Team Cross Runs

I’m a Gym Rat

At least according to Foursquare, where I finally earned the Gym Rat badge.  It actually takes a bit of work to hit the gym 10 times over 30 days (or 3 days a week) in the middle of the summer.   I didn’t reward myself with anything too exciting as recommended by Foursquare!

It was a good week, busy but good.  I worked out 4 of the 7 days, sadly I had to drive my car for work every day. I was teaching a carpentry for kids class and needed to be able to transport lumber and tools.  If you want to purchase a trailer for me that’d be awesome! Especially since this winter we’ll be dropping to 1 car, about the same time as the kid pops out!  My bike numbers were down, but my running was up (to 2)!

Bike: 21.1 Miles

Run: 2 Miles plus 30 minutes of aqua jogging

Swim: 0.7 Miles

The one day I ran on the track in the YWCA for a mile with a little knee pain.  Unfortunately, it was the wrong direction (turning into my bad knee) but I survived the 6 laps and the pain slowly went away.  The pain appears to be on the outside in the area where they stuck the needle in to drain the fluid.  This was followed by 30 minutes of aqua jogging.

My other run was at Pike Island and was pretty much a brick workout, I rode 7 miles on my bike to get there.  I walked from the parking lot to the island and then ran a mile, walked back to my bike and proceeded to ride 14 miles home.  I obviously took a different route and found a great place to hammer it on the bike.  The roads around the airport are quite flat, wide, and not heavily traveled.  I’d recommend it for a 3 or 4 mile stretch of hard riding.

The only other notable event was that it stormed as we arrived at Nokomis and cleared up into a perfect evening for swimming.

I’m optimistic about my knee and hope to be able to slowly build up my miles so that Ragnar won’t be too much of a shock to my system. I’m planning on picking one of the shortest legs and surviving! I go next week to the Infectious Disease Specialist!

This week’s One Post is an older post about Running Logs. I continue to use Running Ahead and am quite happy with it.  You can always click on the blue “R” at the top of my site to check out my running log or they get posted to my Facebook Wall.

I hope you have a great week!

Happy Independence Day!

Yesterday!  I hope you had a good and safe time celebrating the independence of our country.  We live in an extremely diverse neighborhood and it was interesting to think about the different reasons we all have to be thankful that the US is a free country.

It was a pretty good week, busy as usual. I’m enjoying my summer job working with kids.  Last week was water week which included a water balloon fight and a trip to a local water park! The heat isn’t fun since the school isn’t air conditioned but we manage!

The best news of my week was that I ran! Only about a mile and while my knee hurt there was no swelling during or after the run! So that is a good sign.  I might take it out for a spin again this week and see how it goes!  I’ve been biking and swimming so hopefully I’m getting into/staying in some level of fitness.   I also aqua jogged again this week. I did 30 minutes with my shoes on (which is a nice added challenge).

My weekly activity summary looks like this:

Bike: 53.8 Miles

Run: 1.5 Miles

Swim: 0.5 Miles

This week’s ONE POST is last year’s post about Minneapolis being one of the best biking cities in the World!

Did you have a good week?

What a Month

This has been a rough month.  I really, really want to run.  Biking and swimming are great, but runners want to run.  The latest report from my doctor is that I tested negative for Lyme disease (which doesn’t mean it isn’t still inside of me), but my knee is still swollen slightly.  She drained fluid off of my knee and it looked normal for awhile.  The last few times I’ve tried running it has swelled up.  Ugh.

Here is my mileage for the month:

Running – 4.7 miles (over 3 runs)

Biking – 257 miles (as of last night)

Swimming – 1.6 miles

Aqua Jogging – 3 sessions

Here is a look at the goals I set at the beginning of the year.

Run Around All Named Bodies of Water in Minneapolis

Ugh.

Read the Entire Bible in a Year

Staying on track to complete it in a year.  Half -way!

Read a Book a Month

I finished an amazing retelling of the battle for the first 4-minute mile.  The Perfect Mile chronicles the journeys of Landy, Santee, and of course Bannister as they try to be the first one to crack the 4 minute barrier.  It also includes some bonus coverage of the lead up to the “Mile of the Century”.

Blog Regularly

Well as you’ve noticed this hasn’t been going too well.  It has been hard to think or write much about running when I can’t run.  It has helped to read The Perfect Mile and relish in the delight of being an athlete and the reminder of my college days.

Treatments for Plantar Fasciitis has stayed at the number one spot, however this month Minnesota Marathons has moved into a close second. (too bad I won’t be able to run one)

This week’s ONE POST is a tie.  Relieving IT Band Pain and a story from 2008 about sportsmanship at the high school level.

Running – Good & Bad News

Which do you want first?  Well the Good News is that I went to the doctor on Monday and she cleared me to run.

The Bad News is that she wasn’t like, “you are healed” but more like, “give it a try and see what happens”.  Well after 2 runs totaling 3.5 miles the verdict is that my knee swelled a little and is hot to the touch so there is still something wrong.  Ugh.

I ran 2 miles with Brad at Fort Snelling’s Pike Island coincidentally on National Running Day.  My knee felt stiff, but it didn’t really hurt.  I didn’t notice anything abnormal when I got home, but we also biked pretty hard from Snelling to home.

On Saturday, a program I run had a booth at the Midtown Farmer’s Market.  I have to help set it up and tear down, but a student and their parent are in charge of running the actual booth, so I decided to run home after helping setup and then we went back later to tear down.  It was a 1.5 and most of it was on the Greenway’s dirt trail.  I felt fine on the run; my knee actually felt a little better than on Wednesday. But after wards it felt a little more swollen and was quite noticeably hot.  So that’s not good.

On Tuesday I did my first ever open water swim.  A few co-workers are triathletes and are going to do weekly swims at Lake Nokomis.  I didn’t have anything else to do, so I went with and had a good time.  Open water swimming is so much different than pool swimming.  It felt really weird at first and even though I could touch (my hand actually hit the bottom once or twice) it was still a little scary feeling at times.

On Sunday, my friend Brad was running the Minneapolis Marathon.  Brad also just had a baby on Tuesday morning and was extremely exhausted.  He decided at Mile 18 to drop out of the race.  I can’t imagine how getting very little sleep would impact your marathon performance.  Great job Brad!  I had a lot of fun riding around on my bike cheering him and other runners on for the race.  I ended up knowing 4-5 other people out there.  I wore my Team World Vision jersey and one of the racers was wearing his and talked to me a bit.  His name is Jesse and he ran a 5:07 even though he tore his meniscus (again) before the halfway mark.  At mile 18 he said, “I’m going to finish, even if I crawl.”  After Brad dropped out, I decided to not ride back downtown to the finish, but met my wife at Lake Calhoun.

On the ride there I got into a small pack of bikes and we were nailing 20 mph for 4-5 miles.  It felt good.  I ended up with 35 miles for the day. Crazy!

This week’s stats are:

Running – 3.5 miles

Biking – 71 miles

Swimming – 450 meters

This week’s One Post is Running with Music in my Ears!

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• Minneapolis Marathon 2010 Course Breakdown (slideshare.net)

Gorgeous Weekend

Gorgeous weekend after a crappy (rainy) week.

Rode a total of 33 miles on Sunday!  I did the first 19 miles solo around the southern half of the Grand Rounds at a decent clip.  I stopped to take photographs along the way.  I hit Midtown Greenway, Lake Calhoun, Lake Harriet, Minnehaha Parkway (skipping Lake Nokomis), Minnehaha Falls, and the West River Road.  The falls and river road were full of people enjoying the day and raising money for the MN AIDS Walk (which raised almost $350,000.  In the afternoon Christy and I rode to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Sebastian Joe’s, Lake of the Isles, Cedar Lake, the Sculpture Garden, Loring Park, and a local co-op for groceries before having a nice bonfire at home!

The rest of the week was busy work stuff and lots of rain.  I felt like it rained almost every day! I totaled 51 miles on the bike for the week!  Good times.   I did go to physical therapy and he gave me a few more exercises.  My foot is feeling pretty good for the most part and my knee feels fine with maybe a little tenderness here or there (which reminds me I need to take my drugs).

On Thursday night a friend and I joined other friends watching the TC 1 Mile downtown.  This is always a fun event.  Check out some of my pictures.   The winning elite time was 4:04.  The winner of the open wave was 5:58 by a 10 year old!

How was your week?

ONE POST: is a Foto Friday of Gooseberry Falls!

Aqua Jogging

Another week in the bag.  Lots of pills taken, feeling a little better. I’ve been feeling pretty good actually, both my foot and knee have been feeling a lot better lately.  Not that my knee has hurt too much since the swelling went away a few weeks ago, but there has been some slight pain and tightness when I bend it too much.  The biking has been going really well, though after two hilly rides my knee hurt a little more than usual.  It is also hard to remember to take my antibiotics, though I’ve only actually forgotten once.  On Friday I’m not sure why I decided to ride to work, it was raining and in the 40′s.  Obviously, I got soaked and even my windbreaker pants got soaked through.  Good thing I had planned on changing at work.  The ride home was still cool but not raining.  Then on Friday and Saturday night we had frost/freeze warnings out, yuck.  Actually, during the day on Saturday there was hail/snow coming down occasionally. Check out this picture a friend took in northern MN.

On Sunday, I finally got my lazy butt out and off the bike and went to the YWCA and did some aqua-jogging, using a belt.  The doctor wants me to avoid the impact of running but is fine with me aqua jogging. I didn’t think to do any research, but strapped on the belt, hopped in and started jogging in place.  It is actually rather boring, but it helped that I started doing little circles in my lane.  I jogged for 10 minutes and didn’t feel my heart rate really coming up at all, even after I increased my turnover so I swam for 150 meters before jogging for 5 more minutes.  After any good pool time a hot tub is a must and that felt relaxing!  Have you ever aqua jogged? Got any tips?

Weekly totals:

Biking – 29.7 miles

Swimming – 150 meters

Aqua Jogging – 15 minutes

This week’s ONE POST is my race review of the 2009 Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon

Lyme Disease & April’s Thoughts

Lyme Disease.  That is my my final diagnosis for my knee.  When my sports doctor got back from a conference the final results from my blood work had arrived and showed that I had a confirmed case of Lyme Disease.  This is the dreaded thing ticks carry.  We aren’t sure when I actually contracted it, but I never had the tell-tale rash and being a runner Lyme Disease wasn’t an obvious choice.  So now I’m on a month-long course of antibiotics.  Assuming they work I should return to normal life.  I didn’t realize this but Bart Yasso has chronic Lyme Disease.  Obviously the knee has helped set the tone for the month.  I logged 68 miles on the bike, most of which are commuting miles and did a 3 mile test run.  Hopefully by the end of May I’ll be running again.

This weekend I went backpacking with a friend at Jay Cooke State Park.  We had a good time hiking and exploring. Last year Jay Cooke was our final run of mancation and hiking there brought back some memories from then!

I’ve set a few random goals for the year:

Run Around All Named Bodies of Water in Minneapolis

This whole not being able to run thing is really cramping my style on this one.

Read the Entire Bible in a Year

Another good month.  Mark is a really small book, but they’ve spread it out over 2 months!

Read a Book a Month

I read Cause Wired which is about the digital revolution and the social (philanthropic) sector. It combines two of my favorite non-running topics – social media and the nonprofit/social justice realm. I received it free for taking part in the Blog Action Day Against Poverty.

Blog Regularly

I haven’t posted since March 10 on my personal blog (I hope it isn’t dying).   I posted regularly on here and that’s more important for you!   I continue to do well on my Project 365 (taking and posting 1 picture a day). I’ve almost forgotten to post a picture and have actually forgotten to post the picture I took, but I’ve taken a picture (some better than others)!

Other things of note… Things have been really good but very busy.  We’ve gotten some yard work done and ended up doing more landscaping than we’d planned on.  I was getting a little tired of looking at weeds in the “flower beds,” our yard is full of dandelions and I’m pretty sure my one neighbor hates it.  Sorry! One of the things I did was buy a hanging plant, sadly a bird created a nest in it and destroyed the flower, but there are pretty little Robin eggs in it!

The most popular post for the month is my more up to date Curing Plantar Fasciitis which finally outstripped the older Treatments version.  One a side note, I still have PF.

This week’s ONE POST is about Recovery and Detraining after a big race.