Thetis Lake Relay

It was awesome to get out racing again! I haven't done a serious race since the TC10K back in April, although the Thetis Lake Relay wasn't very serious as you can see in the photo... I joined up with Simon, Nate, and Mike to make up the PIH Prancing Bambies relay team. It was a fun day: good weather and very muddy trails, and lots of great headgear. The highlight for me was Simon running the relay with the impressive horns on his head, and seeing everyone's reactions. It was also great to be on a very evenly balanced team! All four of us finished the ~4.3K loop within 2 minutes of each other, and ended up finishing in a time of 1:14:35. This was 6th in the Senior Men's division, and 11th overall. Pretty impressive considering we were all out there just to have fun...
I did the first lap in a time of 18:08. It wasn't pretty, as usual went out to hard and died near the end on those hills. Next up was Nate who came in right around the 20 minute mark. Third was Simon who flew up the hills (I think he was part goat) and came prancing in at 18:02, and the Mike cleaned up the last lap in 18:20.

Anyway, since it's been months since my last post you can probably guess that I haven't been running much, or at least not running anything worth writing about. The knee is slowly improving, I hope. I've been seeing Scott Simpson (physio) for the last few months and I've certainly improved quite a bit in that time. But the knee still isn't strong enough to let me train properly on it. So to keep me busy I've started going to the CrossFit Zone gym down town. CrossFit is an amazing full body workout which combines a lot of basic exercises (pullups, pushups, situps, burpees, squats, etc) with some olympic weight lifting (deadlifts, cleans, jerks, etc) and some short running intervals. It takes boring gym workouts and makes them fun, competitive, and often time-based and always leaves you feeling like you really got a good workout. It is free to try as well.

Short Leg

I recently decided to go get a second opinion on my knee injury, so I went to the Synergy Health Management group and saw Dr. Jamie Grimes. His diagnosis is that my left leg is about 1cm shorter than my right leg. It certainly seems to makes sense given my condition. He noticed that my right quad and glute are much larger/stronger than the left side, obviously compensating for my short leg. For now I've been given a 5mm heel lift, and I have two incredibly painful massage sessions (mostly on my right hip flexor and IT band) a week. Hopefully it will solve my problem.

I found this interesting article on Leg Length Discrepancies. The author lists 4 problems associated with short leggedness:

1. Iotibial band syndrome (pain on the outside or lateral part of the knee)
2. Piriformis syndrome (butt pain, not to be confused with sciatica, where the pain runs down the back of the leg)
3. Hip pain
4. Low back pain

I have been experiencing at least 3 of those symptoms...

Oh well, for now I'm enjoying volunteering at races, and spending more time in the gym. This weekend is the Peninsula Runners Cool Half Marathon in Oak Bay, I'll be working the bag check.

TC10K

Going into the TC10K I had no idea what to expect. I've been off my usual training for 3 months now, and haven't managed to run more than 30K in a week. Anyways, I was very eager to get back to racing and see how much fitness I had really lost!

The good news is I guess I haven't lost that much. I was secretly hoping to run around 39 minutes, and ended up finishing in 38:06 (114th overall, 3:49/km), which is only a minute slower than my last 10K three months ago. And even more promising is that my right knee didn't hurt during or after the race at all. Almost everything else is hurting now though, quads especially. Anyways, I'm taking this week off to fully recover, and then next week I'll be slowly building up my training, which is perfect timing because the Harrier's Tuesday night workouts are at Mt. Doug now! Woohoo.

Oh and one more thing - my team (Chisel Mod Squad) won the Education team category! Our top 5 runners averaged 42:41 which was just good enough to win the category. That's not too bad considering that there were 32 teams in the category.

Good luck to everyone going over to the Vancouver Marathon this weekend!

Jumping on the blog bandwagon

Hello,
I finally decided it was time to start blogging about running, seeing as it is the cool thing to do these days.

After having a good off-season I started 2009 strong with a solid 29:28 at the Pioneer 8K, and then a new personal best of 37:07 at the Cobble Hill 10K in January. But after that it went downhill. I didn't take enough time off after Cobble Hill with back to back speed and hill workouts all on pavement (and a bit of indoor soccer too) and then my right knee decided that it had enough. The pain was felt right under and around the knee cap. I took a few days off and lots of icing hoping it would go away but it didn't. So back to the Chiropractor I went (I see Rob Hasegawa at the Cedar Hill Sports Therapy in the Tuscany Village, who I'd highly recommend to anyone with running problems) and as I feared I had a bad case of Runner's Knee. So that was early February, and since then it's been a slow recovery - lots of icing, stretching, yoga, and not much running. Well okay, maybe not "lots", but some. But I think I'm finally seeing some improvement. Interestingly I have no problems running on the track, but as soon as I run on the road it hurts again.

I'll be adding more content as the weeks go by and my training starts up again.

Also check out all the other running blogs that I've listed on the right.