Is it bad, doc?

Something is wrong with me -- very, very wrong. If it's not some ghastly parasite or illness, then at least a debilitating case of hypochondria complicated by a crippling unwillingness to take responsibility for my shortcomings.

This is a race report of a DNF, but it is also a big, fat, protracted excuse. And this excuse picks up from my last post 2 weeks ago. My slothfulness has not improved. Mom came to town for 6 days last week, and in those 6 days I slept 10 hours per night and did nothing but sit on my big, fat ass for all but 2 of those days with a headache and feeling like I could curl up and fall asleep in the first available doorway or park bench. The one non-work-related workout that I did was a 9.75-mi run up Montara Mountain. Parts of this trail are steep, but never you fear, I walked those parts as well as a great deal of the more "runable" sections. I felt like the batteries in my legs needed to be changed and I was breathing through a fluffy towel. I stopped on an easy bit to shed a layer and almost threw up in the brush at the side of the trail. After that 10 mile run I felt like I'd run 18 hilly miles without a walking break. My calves were sore. Stairs were a chore. I was stiff. My knees hurt and my quads hurt.

Then there was the crushing, blinding fatigue. Despite all the sleep I've been getting, I felt like I could fall asleep at any second. I had headaches. Smells were making me dizzy and nauseous (like the old lady soap and halitosis smell coming from my mom in the passenger seat of the car). It felt just like a hangover when an hour after you wake up, your eyes are closing on their own and you feel like your limbs are filled with concrete.

Flash forward to Friday. Insomnia was back and I'd only slept about 4 hours, but at least I didn't feel hung over anymore. It was a beautiful day so I went on a hike with two trainers from work in lieu of a run. We hiked five miles over trails I run all the time, but afterward I woke up sore after my fitful nap. My calves felt like rocks and my feet hurt. The tops of my calves never get tight. My feet never hurt. I ran a marathon in racing flats a week after buying them and another in Nike Frees when I'd never run more than an hour in them in training, and even then my feet didn't hurt, but they hurt after a 5 mile hike?

Alright, alright. I'll get to the race report.

Another night of insomnia later, I got up at 3am to make the 6 o'clock start of the Santa Cruz Randonneurs 300k. I made it to the start early, pissed, checked in, pissed again, and then waited for the start. I was planning on riding conservatively, but fell in comfortably with the lead group. "Were you at the ride a couple of weeks ago?" a SMO40 (straight man over 40), or "SMoFo" asked me. "You were the one riding with the lead guys who kept getting dropped and then catching back on, right? And then you just disappeared."

A quick look at his ass and I recognized him. I explained about the flat tires and how I'd covered the distance but DNFed all the same. "I won't be riding that fast today though," I explained.

"Me neither! Those triathlete guys were pushing 25 mph all the way to Half Moon Bay and then they just dropped off some time after you disappeared," he explained. Well no wonder then! I thought. And here I was beating myself up for being out of shape, but when they said we were still holding 24 mph at mile 50, they had meant the average pace, not the current pace. If you remember, I was riding blind without a computer that day. Then the SMoFo and I made the usual excuses about how little training we'd done in the rain so that we could be friends. "I haven't been training," means, "be nice to me and I'll be nice to you. We can work together to get through this easier rather than dragging each other's asses through the dirt."

SMoFo and I eventually found ourselves in a group of six guys at the front of the race. Every once in awhile that thing would happen where I would realize that I was sitting on a wheel that was dropping off the pace and have to come around. Then I'd catch another wheel just as he also fell off the pace and I'd have to come around again. "Thanks for pulling us up!" one guy said.

"Pulling?! I've been sucking wheels this whole time!" I said.

I was sucking SMoFo's wheel when suddenly I heard a nose noise and got a wet spray all over my face. "Gaaargh!" I yelled. Nothing says "I love you" like a snot rocket to the face. He apologized profusely and I said it was okay, these things happen. Because what else can you say when someone is genuinely sorry and getting mad won't get the snot off your face. So now he was obligated to be nice to me out of guilt, and I was obligated to be nice to him just to prove that I wasn't the sort of person who could hate you forever for blowing mucus straight into my face. I could imagine a romantic comedy starting this way.

The course went 50 miles north, turned back to Santa Cruz, then went 50 miles south of Santa Cruz to Marina before heading back again. About 5 miles shy of the first turn-around in Half Moon Bay we hit a 1-mile gradual climb. As I do, I slowly, slowly fell off the pace, despite riding so hard that I could taste the ocean in the back of my throat from snorting my own sweat (I don't do snot rockets). At the top of the hill I was probably about 15s down (a difference that I can usually make up, but not in today's stiff headwind.) SMoFo hand fallen away a few miles back, and the 200-rider-strong pack had long ago whittled down to the 3 men ahead of me who I just needed to ease the fuck up a second! I sat there bitching and whining at them in my head. What fucking gentlemen! You wait up for other riders, but you won't softpedal for half a fucking minute for me. But they weren't listening to the thoughts in my head and before long they were gone up the road.

At Half Moon Bay I had to pull out my cue sheet (which I had this time), and finally my SMoFo caught up. Together we rode right by the control and had to turn around.

The three fastest guys pulled out of the control point as I was refilling my bottles. If I had arrived thirty seconds earlier then I would have been with them, but instead SMoFo and I set out alone. Over the next 50 miles I would go over and over in my head how I could have made up that 30 seconds to stick with the 3 other SMoFos. Not that Mr. Sniffles was a bad guy, just that there was only one of him, and I'd already proven myself stronger. I would much rather be the weakest in a strong pack than the strongest in a weak pack over this kind of distance, where I could usually count on my legs giving up more slowly than the big boys.

We had a tailwind now, so SMoFo spent the next 10 miles riding next to me and telling me about why he hadn't been training. His brother the lifelong smoker had gone in for bypass surgery. Then he'd developed blood clots in his legs in the hospital. They became gangrenous. They cut off toes, but then they had to cut off one leg, then the other to save his life. SMoFo had had to sign off on all the amputations and had gone to the hospital every day for 45 days to visit him. After a month, when his brother finally came out of his stupor and discovered his legs were gone, he'd told SMoFo that he should have just let him die. Neither of us really wanted to talk after that, so I pulled for a long while.

When SMO40 rolled up next to me again at mile 70 I told him, "I'm already counting down the miles."

"My legs don't feel good," he confessed. "I think I'm going to stop when we get to Santa Cruz. Do you want me to pull you until then so that you can save your energy? How's this pace? 20 mph?"

"Feels good," I said. Then he took off at 21. Before I'd realized it, a gap had opened up and when I couldn't even make myself care, it was the first hint that I was already cooked. I knew that I had to keep eating if I expected my legs to continue to work for me, but now that I thought about it I realized that I was nauseous too. When SMoFo finally noticed that I was gone and let me catch up, I told him that I didn't think I was in the right frame of mind to concentrate on staying on anyone's wheel.

For the rest of the ride back we leapfrogged along in silence, me opening big gaps until I thought that he was gone behind me, then 20 minutes later there he'd be. All I kept thinking was, Please don't leave me here alone! I intended to keep going, but I had no idea how I'd negotiate the next 2 pages of turns alone with no handlebar mount for my cue sheet. As we crossed the Santa Cruz town line, SMoFo said, "half way there!" I looked at my watch: 94.67 miles. I wanted to cry. I was already sore and tired like I had 200 miles in me already, and now the wind had turned again. I felt like I could curl up and fall asleep over my handlebars.

"SMoFo, can you do me a favor before you go? Can you stop off with me so that I can get a Red Bull and go to the bathroom without leaving my bike alone?"

"Of course!"

When I stood up at the 7 11, my eyes wouldn't focus. I almost wandered right into the stock room before I realized that I had to ask first. The clerk looked like another lifetime smoker -- unsympathetic. No bathroom. "Fuck it!" I said when I came out, handing my brevet card to SMoFo. "Will you give him mine too when you throw in the towel?"

We said our goodbyes and I went back to the car, frustrated. I couldn't work it out. Was I just out of shape? No, can't be. I've ridden 1 century, 3 200Ks and a trainer century in the past 3 months and all have felt better than this. Nutrition? No, by now I've got my routine down. Overtraining? How could it be? Everything indicates that I'm getting stronger since my training got cut by 50% because of the African Sleeping Sickness. Pacing? No! I'd been watching my heart rate and breathing all morning.

Which leaves only more drastic hypotheses: chronic fatigue? adrenal burnout? anemia? B12 deficiency? parasites? cancer? some rare genetic disorder? There are 199 possible causes for "extreme fatigue" on wrongdiagnosis.com and 99 if you add a second symptom of "low energy."

I wish I could just get a full blood panel, but I can't afford insurance. So I'm turning to the common knowledge of the Internet community, because how could that be wrong?!

Stay tuned, the race report for the next day is even more interesting. Rather than snot, this one is all about vomit-- MINE!

RICE makes you fat

Things are not going well in Claire country. They are not going well at all. I'm stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare where my driver's license has been revoked. It's a long, long, frustrating story and basically boils down to a policy that the DMV has that they don't properly notify you of payments due. Let's just leave it at that. If I tell you the story I might cry again and that won't help matters any. The point is, it's been upsetting me.

On top of that, horror of horrors, I'm injured. It seems incredible, after all the shit I've put my body through over the past year that what put me over the edge was a 3-mile easy run. Monday I was running along at about 10-minute mile pace just thinking about life, flowers, butterflies, stars, puppies... when I started to get a bit of an ache in my left foot. It wasn't too bad, and things ache all the time only to feel fine the next day, so I finished my run (hey, I had to get home, didn't I?) not too worried about it. I ran some cold water in the tub and soaked my feet for a few minutes, and then forgot about it.

The next day it didn't hurt in the morning, and I forgot about it. I forgot about it on the walk to work. I forgot about it while at work. Then I remembered about it on the walk home from the train when it started to ache a little bit. But I'd just found out about my driver's license, and I really, really, really needed to run and I needed to run HARD. And anyway, if I were injured, I would get some warning before I really fucked it up, and I could back off. So I put on a different pair of shoes and started running. I was doing half-mile repeats up a slight hill, and while I was running fast the foot didn't hurt, but running slow back down it ached like hell. So it's not running FAST that fucked me up, it's running SLOW. What the fuck?! I hoped it would go away as I warmed up, but instead it got worse with time: it was fine on the way up, but killed on the recovery run back down. So after three repeats I turned around and hobbled home. I paid special attention to exactly where it hurt, and where the pain radiated through so that I could look it up when I got home.

Immediately I sat down at the computer and searched "anatomy of the foot" and found what seemed to be the culprit: the Peroneus Brevis tendon, a tendon that goes from the lateral head of your gastrocnemius (calf muscle), under the bump on the outside of your ankle, and tucks under your foot to insert at your fifth metatarsal (the bone mid-foot behind your pinky toe). The alternative is a stress fracture, but I do not have a stress fracture because there is no cure for that other than total rest for 6 weeks, which probably means crutches.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck! I'm supposed to be running the Hartford Marathon next weekend! I'm supposed to be running all this fall and finally becoming a fast runner! I'm not supposed to be injured.

If I get an overuse injury, shouldn't it be in one of the big muscles or joints? Not the tiny little peroneus brevis tendon that is responsible for "plantar flexion and eversion" (curling your foot and rolling it outwards). I do neither of these in road running. Sure, I turn my ankle all the time when I'm running on trails, but I haven't run on trails since last Wednesday. It certainly didn't hurt then. Come to think of it, if this were an overuse injury, why wouldn't it start to hurt when I WAS on a trail with my ankles rolling all over the place??? If I'm going to be taken down, I want it to be something dramatic, not the inflammation of some tendon no one's ever heard of. I feel I'm entitled to something really badass that includes exclamation points at the end, like Exploding Gluteus Syndrome!!! You know, something that involves sparks and maybe a bang, or at least a pop or a crack.

But no.

I have a pretty good idea of what caused it, the same thing that causes most sports injuries: overuse. I haven't bought new shoes in a long time. In fact, one of my pairs of shoes is over a year old (although they haven't been in the rotation for much of that time).

On top of that was my decision to run more in order to run faster. I figured I'd train like a runner, running every day with easy 3-mile runs on the "off days" instead of bike rides. So I ran Saturday and Sunday, Monday I ran easy and it started to hurt, and Tuesday it got worse. What's really frustrating, though, is that I broke none of the 3 commandments of running: I didn't go too far (it was a short run that killed me), too fast (it was slow running that did me in), or too soon! I have done similar running volume and similar intensity many times before with no ill effect. And too soon? Come on! Certainly I have enough of a running base in me to be able to handle an easy 3-mile run!

There's no use in seeing a doctor for now (although I finally have health insurance again!!! yippee!), since what he is almost certainly going to do is tell me to RICE it: Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation until it gets better. I don't need to pay a copay and lose several hours of work to hear that. And anyway, doctors hate distance runners. They're worse than fat people. They can't WAIT to tell you that running is "bad for you".

I'm doing everything I should, staying off my feet, icing them, taking Advil (right, Judi?). But I am grouchy. I'm back in that place where I can't drag myself out of bed in the morning to go to the gym. I'm bringing healthy lunches, but going out to buy pizza and cookies instead. I'm eating all kinds of high GI foods, processed foods, and crap I would never normally eat. I'm getting fat.

Which brings me to another point: Rest. I hate rest. It makes me grouchy, depressed, and frantic. I know you need rest, but I prefer to take the "active recovery" option, the one where I sit in the back of the lane and just swim easy, or where I ride my bike easy with slower cyclists and enjoy the ride. Complete and total rest has dire implications for me. What if I get fat? What if I lose my fitness? What if next year I don't have the drive to get in as good shape as I am this year??? I mean, if you're just going to sit around on the couch, you might as well do so with drink in hand.

I know that you need to take time off, and also work rest into macrocycles with the off-season and so on. Rationally, I know this. This is what I would tell anyone else: that they need to take time off to rest. But deep down in the core of my being, I think it's a bit blown out of proportion (read more about it here). You need to let your fitness dip, sure, but get out of shape? Sit on the couch until I'm back to running 10-minute miles? Get fat? Sometimes I think I'd rather get my legs chopped off and continue training than be subject to that.