the mountain... There was no way, we could get the dog up to the peak. There was an alternative route, but that had ladders too. So I went up to the peak while Terry stayed with Karma and then he went up while I stayed with her. At least we saw the first peak and the stunning views before heading back to the parking lot.





We left Grandfather Mountain around 3.30PM, got a late lunch on the road and then stopped again at Linville Falls for an easy hike and really beautiful views on a nice water fall and a lot of nice people along the way we chatted with. The place was even more crowded than Grandfather Mountain before, but that didn't matter because the trails where nice and wide. We spent another 1.5 hours there and walked from one viewing area to the next.



On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at Eddie's Spaghettis, the best Italian place in the county per vote in 2007. The food was alright and it made me wonder how many other Italian places are in the county. Honestly, I was so hungry, I would have eaten anything. Back in the hotel, we where glad to finally lay down and rest our legs a little. Later, we actually ended up walking to the gas station across the road for some ice creme before snoozing off.

Day Three (Sunday): Gem Mining and the Return to Reality

This morning we got up, had some breakfast and then headed out to find the Lucky Strike Recreational Mining Company. In the area are tons and tons of gold and gem mining places and we saw a report on the Travel Channel previously and thought we will try our luck with some mining. It was fun and we actually found some really nice precious and semi-precious stones. While talking with the lady that was running the diner that morning, we found out that the gem mining is basically just a fun activity for the ladies and the kids. They buy the stones and prep the buckets that they sell you. So it's kind of fake panning, but at least you are guaranteed to find some stones and really, it was fun! :-) The gold mining you can do there is for real though! After our treasure hunt, we hit the road again back to Greenville.



Halfway there, we passed the sign "Saluda Historic Downtown" and we took the exit to have a look at it. I was there before several years ago and yes, it's a cute historic downtown, it's just very tiny. Already heading back, I saw the sign for Keith's Bike and Tri Shop and decided to stop since Coach Katie once mentioned that they have cheap bathing suites. We probably spend an hour in the shop, chit-chatting with Keith and looking at tons of stuff and buying some of it.

We got back to Greenville in the early afternoon, so we had time for some cleaning and a nice 5.6 mile run... Since we haven't been on our legs enough over the weekend! :-)

This was an AWESOME birthday weekend... Couldn't have asked for anything more! THANKS, TERRY!

Hiking Trip Picture Preview

We are in Marion NC right now. After four hours of hiking/ mountain climbing today, we are currently relaxing in the hotel room... Debating to get out once more to get some ice cream... Nothing is decided yet! :-)

Anyways, the travel report will need a little longer, therefore here a little picture preview.


Friday afternoon somewhere between Asheville NC and Mount Mitchell State Park. Visibility was bad then and got even worse once we started hiking up Mount Mitchell.





View up to the Mile High Bridge on top of Grandfather Mountain from the Bridge Trail Saturday morning. All day it was sunny, warm and very windy.


And we went from hiking to mountain climbing in no time. This is on our way to McCrae peak.


Self-portrait on Grandfather Mountain Trail... After the fifth try, it took both of us holding the camera to make the shot work... Go figure! ;-)




Saturday hike concluded with several great views on Linville Falls.

Random Thoughts on a Pretty Thursday

1. Even though it's Thursday, it's actually Friday for me... I will be off tomorrow. Terry is taking me on a hiking trip for my birthday. The itinerary is not completely finalized yet, but most likely, will have Grandfather Mountain and Mount Mitchell in it. Hopefully the weather holds up.

2. I really had a good birthday. The phone didn't stop ringing, I got tons of text messages and e-mails and I got a birthday card from my parents (via snail mail ;-). It really means the world to me, that people still check in on me on my birthday after I have been gone for so many years.

THANK YOU and DANKESCHÖN to everyone that thought of me.

3. I wish people would leave their swine flu at home. Newsflash: The world doesn't end, only because you miss a day or two at work.

4. Sabotage is the name of the game. Last night I skipped my run because I just felt tired and wiped out. But I set the alarm in order to do a strength class this morning. Come to find out this morning, that I set the alarm on 5:45AM exactly when the class starts. Harmless mistake or do I sub-consciously sabotage myself? Will I really end up having two rest days in a row?? NEWSFLASH: The world doesn't come to an end, if you miss a day or two of workouts.

5. Dogs dream too! Karma must have had a very exciting dream last night... Maybe she was chasing a squirrel or something... She woke me up and it took me a little to realize that she wasn't in pain, but rather squeaking with excitement! I never heard a dog squeak... I wonder, if we have a swine flu thing going on here? Just kidding.

6. Have you already heard about dogbook? I am torn on this topic... NOT! I am busy enough keeping up with my own facebook page.

7. Can someone please explain to me, why meat is more expensive here than vegetables? I tried to do a little research on the topic, but didn't get very far. Can it really be the case that the government subsidies are the whole reason for it? Is it that simple?

Source: PCRM Article

8. Why is this Thursday pretty? Have you looked out of the window today at all? It was clear blue skies and nice temperatures.... Not too hot and not too cold.

9. Can't believe that it's already the first day in October.... The rest of the year will be a blur of Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas candy.

10. Speaking of Christmas. I am really looking forward to going to Germany over the holidays and even better is, that Terry is going to join me this year.

11. I wonder if I still remember the Salsa steps... We'll find out tonight!

12. How OCD am I? I am looking for additional random thoughts, because I don't want to end this list on 11.... But what would be a good number to end it with? 12 maybe?? :-)