Downward Dog

Yesterday didn't turn out as badly as I was expecting it to. I had a nice coffee with my older sister Julie. Then I came home and made the best sponge cake yet (I've finally found a decent recipe thanks to above-mentioned sister Julie who is an amazing cook) I'd bought myself a new cookbook which I showed to Luke (#3 son) and he got all inspired to experiment so we made a spinach and feta gozleme. Yum! And to round off the day I had a nice walk with Sam (#1 son) and the dogs. I managed to get through the day without a nap and then slept a lot better at night.

I talked a lot with Sam about my overtraining syndrome yesterday. He doesn't like the new name, Unexplained underperformance syndrome, because he believes it's the training that's the causal factor. I do think that intense training has a lot to do with it but in my case it was a major emotional stressor that tipped me from compensating into decompensating. The stressor was in the form of a 15 year old half-brother in another country. There's been an enormous toll on my mother and my four sisters and I was using running to help deal with it but now I've had that crutch partially removed and I'm needing to find other ways to deal with the stress. Walking is good but it doesn't quite give you the buzz that running does. I'm contemplating either yoga or pilates. Any opinions would be gratefully received.

Blah

I'd just like to start by saying This Week has Sucked!! Actually, the whole week hasn't sucked just the last three days. I've hit the wall, energy-wise and have spent most of the days being athletic vicariously by watching the tennis. (Or in other words - being a couch potato) I had to miss yesterday's run and I don't like missing runs.

I haven't quite diagnosed my problem but number one on the list is over-training syndrome rearing its ugly head again. Last week, because I'd been feeling so good, I went for an extra-long Thursday run. I was still tired when I ran on Saturday and Tuesday's speed session was pretty full-on. Diagnosis number two would be a low-grade virus. I've had a lot of nausea with the fatigue but the nausea could be a symptom of diagnosis no 3 - a side-effect of the new supplement I've started this week (and have now stopped to work out if it was the cause). The final option would be something like cancer - but I think this is the least probable so will disregard it at the moment.

So it's the second-last week of my break before I go back to work and what have I achieved? That's right, a big, fat ZERO!! Actually, that's not totally correct. I have made Luke come out so we could get school shoes and runners seeing as his feet have refused to stop growing. And I have made my first attempts at sponge cakes (Not totally successful - the first didn't rise and the second didn't taste that great) At least I get my beach run on Sunday, all things going well. Finger's crossed that I'm feeling back to normal soon.

Crazy Men and Ducklings

I've found out that there is one thing that you shouldn't do while recovering from overtraining syndrome (apart from obssessive, excessive exercise of course). The most important thing you can avoid while you're recovering is reading inspirational biographies. I've just finished Dean Karnazes 50 Marathons in 50 Days. Big mistake! All it's made me do is want to run. I want to run hard and long and often and all I'm allowed to do is moderate and short and not-as-often-as-I'd-like.

I'm not saying that I want to emulate what DK has done. Personally I think there's a high degree of crazy in his make-up. And I think he has an amazing physiology for his body to cope with the torture that he chooses to inflict on it. But all runners have some degree of crazy in them. We subject our body to enormous degrees of discomfort (and discomfort is an understatement) and manage to get satisfaction and, sometimes, pleasure from the pain. Nuts, huh?!

Sam, my newly accredited exercise physiologist son, has told me that it'll take AT LEAST SIX MONTHS and to be patient. Easy for him to say. It's been three and a half months without seeing the improvement I'd have liked to see.

I spent a little time on-line researching again yesterday and found out that overtraining syndrome has another name - Unexpected underperformance syndrome. I stumbled on another sufferer's blog and he recommended magnesium citrate. So today I went out and bought myself a tub of special powder which I hope will be a magic bullet. Finger's crossed.

Speed session today was tough. A 1k time trial (not liking these in my less-than-speedy state), 200 and 100m reps with the same distance recovery and another 1k thrown in for good measure. The aim was to get your 1k's as close in time as possible. It was a miserable fail for that - my first was 4:16 and the second was 4:39 - but I did give it all I had. On the plus side I actually got faster in the 200s and 100s as the session went on. And on the plus-plus side we saw a cute duck family (mummy and 12 ducklings) on our cool-down run.

How much Chocolate is too much?

I've finally found out the answer to this perplexing question that millions of women before me have puzzled over. The amount of chocolate that I was given for Christmas was too much. The list starts here -
1 x 380g packet of Peanut M&M's
2 x 200 g packets of Peanut M&M's
1 x 180g packet of Clinkers
1 packet of chocolate-coated liquorice
60 Ferrero Rochers
1 enormous box of Lindt chocolate
1 175g box Lindt Lindor
1 225g box Guylian chocolate
1 packet of Cadbury's Scorched Almonds

All of these were given to me on Christmas day but on Friday Sam returned from his trip overseas and presented me with a block of Australian organic chocolate, a packet of beautiful Dutch chocolate and a 1 kilo packet of Peanut M&M's!!!! I'm now opening my pantry with fear and trepidation. Fear in that some of those packets and boxes will fall out and bury me alive on the kitchen floor. Trepidation that the millions of calories contained within can somehow be absorbed without consumption. Needless to say, I'm NOT looking forward to Easter.

And on the running front I had a lovely run yesterday. I was tired before I started so decided to be really cautious (I'm terrified of slipping back into overtraining syndrome) It was quite a pleasant morning - humid, but that's pretty normal at this time of year - and I was travelling well up to about 8k when the dreaded toilet urge hit. No problems, I thought. I was close to Southbank and the toilets were bound to be open. Wrong! The first toilet I hit was locked so I continued on to the far end. There was a security guard near the ferris wheel so I asked him if nearby loos were unlocked. He told me it was his first day on the job but he thought they should be.

I trotted off to the closest ones only to find them locked, as were my last options at the Piazza. At this point I was starting to sweat knowing that there were no more toilets until I got back to my starting point 4 k's away. So off I headed back past the security guard who asked if I'd had any luck. When I answered no he decided to share the fact that he was in possession of a key to the disabled toilet that I'd just tried and he'd let me have it if I'd solemnly promise to bring it back. I must have looked trustworthy enough because he graciously bestowed me with the shiny silver key and I earnt that trust by returning it in pristine condition.

It was only afterwards that I started to wonder what he thought a sweaty 40+ woman would do with his precious key. I suppose I could have spent the next few hours spotting equally desperate exercisers and offering them relief ... at a price. Or I could have taken the key, had it copied and used it for illicit after-hours comfort stops. Or made multiple copies and sold them on the black market to the disabled and able-bodied alike. Or altruistically I could have given them to the homeless so they could have a small port in a storm.

I'll never know what he imagined. All I can say is that I was truly grateful and the rest of my run was much more comfortable.

Happy Days

The last 24 hours have been happy ones. There's been no special one event to make them happy - just a series of nice things. The first was yesterday's run. It was supposed to be a 10k but I've been feeling really good so I decided to stretch it out a little. I was careful to take it slow - aiming for 6 min k's - and to keep my heart rate lowish. I managed a nice 16k run. The longest run I've done since I had to slow down. I didn't feel sick afterwards and didn't feel excessively tired. Yay!!!

The next nice thing that happened was getting chauffered around to two different shopping centres. My baby Luke is learning to drive so I was less of a passenger and more of an instructor. We managed to get safely there and back and rack up another hour on his log book.

I've been working on a jigsaw with Luke for the last couple of days and we'd gotten to the hard bit. Everything was shades of brown/grey and just putting in one piece warranted a high-five so my next nice thing was having Steph, one of Luke's friends who loves jigsaws, come over to get us over the hump. Then Teresa, Josh's girlfriend, came for dinner and together we finished it. Huge sense of achievement!

And for the final happy thing - Sam arrived home from his European adventure. I'm a happy Mum!

Techno-phobia

My husband Iven is technologically challenged. He won't use the computer without a tutor (myself or one of the kids) at his side. He never sets up any of the new electronics - TV, VCR, DVD player, PVR. He did have a mobile phone but couldn't use it. The boys and I throw our hands up in exasperation over his ineptitude but we manage quite well despite him. However, my recent trip to Sydney with my sister highlighted the need for him to have a mobile phone and to be relatively proficient at using it. So for Christmas we bought him a brand new Samsung touchscreen phone.

One of his objections to using his last phone was that his fingers were too fat to manage the buttons - ergo the touchscreen. He'd had a little play with coach Chris's iPhone and managed it ok so touchscreen meant that fat fingers were no longer a valid excuse. So on Christmas day he was presented with his gift and he seemed pretty pleased. I sent him a text and waited with excited anticipation for the reply. It took forever to get a response and when I opened it ... nothing!! He'd only managed to send a blank text.

The next day the same thing happened and that's when it occurred to me that a blank text means that I can fill in the empty spaces. Obviously in his first text he'd meant to say "You're lovelier than words can say" and the second text while I was at the boxing day sales was "You can spend whatever you want - you deserve it for being such a wonderful wife!"

I was really starting to enjoy getting these blank texts so you can imagine my disappointment today when I got a text with words that made sense. Ah well - them's the breaks!

Physiology 101

My coach put me onto an interesting site yesterday - http://www.mastersathlete.com.au
It has a bit of information for (how do I put this nicely?) more mature athletes. The information I found most interesting relates to a phenomenon that I've been experiencing in the last week or so and has to do with the effect of heat and humidity. Apparently for every degree over 21 C the heart rate elevates 1.4 %. This morning it was already 24 C when I started out and the humidity was 84% (yes, it did feel like I was running in a warm bath) so the apparent temperature was more like 28C. So for 7 degrees over that should increase my HR almost 10%. And it did! Right from the beginning it felt hard considering the pace. My average HR was 175 (yes I know it's high but my recorded max has been 200 and I've lived to tell the tale - 220 minus age does not work for everyone) So working backwards from there - had it been a cool day with low humidity I probably would have run it at about 160 bpm. Isn't physiology interesting?!

And talking of physiology I've been thinking a lot about the aging process lately. I'll be 47 in just a couple of months and lately I've found that I'm having to hold my book just a bit further away. I'm not worried about wearing glasses. I've been wearing them since I was 10 but that was for myopia. Now I can't even see close distances that well. I think that the long-sightedness should cancel the short-sightedness out. Seems only fair.

The other thing that I think is highly unfair is that at certain times of the month (which will remain nameless) I break out! Surely, as I see the big M looming on the distant horizon, I should not be getting pimples like my 16 year old son. Ah well, my mother always said you're still young if you can raise a pimple!