Monthly Summary – November 2014
The highlight of the month was only tangentially related to training. I officiated my first wedding. Becky and Ankur asked me to do it and I had a blast. I’m not a natural public speaker so I was as nervous as I can imagine but I pulled it off and was even mostly happy with how I did. I took the above picture about 5 minutes before the ceremony started. (I say “tangentially” related to training because I met both Ankur through running and Becky through triathlon training and introduced them during a run.)
After a frustrating start to the month of training, November closed in decent fashion. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, but I feel like things might be back on track. On track for what, I’m not sure, but nonetheless I’d rather have “on track” than “off the rails” (which is how I felt earlier this month).
Near the beginning of the month, I got this awful pain in my side along my upper ribs that sidelined me for a week. It felt sort of like a bruised or broken rib and sort of like a muscle pull. But I didn’t have any trauma that would have caused that type of injury. The first week it hurt enough that I couldn’t do any exercise and it actually affected everyday things like getting out of bed and sitting at my desk. Over the last few weeks, the pain has consistently gone down. It’s still there just the littlest bit, but nothing that’s stopping me from being active and I think it’s just about 100% gone. I still don’t know what it was.
I’ve also still got this nagging core/hip injury that’s been bothering me on-and-off for months. After trying everything else I could think of, including stretching, massage, time off, advil, ice, ART and strength training, I finally gave in and went to the doctor. He diagnosed it as an abdominal wall/oblique injury and recommended PT. That strikes me as a catch-all diagnosis, but at least he didn’t think it was anything more serious. I’m starting PT this week. Fun.
I started framing my monthly summaries with the below goals in September. I think it’s working well for now. With not much actual training going on (or put differently, nothing that I’m really training for), these discreet goals give me something to work towards. The red is my evaluation of how I did:
- Eat better. I’d give myself a B+ on this. Between leftover Halloween candy sitting around the office and a bunch of days of Thanksgiving deserts, I overdid it a bit on the sweets. Other than that, I was pretty good about avoiding the processed junk. I’ve definitely found that with my workout volume down (this month was very close to my monthly training hours low for the year), my appetite has also been down. I guess that’s how it should work.
- Focus on getting better sleep. Eh. I’m sleeping ok. In the second half of the month I got back into more of a rhythm, I did a better job of getting in bed earlier and being more motivated to get up early.
- Continue swimming, yoga and strength training on a regular basis. I missed a week of swimming because of my back but still managed to swim a lot in November. We were out of town this last week, so I swam in a short course pool at the local YMCA. It made me appreciate my outdoor long-course pool. I barely did any yoga or strength training because of my back. Even once it started feeling better, I didn’t want to push it.
- Run easy. Maybe hit the trails for some easy training. After taking about a month off from running, I started up again – really easy – in mid-November. I’m doing run-walk intervals; usually alternating 4-5 minutes of running and around 2 minutes of walking. And the running is slow. The first week, I stayed on the treadmill and kept the running intervals at around 10:20 minutes per mile. This week, I ran on flat roads but still don’t think I ever ran faster than 9:40 minutes per mile. The running hasn’t made my ab strain any worse, but I’m still going to take it very easy for at least a few weeks. As much as I’d like to get back on the trails and do some real running, it’s more important to me to just get healthy. I’ll see what the PT recommends this week.
- Be positive. I didn’t do such a great job at this for most of November. I’ll work on this in December.
- Read at least one book, hopefully two. I finished Operation Mincemeat, read The Secret Place by Tana French and started Redeployment by Phil Klay. Operation Mincemeat was a bit of a disappointment. It started off strong and the story itself is awesome, but the book dragged and I think it would have just been better as a long magazine article. At points, I felt like the author was adding details just to make the book be an “appropriate” book length. The Secret Place was another fun Irish murder mystery from Tana French. Elizabeth and I have read all of her books. This one was my least favorite of the series, but it was still a good read. She always develops characters really well, especially the main detective characters. I really enjoyed the beginning and the end of the book, but the story seemed to get a little lost in the middle. Redeployment won the National Book Award this year (announced just the other day). It’s a collection of short stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan written by a former Marine. I’m only about a third of the way through it but each story so far is compelling in its own way. I can’t say the book is “enjoyable”, but the stories are fascinating and stunning and shocking. This is not a book about the glory of war. I track all my reading on Goodreads, so if you’re on Goodreads, connect with me there.
Here’s November:
Swim: 25,835 meters
Cycling (outdoors): 0 miles
Run: 26.7 miles
Total Run Elevation Gain: 2,306 feet
Strength Training/Yoga: 4 sessions
Approximate monthly total training time: 22.5 hours
Weight: 161