A Cautionary Tale

A whole ton of groceries from Costco just got delivered right to my door! I ordered it all on Sunday. We ate our way through almost everything in the house over this past week, so when all this food finally showed up it felt like a giant relief. Minus the fact that I ordered eggs but didn't get any. #firstworldproblems I will say, people who don't live in Hawaii might not understand what a giant PITA it is for us to shop at Costco. Even before all this current Covid craziness, Costco shopping was a PITA. Now the lines are so bad (and have been for weeks WTF?) they're showing them on the news. Also, an employee at Hawaii Kai Costco tested positive for COVID 19 and I'd bet anything that there are more who actually have it but haven't been tested so the extra money I spent to have those delivered was worth every dollar.

Anyway. Today I just want to share a cautionary tale of sorts and hopefully you can apply this to yourself in some way. I don't know maybe everyone needs to learn lessons for themselves ... I think sometimes I have to learn the same lessons over and over before I finally get it. It has to do with running, and how to build up volume safely after taking some time off. Now might be a decent time to share it, in case any of you are currently not running very much due to lack of motivation or whatever...

I didn't run very much in Q4 of last year. Oct-Nov-Dec I ran a little here and there but my motivation was low and I just didn't feel like it and everyone was touting off season or whatever so I used that as my excuse to sit on my ass (actually I was riding my bike bc that sounded more appealing) and justified it that it was the smart thing to do so ok whatever. But then January came and I decided that get off my lazy ass and start running again! Yay running! I could tell by how labored everything felt that I'd lost a bunch of fitness but the more I ran, the stronger I would feel and the less I needed to walk to catch my breath so that was motivating to keep running more.

I knew I needed some new/different goals so I decided that I was going to collect vertical. Let's see how much vertical I can run in January! That seemed like a decent goal bc when you're running that much uphill, pace becomes less of a thing to worry about. Ya so the run was slow but it also involved 1500ft elevation gain so get over it, right? So I sought out hills and ran lots of them and felt myself getting stronger each week and all was good, until it wasn't.

What goes up must come down and I suspect all that downhill running was a problem given the lack of fitness I was starting with. At the end of January, Strava tallied my total elevation gain and it was over 10,000ft for the month which I thought was super cool! But that's also 10,000+ ft of downhill. I was feeling a deep ache in/around my hip/groin area and in my gut it was a bad feeling like ugh. It reminded me of the way that hip area felt in 2016 when I developed a stress reaction in my femoral neck... Back then I was completely shocked when the MRI showed a reaction in my bone. But this time I knew deep down that I'd made too big of a jump in my training and it made sense to me that my bones might need some time to catch up on their remodeling processes.

I'd argue that the amount of running I did in January, even with the elevation gain/loss, is a reasonable amount to do, as long as fitness was solid at the start of a block like that. Coming off a couple months of pretty low volume, it was too much. Ultimately it meant that the progress I'd made, the fitness I'd gained, was pretty much all for naught because I ended up taking a lot of February off from running. Total rookie mistake which is actually embarrassing since I've been in this sport for 20+ years and absolutely should know better. I never got an MRI so I don't know for sure what the problem was, but after a few weeks with no running and a visit to a sports chiro and some help from Holli and tons of rolling and mobility work, I cautiously started running again in March. Smarter this time, running every other day, starting with short trots and gradually building back up. After a month of consistency I'm back up to 5-6 miles now and completely pain free. Yay!

I share this story now for a few reasons, but mostly as a cautionary tale to people who might not be running much right now but thinking they'll start back running once this pandemic crisis settles down.  If you want to be running a solid amount this summer, you need to be running at least some right now. You don't have to run long, but keep your frequency up so you don't have to start from scratch when you're ready to train again. Because if you start from scratch and try to jump back into your old routine, your brain will remember what you used to be able to do when you were fit but your bones and tendons and ligaments might not! It's prudent to build back cautiously so you don't end up setting yourself back because you jumped back in too fast. Or better yet, keep running now so you don't have to treat yourself like a fragile egg this summer.