And the Winner Is…

Went back to the ortho today to review results of the bone scan for my right foot. No stress fracture present. Based on my detailed symptom description, the diagnosis is adhesive capsulitis, which isn’t full-fledged Morton’s Neuroma, but rather a side-effect of Morton’s Syndrome. I have Morton’s foot, which is where the second metatarsal is longer than the first. While this usually means the second toe is longer than the big toe, that’s not always true, but in my case it is. Both of my feet have this, and whenever I run marathons, it is my second toes that suffer.

Anyway, back to the diagnosis. What this does is make it painful to land on that second/third metatarsal, which I guess I should have had checked out months and months ago while experiencing ball of foot pain while cycling and sometimes running. So it’s anyone’s guess what my progression has been, and whether it had to do with not always wearing my former orthotics, running a lot, or whatever. For now, we are calling it an overuse injury.

So what is the prognosis? I was calm when I asked, and I know that most soft-tissue injuries can take many weeks to completely heal. 8-12 was what I was told. Well, since it’s week 4 of not running, maybe I will get lucky and be through this sooner , like 4 weeks from now. If that rolls, I am good. For treatment, I have a prescription for these NSAID pads to wear on the bottom of the foot all day long, and I am to ice the BOTTOM 2-3x per day. Here I was focused on the top of my foot, who would have known? And of course, no regular running. I am not to try for 2 more weeks. I’m OK with that.

Last week was my first week of combined water running/elliptical, and this week I’ll get in a combined 5 hours total and more next week (during what was supposed to be my “big run week”). In a way (and anyone who knows me well knows I am always looking for the silver lining in everything), it’s good that I have been doing things that are making this transition not too bad, like already spending lots of time in the pool! And I am lucky that I live .6 miles from my pool, so this doesn’t really add any time to my day. But it does mean that since I only want to make ONE trip to the pool daily for a swim, “run,” or swim/run combo, that I am up early all weekdays.

I have gotten my prep time down to 40 minutes from the time I wake up to the time I am in my car driving to the pool, and I can get in 2.5 hours of whatever and be back home working by 8:30 or 8:45. It’s pretty funny how now whatever I am about to do I am always mapping out the fastest route, not because I am trying to save energy, but because I am trying to save TIME. Every second I save doing one thing means less cramming at the end of the day so that I can still fit in :30 of stretching, sitting down to eat dinner, prepping the coffee pot and workout gear for the next morning and maybe some reading before trying to be asleep at 8PM (for my 5:05AM wakeup call). Oh and also now that it’s spring I need to fit in mowing the lawn here and there, trips to the ortho, dentist, haircuts, waxing, massage. So all those seconds I am saving helps create less stress in my day!

Good thing I have my morning routine down since my training hours just keep going up! While the actual act of water running isn’t too bad (and I am pretty good at it I guess since I can hit nearly my regular run cadence in the water), I am missing spending that time running outdoors, and it breaks my heart that I can’t even go for walks, as it will just aggravate my foot. But at least I can take breaks from work and go out into my yard and pull weeds, gaze at the flowers and animals and enjoy the fresh air. Guess that means I might be catching some sun time mid-day on a chaise lounge!

I am not happy about still not knowing whether I can make it through the UMC run, but I am sure I will begin calculating that if I am able to run some of it and then walk, I might still be able to do it. Right now I CAN walk without pain, but no way I can do 13MPM walking for 52.4 miles, so I need to be able to do SOME running. Still, taking things one day at a time and we’ll see where I am in a few weeks. Bottom line: I am going to give this recovery business the attention it needs. And now I can stop digging into muscles that I thought may have been culprits and hurting them!

Back on the bright side, I am biking and swimming like a monster! Which is good, because I still need plenty of bike fitness for UMC. My last 3 weeks of training have seen 12, 10.5 and 10.75 hours of biking, much of it on the trainer. In fact, this past weekend, on Saturday I did 4:40 on the trainer and 4:30 on Sunday. Isn’t that crazy? Someone asked me what do I do when spending all that time there? To me, it’s the same question as how do I get through 2.5-3 hour swims? Or treadmill runs?

One of the qualities that you absolutely MUST have to do this ultra stuff (even Ironman, to an extent) is the ability to be OK inside your own head for many hours at a time. And you also need to be focused and determined and disciplined enough to just get it done, whatever “it” is. As my dear friend Susan pointed out to me early on in this Ultraman campaign, I have all this additional time in which to perform my “moving meditation.” And it is true.

Effectively, when doing long swims, rides or runs, I am meditating on swimming, riding or running. When I swim long, I am thinking about swimming and…nothing. I do count my laps and occasionally glance at the pace clock, and I do play around with my breathing patterns and spend time focusing on my stroke, but that is what swimming is. Sometimes I might notice that my triceps are a little fatigued or sore, and I just observe it and keep going. Sometimes a person will stand at the head of the lane trying to capture my attention to let me know they are getting in. When my long swims were shorter (5,000 yards or less), I might be able to think about other things like things I need to do, and remember them when I finished the workout. Not so much with the long swims I am doing now! Just like in any long race, if I were to start thinking, “Oh God I have so many more yards to go,” I would lose it. Staying in the moment—what breathing pattern I am following, which lap I am on, how many laps I have in this current set—it paramount.

When I ride long on the trainer (3+ hours), although I have the TV on, I am not paying attention to it (it’s on mute anyway), and I am focused on power output, sometimes cadence, and storing up all sorts of information about how I feel and why for future reference. I usually have the powermeter display showing me TSS (Training Stress Score) rather than elapsed time, because mentally it feels easier to shoot for 17 TSS points rather than watch 15 minutes slowly pass. But that’s just me. I do have to look at elapsed time every so often to know when it’s time to take in some nutrition. Music helps to keep my cadence high (I seem to prefer around 100rpm nowadays).

When I ride long outdoors (4+ hours), even though it’s outdoors and I have to pay attention to traffic and the road condition, it can get just as mind-numbing if you aren’t just into the experience and realization that you are so lucky to have the fitness to do this and the time to spend doing it and think about nothing except biking!

When I run long (let’s say 2+ hours on treadmill or 2.5+ hours outdoors), there seems to be much more of my body that is engaged, if nothing less than because of the impact on the ground or treadmill surface. There’s your running form, breathing, heart rate (I am generally oblivious to my heart rate when swimming and biking), watching your footing, but it still comes down to thinking about running. And there is that extra component—the pain—that seems to keep me engaged. I’m not saying I don’t swim or bike hard—I do—but running is the hardest of the three sports (which is why my fucking foot, which is the new name for my RIGHT foot, hurts), and unless you are running super easy, it’s hard right away. It is just the nature of running, at least on pavement.

I know some people who can’t run, swim or even bike much longer than an hour unless they are with others. Which is fine. If you can synchronize your schedule with others and always do group workouts, that’s wonderful. But ultimately, you are alone in the race, and I think it’s important to be OK inside your own head for your projected race distance or you might have issues. At some level, it’s important to be able to put all your effort, including your easily-distracted brain, into the activity that you are doing. If you get used to it in training, then when you train or race long, you have a higher chance of experiencing that wonderful thing called FLOW, which is where your physical and mental training intersect with your confidence and execution ability and while the training session/race might not feel effortless, it’s within your grasp to meet your expectations, and all that thinking about your form, your pace, your nutrition, seems to fade into the background and you are just purely doing the sport and being in that moment.

I have had struggles with the expansion of my time zone comfort level throughout this Ultraman training, and at times, it has been hard to tell whether I was struggling physically with my adaptation to the load or mentally, with my adaptation to the expansion of time. Certainly, I have inched up my training based on normal periodization protocol (normal for me, anyway!), but while my training time has expanded, so necessarily has my non-training time contracted, and I think it’s more the getting used to that non-training time going away that has been difficult to adapt to. When you have 1-2 less hours every single day to get your “normal life” done, you just can’t slack too much at all. Which is why I do these funny things like see what I can get done while I am heating something in the microwave for 8 minutes besides just wait for it!

At this point in my training, I can say I have already done so many things I had never done before, and I can tell my fitness is very, very high. If I can continue to get adequate sleep (only 9 hours now, down from my preferred 9.5-10 nightly) and I stay watchful of taking in adequate calories (which is even more difficult than it was when I was Ironman training), then I can make it through this, hopefully fix my injury and get to the UMC starting line in one piece! If I make it there and I can run, even slowly, I think I will be fine.

I am a little excited because this weekend I am going up to Wisconsin to do a very hilly century ride on Sunday, weather permitting. This week was scheduled to be a big biking week, but hey, I have already had 3 of those, so this will be #4, meaning my bike fitness should be going through the roof any day now. I had planned on less running, but will try and hit 5 hours of elliptical/water running, and keep a good swim focus going. Then next week was to be a big running week, which I will still do, just mostly in the pool, lots of swimming, and a slight rest (8 hours) from biking. Hopefully, my fucking foot gets better over this period and I will try and run on it again.

Bottom line is that I plan to keep on keeping on, building more bike and swim fitness, and see where I am in 2 weeks.