My First 10K

I wasn't very well-prepared for my first 10K, the Capitol Hill Classic.  Before today, I had never actually run 6.2 miles before, although I did make it to 5.8 on March 9th.  Since then, I have run exactly four times.  Then yesterday I played in a roller derby bout.  And last night I got about six hours of sleep after I finally wound down from the bout.  (We won, by the way, finishing in third place for the season.)

Here's how to run your first 10K the morning after a roller derby bout:

Get Your Priorities Straight.  I knew I hadn't trained for this race, and there was nothing I could do about it.  I refused to let myself worry too much about that before today because I wanted all of my attention focused on the bout.

Free your mind.  Knowing I was going to be unprepared and unrested was actually quite freeing.  I didn't expect myself to run fast or break any speed records.  Really all I wanted to do was prove to myself that I could run the whole distance in preparation for the 10K I'm running next month in Maine.

Get your head in the game.  Whenever the race crossed my mind these last couple weeks, I'd tell myself one thing: This race is going to be 99% mental.  I knew that if my body was fit enough to run 5.8 miles, there was no reason I couldn't run 6.2 provided I didn't talk myself out of it by thinking about how I had never done it before, and how tired I was after the bout.  Today, every time I started to feel tired, I focused on my form and my pace and told myself to just keep running.  You're feeling fine, I told myself over and over again.  You are not going to walk.

Calm down.  My only goal for the race was to finish without walking, and I knew the key would be to run a nice, slow pace.  Every time someone passed me and I had the urge to speed up, I reminded myself to keep calm and stick to the plan.  I ran what felt like a natural, easy pace to me.  I have a GPS watch that I wear sometimes for running, and I wore it today so I'd know, at any moment, exactly how much farther I had to go.  I could also see that I was running a steady pace the whole time.  It was extremely helpful to know both of these things.

In the end, I was very happy with my race time of 59:37, which was faster than I expected. I was in the top half of female finishers, and I felt strong enough at the end of the race to kick up the pace and really push to come in under 60 minutes.  I can't say I had as much fun as I do running 5Ks, though.  An hour feels like a really long time to run.  After the 10K in Maine, I think I'll be done running that distance for awhile.  High intensity interval training takes less time and is better preparation for derby.  Still, it feels good to have done something I'd never done before, and I'm looking forward to doing it one more time next month in my home state.

Look at me, I'm running so fast I'm blurry!

The Last Bout of the Season

In a few hours, I'll be heading over to the Armory for the last bout of the season.  Sometimes I still can't quite believe I'm actually a DC Rollergirl, but here I am getting ready to take the track with my team, the Majority Whips, for the last time this season.

I thought I would be nervous about this bout.  We all want to win very badly of course.  But I'm not nervous at all because I am just so grateful to have had this year with this group of amazing women.

Here's something I learned this year: my problems are not special.  I used to have this whole narrative about all the obstacles I had to overcome to get this far in my derby career.  But what I learned this year is that every one of us is pushing through obstacles--small and large--every single day.  My problems aren't special, and that is an amazing comfort.  We are all in this together.

But today I'm not thinking about any problems.  This is the last chance I'll have to skate in what we've dubbed Lucky Season Seven.  I'm the lucky one, and I am so excited to get out there and skate with my team.

My New Favorite Blog

Today I discovered Sarah Waybright's blog, Why Food Works.  Waybright is a registered dietician, and here are the things I love about her blog:

It's about eating.  This is a nutrition blog, not a weight loss blog. The blog has lots of recipes, and many of them look like things I could actually make--there are some that pretty much just require you to throw a bunch of stuff in a blender.  The first one I'm going to try is this recipe for strawberry quinoa scones.  That's right, people.  Quinoa in a scone.

It's about science.  Waybright wants to help people understand how food works in the body when you eat it.  She talks about protein and fiber and bases her recipes on solid nutritional research about what a body needs to function at its best.  For athletes, she offers equations and graphs to provide guidance on the best post-workout snacks.

It's accessible. The writing is clear and easy to understand (with lots of photos, too).  She presents the science in small, easily understood chunks with practical application to recipes you'd actually want to cook and eat.  The tone is not condescending, preaching or professorial.  The tips seem refreshingly do-able.  For instance, did you know only 20% of Americans eat fruit at breakfast?  Eat a delicious piece of fruit with your breakfast!  Totally do-able. 

Fitness Milestone: Pushups

If hearing me talk about how it helped my roller derby game wasn't enough, here's quantifiable evidence that the Bodysmith class I took was awesome.  Never in my life have I been able to do a full-on pushup.  Ever.  I've always done the modified version on my knees.  Toward the end of the eight-week class, I started trying to do one or two "real" pushups when the class called for it, and I could usually manage at least one.  Until yesterday, I didn't know how many I could do with fresh arms, when I wasn't already tired from doing a bunch of other upper body exercises.  Yesterday, I decided to find out.

Five!

I can do five full-on pushups now with fairly decent--I'm not sure I would say good--form.

Pushups are one of the things I thought I'd never be able to do.  Partly because I didn't really care that much about working on them, and partly because I just figured I'm a person who has more lower body strength than upper body.

I made it to eleven of the sixteen classes in our Bodysmith session.  I'm planning to sign up for another sixteen sessions in a couple of weeks.  I can't wait to see what else my body can learn to do.

Seven Days

A week ago Wednesday I came home from derby practice, pulled my phone out of my bag and saw several voicemails and missed calls from my family.  It turned out my dad was in the hospital in New Jersey, where he and my mom, along with my sister and brother-in-law, were vacationing.  (I had just driven up the week before to see them for a couple of days.)

My dad has had a tough time in hospitals, and I have been at his side for most of it.  Ever since the surgery that nearly killed him back in 2005, whenever he is in the hospital, the only thing I can think about is rushing to his side to keep my eye on him.  So that's what I did first thing Thursday morning.  Everything turned out fine, but it was a stressful couple of days.

I've had a tough time getting back in the swing of things since returning to DC.  I was stressed out from missing two days of work unexpectedly, and it took me a few days to catch up.  I was so tired.  I would come home from work and do nothing but lie on the couch watching Netflix, and I was sleeping ten hours a night and still not feeling rested enough.

Yesterday, finally, I went back to derby practice after seven days of no physical activity.  I honestly cannot believe the last time I went seven days in a row without a workout.  Definitely not at all in 2013.  Probably not in the last six months of 2012 either.

It felt weird.  It felt scary.  I had this irrational fear that I might not be able to get myself started again, and just like that I would slide back into my ancient habits of sloth and gluttony.  I kept having to tell myself that one week would not erase all the work I've done up until this point, that it was just a minor setback, and that if I felt that exhausted, the thing I needed to do most was rest.

Then I felt weak.  There is so much rhetoric about athletes and their relentless drive and determination.  When all you want to do is curl up on your couch in a ball, and you know your league-mates are out there running and skating and lifting weights, you start to question whether or not you really have what it takes.  Or at least I did.

Then I felt guilty for letting my team down and not being there to practice with them, and guilty for letting myself down, too.

Then I felt even more exhausted from all those feelings.

After all that, I thought about the life coach and the year of doing nothing, and I felt better.  It's easy to underestimate the emotional and physical impact of stress. I still don't feel one hundred percent, but I've decided I've recovered enough that exercise is probably better for me than not at this point.  Practice last night was hard--I felt more tired than usual--but I did it.  Today I took the afternoon off work and went to the movies, an activity I always find relaxing, and then I did a nice, easy run through my neighborhood.  I have some fun things planned this weekend, and I hope they'll get me feeling better, too.

The Race That Wasn't, April Review and May Goals

April was a strange month.  I spent the first week sick from allergies and missed three roller derby practices.

I thought things were looking up the second week when I set a personal record in the first of what was supposed to be three consecutive Friday night 5K races.  From there, I had a great stretch of physical activity: the run, two Bodysmith sessions, two practices, two additional skating sessions, and then the next Friday night race, which didn't go quite as planned.  The police shut it down shortly after I passed the two mile mark because there was lightening in the area. 

After the race I took a few days off to visit with my parents who were vacationing nearby.  Between the trip and all the extra work I had to do at the office upon my return, and the migraine I got on Friday most likely due to the stress of it alll, I missed two more practices and the last of the three races.

I have only a couple goals for May:

1. Get my attendance back on track.  This was the worse attendance month I've had since I got drafted into the league.  While it's true I had good reasons for missing practice--illness and family--I want to do better.  As it is every month, my aim is 100% attendance.

2. Make a plan for the summer.  My Bodysmith class will be ending soon.  Our championship bout is coming up in three weeks, and after that we won't have any more home team bouts until the fall.   The weather is getting better.  And I'm feeling the need to formulate a plan for making the most of the summer months.  I'm thinking about taking some strength training classes at my gym on Capitol Hill since the Bodysmith sessions have really helped my endurance and skating.  I'm considering taking some artistic skating lessons to improve my basic skills and agility.  I definitely want to do some more street skating and trail skating now that the weather is nice.  I know all of these things have the potential to improve my derby game, but I need to figure out what I can fit into my schedule and what I can afford to pay for.  (No personal trainer for me this summer, alas.)  In May I'll be investigating the options and making a plan.

Progress Report

Last night I ran my first race in the Crystal Run 5K Fridays series.  You may recall this series was the cause of a running breakthrough last year.  I wasn't expecting any big breakthroughs this year.  Although I haven't been running much these last couple of months, I was hoping that all the skating and strength training might help me run faster.  My time last night was 27:39, a personal record but only five seconds faster than my best time last year.  However, last year I improved my time by about a minute over the course of the series.  If I could get my time down to an even 27:00, I would be thrilled.  We'll see what happens.

Today I skated with the DC Rollergirls in the National Cherry Blossom Festival Parade, which was really fun.  I had this moment when I was skating past the National Gallery of Art.  I remember standing right there with a date during the 4th of July parade in 2010, shortly after had I tried out for DCRG the first time.  I remember my date saying, "Maybe one day that will be you."  Today it was, and it was pretty awesome to remember that as I rolled down the street with my league-mates.

To get to the parade today, I skated from my apartment to the National Mall, which meant I had to skate down Capitol Hill.  I was pretty terrified as I haven't done much skating outside and have never tackled a hill that steep before.  I made my way very cautiously, using plow stops and hockey swerves to slow myself down  and taking a knee once or twice when I thought things were getting out of hand.  (Yay for knee pads!)  After the parade, we stopped for a group photo at the White House, and then I skated all the way home.

I think I skated about six miles round trip.  It was so much fun to skate up the Pennsylvania Avenue bike lane and through the streets of my neighborhood.  I think I'll definitely be doing more outdoor skating now that I'm not afraid anymore.