Winter

Winter returned to the Front Range with a vengeance this morning. I awoke at 6:30 to a misty, icy scene with a temperature of 25 degrees. This ice fog left 1/8" of ice on every surface outside, which took almost 10 minutes to clear from my girlfriend's car. By the time I started out on my run at 10Am, the temperature had dropped to 14 degrees Fahrenheit, and it had started snowing, disguising the layer of ice on the roads and sidewalks.

Nevertheless, I bundled up, strapped my carbide spikes on my shoes, and headed out the door to pound a little pavement. It struck me as I started out into a brisk east wind that many, if not most, runners have difficulty finding the motivation to run, inside or out, on the worst days of the winter. If you run outside, you're cold. Treadmill runs, on the other hand, are rarely fun or exciting. It seems a catch-22.

I have never had a problem with winter running. Part of the reason for this is no doubt that I am a Minnesotan native, and have experienced a lifetime of cold weather. But there are more reasons that I believe translate more readily to the average runner. With the proper mindset, winter can help motivate runners, rather than take away their motivation.

I have distilled my thoughts to three points.

First, think of the other less-than motivated runners. Chances are good that, if you are hesitant to step out the door into the cold, nearly everybody else is thinking the same thought. Many of them will no doubt opt out of running, and in the doing lose fitness. Every mile you run on such a day is money in the bank, and translates on race day into those crucial extra second you need to pull out the win, or PR, or whatever your race goal.

Second, winter provides an adversary. The very things that make winter running so daunting, the cold, the snow, the gray skies, make great motivators in themselves. They give you something to strive against, an enemy to beat. And a good enemy is the best motivation you can hope for.

Third, and my favorite, is that it can be really fun to be seen as a little nuts. If you go out running in 15-degree weather with 5 inches of snow on the ground and more falling, people will think you're crazy (and they might be right). But those are my favorite runs. I recall one particular incident, two years ago now, when a snowstorm hit in Boulder and I headed out for a short run. Halfway through, a car full of what I can only believe were college students pulled along side me and, rolling down the window, yelled at me to "go home!" Taking this as a challenge, I picked up my pace and raced them to the next stop sign, half a mile distant, and beat their car by over a block. It remains one of my favorite runs.

There are more reasons that winter is a great motivation to run. Running in the cold burns more calories. Running in the snow strengthens your stabilizer muscles. Running in the winter is starkly beautiful. The three reasons I listed above, however, are the ones that tend to get me out the door on cold, snowy mornings.

And I am going to need the motivation tomorrow and Wednesday, when the temperature is not forecast to break 0 Fahrenheit.

Frustration.

Whether it is due to illness or injury, or simply not progressing as quickly as you would like, frustration is a state that every athlete has to deal with eventually. Having had my fair share of frustration, one might think I can deal with it, no problems. I only wish that were the case.

There are times I deal with it well, and times I do not do so well. Several years ago now, I had a very difficult year. I dislocated my shoulder at the end of September that year, and after going to the ER and the seeing a surgeon, was informed that I needed surgery ASAP. This was not new information for me: my dad had both shoulders operated when he was roughly the age I was at the time. I had lived much of my life assuming that, at some point, I would have to surgically fix my shoulders.

So on November 8th of that year, I had the required surgery. It was more invasive than most, but then my shoulder, as my doctor so elegantly put it, reminded him of "an old, stretched out gym sock."

Pure poetry.

Fortunately for me, my dad was on sabbatical from the University where he teaches that year, and so was on hand for the surgery and first several days the aftermath. It helped more than I can say to have somebody with me who had been through the same thing.

Of course during this period I could not run, but that does not mean I could not exercise. And that is the central idea behind this post. Even if you cannot engage in your favorite activity, be it running, basketball, skiing or any other sport, there is almost always an option.

I used two tactics to stay in relatively good shape after my surgery. First, I had recently acquired an exercise bike, in anticipation of the surgery (in fact I almost dislocated my shoulder again bringing it into my apartment). With that, I was able to get in a biking workout every day. Second, I walked to work every day as soon as I was able. It about two miles each way. Between these two, I was able to keep quite fit during the first two months after surgery.

Then a second injury came out of the blue. On a Friday night, mid-January, the same week my brother broke his back in a ski accident, I slipped on a patch of ice walking home from the grocery store and felt something "snap" in my ankle. Stupidly, both thinking and hoping that it was just a sprain, I walked home, a route which just happened to take me past the ER.

On painfully reaching my house, I downed a couple IBPF, elevated my foot, and commenced icing. The pain did not subside as it would have with a sprain, and I realized that I had probably broken something. The ER confirmed that I had snapped the lowest piece of my fibula off. The broken piece was now floating fully separated from the rest of the fibula, raising concern that I would have to undergo more surgery to reattach the pieces.

When I called in on Monday to my PT, who I now knew quite well, and told her that I would have to miss my scheduled appointment because I'd broken my leg, it was, according to the rest of her office, the first time she had sworn at work.

Here I have to thank my doctor, the same surgeon who performed so admirably in my shoulder surgery. He took a look at the X-Ray from the ER, took a couple more of his own, and decided not to operate. In his words he "didn't really want to have to cut [me] open again." There was over a millimeter separating the two pieces, placing it on the border between operating and leaving it be. My doctor, a surgeon who would have made quite a bit off the resulting surgeries, recommended against it.

As I said above, I cannot thank him enough. That surgery would have added months to my recovery, and might not have allowed me to run distance any more. As it happened, it healed perfectly. And in the meantime, I changed from being annoyed about my shoulder surgery to thankful for it. The therapy required for the shoulder required me to keep my whole upper body in shape, and helped me get through the next months.

That is not intended to discount the part my friends played in my recovery. Each and every friend I had in the area stepped up beyond anything I could have hoped for, offering rides whenever I needed one, company or solitude when I wanted it, and even home-cooked dinners.

The point I am trying to get across is this: injury and illness happen. They are (almost) inevitable. At the moment, I have a bothersome tendon in my left foot, on the outside of the bottom. It has been bugging me for the past several days, but I have been able to run on it up to today, and came back frustrated and wincing from my half-mile run. But you cannot let the frustration win. My response was to declare this my day off from running, and work my upper body and do a little yoga instead. My foot is already feeling much better with a little icing and a good dose of rest.

And as a result of the frustration of four years ago, I have something to compare every other minor frustration to and tell myself "it's not that bad."

If I could get through that and come back stronger than ever, I can get through just about anything.

The Orthotics Question

My favorite column in the New York Times posted a new article yesterday. The Personal Best column is updated inconsistently at best, rarely at worst, but never fails to interest me and pique my curiosity. This post is no different. You can read it here.

I myself have worn orthotics for most of my life. It started when I came back from England at the age of 6 with horrible heel pain. My doctor took one look at me and said "You've got flat feet!"

So started the regimen. For the next six years or so I had to get special shoes, regularly making the trip down to the "Stride Rite" store where a very helpful and friendly old man would patiently fit us in the "correct" shoes to support our admittedly awful feet. Years later, the same man would help me pick out my first suit, a task for which he was eminently, if you'll pardon the pun, suited. Then, when we were old enough that we would not go through shoe sizes quite so quickly, we were fitted with custom orthotics, made possible by my mother's discretionary health fund.

I started with soft orthotics, as it was deemed that hard orthotics would injure my feet and inhibit development. When the time was right, I went to see our family orthopaedist (if that's the right term) Sharie. She took one look at my leg alignment and said "that's the worst case I've ever seen."

Sharie was never much for bedside manner.

Soon enough, my plaster casts were made, and my orthotics duly ordered.

I might point out that this was also the first year I started distance running. It arose, unlikely though it may seem, out of a knee problem. My orthopedic surgeon looked at me and decided I had a condition called tendonopathy, in which the achilles tendon is gradually replaced by scar tissue. Along with a regimen of strengthening exercises, he suggested I run. As my girlfriend at the time was an avid and quite talented distance runner, I took to this quite quickly. That is still the only instance I have heard of in which a doctor suggested running to help fix a knee problem.

In due course, my orthotics arrived, and I joined the distance group on the track team. From the position of captain of the sprinting team the year before, I now took a demotion to a low rung on the distance totem pole. I mentioned my orthotics to my coach, and in the first statement I had heard disparaging orthotics he said "I don't believe in them. We'll get to the why of that later." This would not last long, as my orthotics initially resulted in significant arch pain, and then hip problems took me out for the rest of my senior season.

Nonetheless, I continued to run, with my orthotics, and for many years this worked. I ran and walked in those same orthotics for almost eight years. I set every single PR wearing those orthotics, from the 800 (1:58) up to the 10k(36 flat). Inevitably, they reached the point where there was more duct tape than insole remaining, and I decided to have new ones made at the University of Colorado.

As I might have expected given prior experience, the arrival of my new orthotics was accompanied by a host of new leg problems. I figured these were temporary and just tried to trudge through them. I tried for a year, and never got back into the kind of shape I had been in prior to the new inserts.

Then the FiveFingers started becoming popular, and after many nudges, with great trepidation, I bought a pair and started training myself to run, for all intents and purposes, barefoot. To my great surprise, my alignment-related joint pain disappeared immediately! It was replaced by a far more familiar and friendly pain: muscle-building pain.

Now, after six months of the FiveFingers, I have returned to using shoes for most of my training. I switched back not for the support shoes provide, as I am now a big proponent of strengthening feet and ankles rather than further weakening them with overly-supportive shoes, but for the cushioning. Running barefoot is all well and good on softer surfaces: tracks, trails, and grass fields are all excellent places for that. But for bike paths and roads, the cushioning shoes provide is well worth it.

So thank you, NYT, for confirming, or at least supporting, my suspicion that orthotics are not science after all, but still, so many years on, speculation. I, for one, will keep working on my foot and ankle strength, and keep running minimally all the time, and barefoot whenever possible.

A Quiet Christmas Morning in the Minnesota Snow

There is a song, well known here in Colorado, called "A Colorado Christmas." It goes something like:

The closest thing to heaven on this planet that I know

Is a quiet Christmas Morning in the Colorado snow.

I had not heard it before I moved out to Colorado myself, but having headed back home for Christmas this year, I think if you replace "Colorado" with "Minnesota," it is much closer to heaven in my book. Sure, it might be bitterly cold, but there is nothing in my book to compare to Minnesota in the winter.

This particular post is almost a month overdue, as Christmas was almost three weeks ago. But bear with me, and I promise pretty pictures.

As I mentioned above, I headed home to northern Minnesota this year for Christmas. Before I left, my parents mentioned the possibility of me renting skis while I was home. This was one of those moments that hits you upside the head with a "well, why didn't I think of that (for the past 9 years)?" It was a perfect idea. Skiing is a fantastic workout in itself, it would get me outside in different areas where I could not run, and, since my foot had been hurting, it would allow me to incorporate a low-impact workout into my training while I was home. It also solved the problem of running in the snow, which is difficult and sometimes dangerous.

So the day after I got home, we stopped by our local ski shop on the way home from some Christmas errand or other, and picked up some fish-scale classic skies.

For those who don't know, most classic skis use what is called "kick wax" to grip on the snow, which then lifts off of the snow surface for the glide phase of your stride. This requires paying close attention to the temperature, as each individual variety of kick wax only works in about a four to six degree range. Fish-scales, as the name implies, replace kick wax with little shark-scale like protrusions in the area normally covered by kick wax, facing backwards so that they grip when you push back, but glide (ideally) when you are moving forward. The disadvantage is they do not glide very well at all. As I was primarily aiming for a workout, this fact did not bother me unduly.

It was not until Christmas Eve, shortly before the traditional family gathering, that my dad and I got out to ski. We went to Hartley Nature Center, which has about 6k of classic ski trails, with no skating area. After a short time getting used to the motions of skiing again, I took off down the trail.

I had completely forgotten how much I love cross-country skiing. The motions are so much smoother than running that it sometimes feels effortless. That feeling does not last very long, as skiing is actually one of the most difficult full-body workouts around. And yet, since it is such a smooth, gliding motion, I can push myself far harder skiing than I ever can running.

And it was beautiful! The two days before I got back to Minnesota had seen around a foot of new snow, leaving the trees, a mix of evergreen and bare deciduous, covered in a fresh white blanket. There was one particular point in the loop where the light shone just right through the trees.

As I mentioned, pretty pictures.

All told, I think I skied around 30k while I was home, over the course of three different days. I had only rented the skis for four days, and one of those I decided to take off.

Now, to the source of the post title. One of my family's traditions on Christmas is to go out for a walk. In Minnesota, this almost always means a walk in the snow, and it was no different this year. We opted for a rather traditional route: up the Congdon (Tischer) Creek trail from 4th street.

As ever, it was a beautiful walk. My brother forged ahead for a while, stopping occasionally to try and catch me off guard and knock snow off a tree branch on my head. He failed. After walking for a few blocks, and attempting to drop snow on my several times, he stopped out of range of any snowy branch. Cautiously moving forward, I discovered why he had stopped.

This little guy was just off the path. Clearly, woodpeckers do not take Christmas off. If you can see well enough, the dark areas are the remaining outer layer of bark. The red area is where he (and it was a male, as we found out later, though I forget the species) had already been and searched for bugs.

He was an industrious little guy, and all four of us stopped for several minutes and simply watched him do his thing.

This walk is our Christmas tradition. A friend of my brother's, along with his brothers, have a different Christmas tradition: ice bashing. Simply put, they wander around Congdon Creek bashing ice, not worrying too much about falling through. This is a northern Minnesotan activity if there ever was one.

This year, our two traditions happened to overlap, and we ran into the brothers at the apex of our walk. There were the brothers, two of whom where accompanied by their significant others. And we learned, happily, that my brother's friend had proposed to his girlfriend at the Glensheen Mansion three days earlier. A happy coincidence it was that we ran into them that day.

The remainder of the trip was spent alternately resting, reading, relaxing, and reconnecting. With the difficulties I am currently facing searching for a job in a notably poor economic climate, a trip home was precisely what I needed to regroup my faculties.