Goal setting in one easy step

My running goal(s) for 2011 can be summed up in one word: DISTANCE.

I am not going to concern myself with speed at all this year. I do not have any races planned (though I certainly wouldn't pass up a 5K or three or twelve, if the right one(s) came along) so I have no real reason to work on speed right now anyway.

Instead, I'm going to work on increasing the distance that I can run easily. What I really really want to do -- my goal, specifically, for this year -- is to run a 10K. Not a 10K race, mind you. I just want to be able to run 6.2 miles easily, as a matter of course. By the end of this year, I want 10 kilometers to feel like nothing.

I'm definitely planning to run the Capitol 10K race in early 2012, and if I can get to the point where running a 10K is just another easy/average running day for me before the end of this year, I should be golden. I realize most runners would need way less than a year to prepare for a 10K race, but most runners don't have fibromyalgia, right? Right!

So yeah, the key word this year is DISTANCE. I'm going to earmark the entire year of 2011 for 10K training. Wish me luck!

Thankful

All of the conditions were right on Thanksgiving for me to have a fibromyalgia flare. I'd spent a lot of time standing in one place doing repetitive motions like peeling potatoes and chopping vegetables, I'd been hauling around heavy roasting pans and pots of gravy and whatnot, I'd over-indulged in rich food, and to top it off a massive cold front roared through at midday, dropping temperatures by more than 20 degrees in 20 minutes. If that's not a recipe for flare, I don't know what is!

But somehow, miraculously, I managed to avoid one. I'm not sure how it happened, but I am immensely grateful. (Maybe it was all the tryptophan? I ate a lot of turkey. Hmm.)

At any rate, I didn't run on Thursday but I had a couple of great (treadmill) runs Friday and Saturday! I did a mile on Friday and a mile and a half on Saturday, running hard both times because that's what my body wanted to do. I was completely exhausted by the end of each run and my hips were really feeling it, but in every other respect it felt great to just go all-out and work up a sweat.

I'm taking today off but already thinking about tomorrow's run! I'd like to work in a distance run sometime this week (for me, distance = anything over 2 miles). With no upcoming race to train for, I'll just have to see whether my legs feel like running hard or running easy!

Ready, steady, go!

The Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure is tomorrow here in Austin -- my very first 5K race! I am as ready as I'll ever be. Allergies and fibromyalgia flares have kept me from training as much as I would have liked, but I think I'll do okay. I signed up for the untimed race so I can walk it if I have to. I would like to finish in 45 minutes, but if it takes me an hour then no biggie. I'm really running this race to raise money (which I have, thanks to my fabulous family and friends -- THANK YOU!!) and for the experience of being there with other people who care so much about this great cause.

As I've mentioned before, my sister-in-law is a breast cancer survivor and she and my husband lost their beloved stepmother to the disease. My mother also has a dear friend who is a survivor, and I have a friend who is a few years younger than me who beat breast cancer a couple of years ago and is doing great. It is absolutely my honor to run (or walk, as the case may be) in celebration of all these amazing women!

I will be sure to check in sometime after the race and let you all know how I did. Wish me luck!

Working on it

Well goodness, it's been almost a month since I've updated. Sorry about that! And I'm also sorry to say that I haven't been running or cross-training nearly as much as I would have liked during that time. A couple of weeks of severe allergies, a fibromyalgia flare, lack of sleep and an extremely busy schedule kept me away from my usual workouts, and once I fell out of the habit, it's been really hard to get back in. This is not good, especially since the Komen race is in two weeks! TWO WEEKS! Yikes! I guess it's a good thing I signed up for the untimed version, huh? I think I will probably end up walking a lot of it.

I'm having a really hard time carving out a running/workout schedule. I am a creature of habit and my habit has always been to run or work out in the mornings after dropping the last kid at school. For the past few weeks, though, my schedule hasn't allowed that so I just haven't been doing it at all, really. Maybe one or two mornings a week when I actually have the time, but that's it. I think I need to really sit down and think about finding another time of day that would work better more consistently. Not easy! Ever since school started we have just been crazy busy around here. I know I need to make my running a priority but it just seems like there are so many other things that need to be done with that time.

Oh well. Maybe what I really need is an attitude adjustment, but I don't think one is coming anytime soon!

Mojo restored

When I first started running (after having walked religiously for a year) I didn't have much of a plan. I just wanted to run. I'd hop on the treadmill, cue up my fitness playlist, and if a song came on that made me want to run, I ran. When I got tired or the tempo changed or I just wasn't feeling it anymore, I dropped back to a walk. I'd do that until I got tired or until the clock forced me to jump in the shower and get on with my day, and that was it. That was my training plan.

Then I decided to run a 5K and felt like I should be doing "real" training -- interspersing speed intervals with distance work and whatnot. And that was fun at first. It made me feel like a real runner and forced me to push myself out of my comfort zone. However, the longer this went on (read: about a week)(I have the attention span of a gnat on meth, I swear) the more anxious it made me about my upcoming race. I kept thinking I should be progressing faster and hitting better numbers, and suddenly this whole running thing began to feel like WORK. And anyone who knows me knows that I am the furthest thing from a workaholic. In fact, I'm sort of allergic to anything resembling work.

With my recent medically induced hiatus and my unsuccessful attempt to jump back into hardcore training followed by two days of enforced rest (yesterday and the day before, just too busy), I've had a lot of time to reflect on why in the heck I'm doing this in the first place. I wanted to run because I wanted to run, period. For years I didn't think I could run with fibromyalgia, and I wanted to see if I could, and then I did, and I absolutely loved it. I wanted to run a 5K to prove to myself that I could, and I decided to publicly document my training leading up to the 5K to show other fibromyalgia sufferers that it was possible and to give them hope that someday they could be active again. My only goals when I first decided to run a 5K were to finish and to not be last. Then I started getting fancy ideas in my head about finishing under a certain time, and running mile-long stretches without stopping, and ... well, see above re: WORK. In short, it stopped being fun.

So today I got back on the treadmill. I left my phone, with its fitness apps and its amped-up playlist, on the charger and instead grabbed my old mp3 player with my original fitness playlist (a mix of classic rock, '80s dance tunes and all kinds of random stuff). I ran during the songs that made me feel like running and walked (and sang along, and snapped my fingers) during the songs that made me feel like walking. I didn't watch the clock or my distance or any of that -- I just ran (and walked). It was so much fun! That's why I started doing this. And, I've decided, that's how I want to keep doing it.

I'm still running the 5K. I know I can finish, and I really don't think I'll be last. But now I have a new goal: to have fun with it.

Speaking of fun, here were my two Laughs of the Day (or maybe Laughs of the Run would be more accurate):

1. I did look at my time/distance when I was done, before turning off the treadmill, and it turned out I covered 1.8 miles in 31 minutes. That is a faster pace than any I ran the whole time I was doing my "real" training!
2. Right toward the end of my cool-down, "Road to Nowhere" by The Talking Heads came on. While I was on the treadmill, which is literally a road to nowhere. Oh, the irony!

Not feeling it

So I'm back on the treadmill after my oral surgery hiatus and I seem to have lost my mojo a bit. Monday was my first day back at it and I ran intervals for 2 miles, yesterday I did a brisk 5 kilometer walk, and today I was not. feeling. it. At all. I ended up only running intervals for about three-fourths of a mile and then walking for a bit to cool down. Better than nothing, I guess, but not at all what you would call a good run!

Monday my right knee was a little twinge-y so I wore a patellofemoral strap and everything seemed fine. Tuesday it was my right hip that started feeling wonky around the two-mile mark, so I slowed my pace and stretched the heck out of it afterwards. Today the hip was fine, but my left shin was acting like shin splints were imminent. Argh! It's always something. And as I've said before, fibromyalgia amplifies the body's pain signals and sometimes makes non-pain sensations read as pain. So I never know if I have an actual tissue injury or if the fibromyalgia is taking some random soreness or muscle spasm and amping it up to eleven. Very frustrating!

My original plan was to do 2.5 miles of intervals today. It became obvious after half a mile that there was no way that would happen. In addition to my shin hurting (which came and went as I ran and feels fine now that I'm done) I just felt so sluggish and unmotivated and blah. Maybe that 5K walk yesterday was a bad idea, who knows? I spent most of my brief run arguing with myself about whether I should push through it and do my planned 2.5 miles, but in the end I decided to call it quits for the day. I reminded myself that even though I'm off the heavy-duty pain meds, my body is still recovering from something fairly traumatic and I probably just need a little more time to heal from that before I'm back to my usual form.

That's my story, and I'm sticking with it!

The F word

Take a giant dose of stress, throw in a 3-night lack of sleep, shake vigorously with several days of low barometric pressure and what do you get? A fibromyalgia flare! For those of you who've never had the joy of experiencing one, I can only describe it as a full-body toothache meets the flu. You wake up in the morning feeling as though you've been beaten with a baseball bat, and every time you move, every muscle in your body exhibits the raw-nerve sensation of biting on an abscessed tooth. Exercise is completely out of the question. Surviving it is pretty much the only goal.

This latest flare was mercifully brief. It hit Monday evening, laid me low Tuesday and Wednesday, and finally started to subside sometime yesterday morning. On a scale of one to ten I'd say it averaged around a 5. The most frustrating thing, of course, was not being able to run and work toward my goal of running a (slow) mile without stopping, which I was hoping to reach by the end of this week.

I really didn't feel like running this morning, but since I was sure the flare was 99% gone, I forced myself to hop on the treadmill. I had no plan in mind whatsoever -- walk a slow mile? Try to run just a little? Who knows? But once I had my earbuds in and the Prodigy exhorted me to "Smack My Bitch Up" (look for a post about my running playlist soon), I felt like trying a couple of running/walking intervals like I did on Saturday -- running for 30 seconds, then walking for a minute. I was thrilled to find that not only did it not hurt, it felt fantastic! So fantastic that I didn't want to stop. I did two miles altogether, including warm-up and cool-down. That's almost two-thirds of a 5K!

So my goal has changed. Forget running a mile without stopping. That hurts, and my body doesn't like it, and it was an arbitrary goal anyway. I'm just going to add intervals until I'm up to the distance I need. What I'll do after that, I don't know, but that is my new short-term goal -- build up intervals until I'm doing at least 3.1 miles total at a time.

Alrighty! Onward and upward!

Like running through oatmeal

That's how it felt on the treadmill this morning. I ran the exact same speed/distance/intervals as yesterday (and the day before, for that matter) but for some reason today it was such a struggle. My legs were burning a bit after the first running interval and I didn't think too much of it, but then my precisely timed walk break seemed so unexpectedly short. The second running interval was a definite struggle -- I was fatigued, the air felt thick, I found myself leaning forward while simultaneously landing on my heels more than usual (how does that even work?!), and my calves were burning. The second walk break seemed to last microseconds, and when the third running interval rolled around I found myself thinking "oh no" instead of my usual "let's go"!

My internal pep talk even regressed to monosyllables as I mentally chanted, "Go, go, go. Push, push, push." (Usually my pep self-talks go more along the lines of: "You're strong. You can do this. Just keep moving.") By the time I finished I was panting and wheezing and felt about half dead. It took forever for me to cool down and get my heart rate back to normal.

What gives? I don't know what was different this time. I actually slept better last night than the night before, and had a decent breakfast of protein and complex carbs, but it really was like running through oatmeal today. Maybe it's because it was my third day in a row running the same speed/distance/intervals? Pundits say you shouldn't run every day, but I've found that because of the fibromyalgia, if I don't move every single day my body resets to "zero" and I have to start all over again to build up intensity. It might be time to play around with alternating easy runs vs. hard (for me) runs, though. I definitely don't want to get another injury, and more than that, I want to be having fun!

Yesterday's run was so great, and today it was just torture. Same run, two completely different experiences. Is it the fibromyalgia, or just running in general? Who knows? I just know that for the first time today, with my 5K almost exactly two months away, I started to get a little nervous about it. And that is no place for my head to be while training.

Baby steps

It's easy to get discouraged while exercising with fibromyalgia. Progress can be unbelievably slow and recovery time unbelievably long compared to what other runners seem to experience. Thanks to new technology that allows runners to share run distances, times, pacing, etc. instantly through social media like Facebook and Twitter, I'm constantly aware of how I compare to other runners I know.

In a word, I am SLOW. And lacking endurance, big-time.

I try not to focus on that, though. The important thing is that I am MOVING. I might be doing it slowly, but I'm doing it! And by golly, that's all that matters.

With that being said, I thought I'd report in on my 5K training, such as it is. I'm still running on the treadmill exclusively (a) because it's hotter than Satan's armpit out there, and (b) because I like the control it gives me. Today I did six laps on the treadmill, which equals a mile and a half. The first half lap (.125 miles) was warmup, then I ran eight-tenths of a lap and walked two-tenths of a lap until I had covered 4.3 laps. The remainder was cool-down.

Is that a lot of running? Nope. But it's a lot of running for me, and it felt pretty damn good!

My immediate goal is to be able to run a mile without stopping. Not fast, just without stopping. After that I need to increase my distance so that I'm eventually able to run three miles with just short walk breaks between miles. And then it'll be time to get off the treadmill and hit the trail where the 5K is taking place to make sure my knees can handle it (not to mention acclimating myself to the heat and humidity, ugh). My fibromyalgia is flared by weather changes so that is a huge hurdle for me, running outside with the humidity and everything and still being able to recover afterwards. I guess we'll see what happens!

Pushing through

I am not a natural athlete. Even as a teenager, when I was probably in the best shape of my life, I didn't enjoy sports. I lacked coordination, endurance, talent, motivation -- pretty much everything necessary for success or even enjoyment of most athletic endeavors. My brother was a terror on the football field and my best friend was a star on our high school's cross-country team, and while I was happy to cheer them on from the sidelines, quietly envious of their skill and discipline, I had no actual desire to join them in the ranks of real athletes. When forced to run around the track in high school P.E. class I would drag myself along grudgingly, walking the straights and lurching through the curves in a half-jog, hand clutching the stitch in my side, hating every minute of it.

Twenty-five years, two kids and one fibromyalgia diagnosis later and I am running and loving it. Go figure!

It's easy for me to remember when I first felt the love because it only happened a couple of months ago. I was running on the treadmill and feeling the burn. My shins were sore, my hips were on fire, my left knee felt wonky and I had a weird twinge in the arch of my right foot. I wanted to fall back to a walk, but I had promised myself that I'd run for a certain distance before doing that and I wasn't quite there yet.

So, I pushed through. I kept going even though I wanted to quit. I can't honestly say I had ever done that before with any physical activity (barring childbirth, not that I had much choice there). As strange as this sounds, I'm not sure I even realized it was an option. But this time it was a deliberate choice: my brain threw up a wall, and I decided to crash through it. What I found on the other side was that feeling I've heard athletes refer to so many times -- the second wind, the zone, the endorphin rush. It's a feeling difficult to describe to anyone who hasn't felt it, but it was positively drug-like and I was an instant addict. For the first time I wasn't running because I wanted to be active in my old age, because I wanted to be healthy, because I wanted to prove something to myself -- I was running because it felt amazing!

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that in hindsight it might not have been the best idea crashing through that wall. One of the things fibromyalgia does is magnify the body's pain signals. It also distorts sensory input, telling the body it's in pain when it really isn't. When I first started running, I had no way of knowing whether any pain I felt was the start of an injury or just my central nervous system playing tricks on me. I told myself that real runners pushed through the pain. No pain, no gain, right? They wouldn't say it if it wasn't true! How was I ever going to become a real runner if I stopped every time I felt a twinge?

So I pushed through, and even though I got invited to the endorphin party as a reward, I'm convinced that was the beginning stage of my knee injury. I continued to run on it every day, pushing past the persistent pain signals my body was sending, and weakened my knee to the point that one short trail run was enough to finish it off. Whoops!

I've since become a lot more sensible about pushing through pain. It's still hard for me to tell whether the pain I feel is due to an impending injury or just some random fibro misfire that will disappear as mysteriously as it began, but now when I run and my brain tells me to slow down or stop I do a body check: does anything hurt? Is it a sharp pain or a dull pain? Is it really pain or just fatigue/soreness? No more second-guessing -- if it hurts, I slow down. If I'm just sore or tired, I go a little bit further in pursuit of that elusive but oh-so-addictive runner's high.

I'm not quite there yet, and the going is a lot slower than I'd like, but I can tell I'm making definite progress toward my ultimate goal: no (by which I mean a manageable level of normal-for-me) pain, all gain!

The long road to getting started

I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia eight years ago. If you had told me then that one day I'd be training for a 5K race, I would have laughed myself into incontinence. I still remember the first time my doctor gave me "homework" between treatment appointments. My assignment was simply to walk around my suburban block, as slowly as I liked, and take a baseline measurement of my heart rate. I can't remember now what that baseline was, but I do remember spending the entire next day in bed, flat on my back, popping ibuprofin like candy. I was in absolute agony just from walking around the block! And I had bought good walking shoes specifically for that task!

I spent the next several years joking that I was allergic to exercise. Any doctor who dared to suggest that I get up and moving was shut down immediately. "You don't understand," I would say. "I can't do that. I can't! I have two kids, a husband and a life! People are counting on me to function -- I can't spend two days in bed for every day you want me to get out and walk." So we tried other things: elimination diets, supplements, medications, massage, chiropractic care, acupuncture, physical therapy. It all worked for a while, enough that I was able to get through my day, but adding any additional exercise on top of the housework and kid-toting that I did everyday as a stay-at-home mom of two young children was out of the question.

I'm not sure exactly what changed as the years went by, my children got older, and the demands of motherhood became less physical, but I can tell you that it was a change in attitude more than a physical change. Not that there weren't plenty of physical changes going on as I stared down the barrel of my forties with my metabolism noticeably slowing down, my middle noticeably thickening, and various other bits and pieces suddenly succumbing to the laws of gravity like never before. But it was more the thought of facing my empty-nest years as a sedentary, achy lump of goo that had me looking for a change. Someday in the not-too-distant future my kids would be off living their own lives, my husband would be retired, and I would have nothing but time on my hands. What was I going to do then? Take up needlepoint? Scrapbooking? Fantasy football?

Nah. None of those things were for  me. I wanted my golden years with my husband to be active and fun, full of travel (even if only on day trips around central Texas). That's what I wanted to happen, but I had no idea how to get there. I was able to function with a certain level of pain, but I didn't see that situation improving as I got older. More than likely my pain would get worse and I'd eventually end up in a wheelchair or one of those as-seen-on-TV scooter things. It was a depressing idea, and I was determined not to let it happen. It was definitely time for a change!

My husband was apparently going through a similar early-mid-life crisis, because right about this time he decided to buy a second-hand treadmill. He talked about it for weeks -- where to put it, how much he was willing to pay for it, how he planned to use it -- and I can't say I was overly supportive. We didn't have anywhere to put it, we didn't have much if any money to spend on it, and I certainly never planned to use it! Hello, allergic to exercise, remember? But he found both the money and the space and bought one anyway. (We've been married for a long time; he has learned to ignore my nay-saying.)

On the day after my husband brought it home and set it up, the treadmill and I faced off in the guest bedroom. I thought that as long as it was there anyway, I'd give it a little try, just to prove that I was right about being allergic to exercise. I walked on it for 20 minutes at 2 miles per hour and could barely get out of bed the next day. Vindicated! But eventually I did get out of bed, and every time I hobbled past the guest room, the treadmill was still there. I am nothing if not incredibly stubborn, so a day later I hopped back on and walked for 10 minutes at 1.5 miles per hour. For the rest of the day it felt like someone had tried to pry my legs off at the hip and I made a resolve: no more treadmill.

Then my husband bought a Wii Fit and just to prove I couldn't do that either, I gave it a try. Much to my surprise, I kind of enjoyed it. The exercises didn't hurt and I was able to stand in one place for most of them. So I started doing the Wii Fit every single day, and after a week or two I was only a little sore from it. After three weeks or so, the aerobic exercises barely left me winded. I decided to give the treadmill another try.

The first day I did 30 minutes at about 2.5 miles per hour and I wanted to die. I was popping anti-inflammatories like candy all day long and into the next morning, and I could barely make it up and down the stairs.

The second day I did 20 minutes at 2.5 miles per hour and I was really sore all that day and into the next. I think I got by with only one dose of ibuprofin, though.

The third day I did 15 minutes at 2.7 miles per hour and the next day I felt fantastic.

The fourth day I did 20 minutes at 3 miles per hour and was a little sore, but not enough to need any sort of pain medication.

The fifth day I did 30 minutes at 3 miles per hour and even jogged for maybe 30 seconds at 4 miles per hour.

I kept at it every day, increasing my speed a bit, increasing my time a bit, jogging/running for a bit. I didn't quit like I always have before -- I pushed through it.

And one day, after a couple of weeks on the treadmill, I walked two miles. Which was 1.98 miles farther than I had been able to walk for years prior. My pain was most definitely present, but it was at a low hum, equivalent to the general level of pain I had been dealing with on a daily basis before I'd started this whole exercise thing. I can't begin to tell you how amazing it felt to walk two miles and not only still get out of bed the next morning, but actually be able to function as a human being.

That was all it took. I was hooked. I walked every single day, finding through experimentation that if I skipped a day my body would reset to zero and I'd have to start slow again, building back up to a decent pace. I loved knowing that I was doing something I never thought I could do and I very much enjoyed the increased strength and stamina I had in my lower body. But eventually walking alone, even at a brisk pace, was no longer enough for me. I'd proved I could do it, and now it was time to push myself a little bit further. It was time to run.

I started running the same way I started walking: on the treadmill, increasing my speed and distance in infinitesimally small increments. One "lap" on my treadmill is equivalent to one quarter of a mile, and at my peak I was running nine-tenths of a lap and walking one-tenth of a lap for one mile, with a lap each of warm-up and cool-down. Then I got cocky and decided to run on a hike-and-bike trail near my house, like the real runners do. That proved to be a big mistake -- I injured my knee and had to take a solid three weeks off from running. I did Wii-assisted yoga, stretching and strength training instead, then started back with slow walking and gradually worked my way back up to running. It was a frustrating setback but I learned a valuable lesson: I'm not going to reach my goal(s) any faster by pushing myself too fast and ending up with an injury. With the added complication of fibromyalgia, the old saying "slow and steady wins the race" has never been more true.

Speaking of races, as mentioned in the first paragraph above I am "training" for a 5K. Five kilometers is 3.1 miles. As of this morning I'm up to a half-lap each of warm-up and cool-down, then three laps of running half a lap and walking half a lap. So, a total of only 1.12 miles per day so far, including warm-up and cool-down. I'm trying to work my way up to three miles slowly, but it's so hard to be patient! The race is in September and my goal is to be able to run most of it and keep my walking to a minimum. I'm not trying to win, I just want to finish. It's a "fun run" so it won't be timed anyway, but it feels like a good place to start.

I imagine this introduction is long enough, so feel free to stop back by and keep tabs on my progress, or to pick up and share tips on running with fibromyalgia. We fibro sufferers face a unique challenge when it comes to living an active lifestyle -- let's do this together!