5000m .. done, now a long long rest

Not much posting in the past month, simply because for a running blog, the key ingredient should be running... and I did not have much to say about it.


I did a MRI on the left foot and the diagnosis was that the pain at the ball of the foot was not caused by sesamoiditis or worse a stresss fracture, but by a tendinitis of the "Flexor hallucis longus" . Digging on the web, I found that one of the possible root causes is poor flexibility of the calves, which put therefore more strain on the foot during landing and push-off phase of the gait.
Therapy: RICE, NSAIDS and stretching of the calf.
At the same time, my right back/glute tighness did not go away and I am trying to work on it with the usual array of treatments: deep tissue massage, acupuncture, stretching, etc... (with little success).
So most likely my running season is over before even starting. I must say that the disappointment is big, but I took it with a certain philosophy. Somehow my body is not really well suited to running and I must accept it. I do not feel even the urgency to go back again to training asap because it would be even more disappointing to fall into further injuries.
The satisfaction from running is mainly in the process of reaching the ideal shape through proper training and exert myself to my limits, so scraping through some kind of sub-par training to be able to run later 37 min on 10k is not my idea of running right now.
I might come back in time for a spring marathon or maybe for Berlin in 11 months time... 
So I put my mind into my family, my work and helping our running club.


This said, I ended up anyway running the final of the HK 5000m track championship.
The weather was nice and I brought the kids along to cheer me and also to give them some kind of inspiration to take up some/any kind of athletic/sport (rather than sticking in front of a PC): my daughter loved watching the Pole Vault and it was so enjoyable to make the warm-up with her on the warm-up track, pretending to race each other on imaginary 50m finals. While my elder son got scared by the starting guns !


So I lined up at the start line totally relaxed that I had only to enjoy the day and keep on running for 12.5 laps...
Honestly, I felt much better than expected. I could not really extend the stride, but I was not really breathing hard. I felt like a 3000cc car shuffling at 30kmh because of flat tire...
The 12 laps went away quite quickly and I even found myself fighting at the last lap with another runner for the second-to-last place.. but I could not really run any faster.
At the end, I placed 5th in 17'10" which is somehow pathetic (for being a National Championship) and somehow a positive surprise because I could not believe that I would have run that "fast" after 2 months of no running...
Disclaimer: of the 8th finalists, 2 DNS and 1 DNF... so I arrived 5th 
Full results available HERE (there were good performances by the local sprinters).
But  the man of the day was my teammate Colin, who was able to complete an amazing double feat:

- in the morning, winning the 5000m
- afternoon, double it with also the victory in the 10000m 
Really a big hit which will cost me 3 bottles of wine which I willingly put at stake if he would have been able to achieve the double !! But well deserved !

Am I a 5000m specialist ??...

Today I got the "pleasant" surprise to learn that I qualified for the 5000m finals of the HK track championship

Somehow I did a 5000m track race in February, 5 days after the HK marathon and scored a time of 16'21"...
In May, I popped up for another round because the race was right in front of my workplace and managed a very pedestrian 17'00"...
Now, I have no idea on how they counted the scores (it seems an average of the best 2 performances) and why some runners who run 14'56" are not in..., but these 2 modest performances made me anyway good enough to be ranked 6th and reach the finals to be held on October 30th.
I am very aware of the modest accomplishment becuase I have a IAAF score of only 524 points, which would not have made the cut in any other discipline from 100m to 10000m....

Now, I am planning to not do any run in the next 2-3 weeks to eventually recover from all my niggling pains, but at this point I plan to go anyway to the finals... at worst I will be the 8th best 5000m runner in HK....
For a middle-age guy... it is anyway a satisfaction to compete at Open level and I can bring the kids to cheer me up !!

For a proof that I am not making this up... click HERE and scroll down to 5000m
Good to see that my teammates Colin and David will also be in the race (so we will be 3 out of 8 !!)

we delivered.... 1st place at the XC National Championship

Lately I have been absent from this blog because my mood was terribly low... no point to afflict others with the stories of my injuries, etc, etc...

I also know that I still have to make a detailed report about my visit to StrideUK and explain why I am inured and how I am trying to solve it (especially because the case might be interesting also for many other readers).

So this week I will try to clean up all the overdue...

without dwelling into all the details, the tightness in the glutes obviously ended up also "killing" my back...

so I basically did not run for 10-15 days while I was doing my sessions of acupuncture, massage, etc.

Now... the fact was that I was entered as one of the 6 man team for our club into the Hong Kong Cross Country Championship, to be held on October 2nd. So I really felt the pressure to be there and contribute points to the team. 

Moreover, the idea of our young club reaching the podium of the championship was giving me extra-motivation to give it a try.

After 15 days of no running, last Thursday I went for a jog and it was painful everywhere.... those 6km felt harder than a marathon and I was really thinking to quit running altogether because it did not really make sense to hurt my body further.

Friday so I ended up for another session of treatment at the local clinic and endured very deep tissue massage and a session of acupuncture with at least 10 needles placed in the back and in the leg...

Saturday I tried another easy jog and felt better, but running at 5'/km with the HR already at 150bpm did not really hint into a good state of fitness...

To patch up the different ailments, I took a good dose of pain-killers and muscle-relaxants to keep the glutes at bay for the race...

On Sunday morning, I really felt energized... we were there, with our "azzurro" jerseys, ready to take over to more established teams, but I felt confident because our club has a great depth and we had at least 4 runners capable of a Top10.

How many years without running a XC race...? at least 15... and at least 25 from my last team XC at school... 

On top of everything, the weather in the past few days has been awful, with heavy rains and a thypoon: so the course was MUDDY... really muddy, with large patches of flooded grass... honestly I was salivating to the idea to make a real XC, albeit my poor conditions...

Anyway, we start hard as in any XC... but I want to be really conservative because on that course the last lap is going to be very long . 

While in front my team mates were doing a terrific race, my personal challenge was to finish the 3 laps without blowing up too much and run as smarty as I could...

In the last lap the soil has totally loosened up and in some patches my feet went 20cm in the mud... in one section I peeped my Garmin and noticed that I was running at 4'/km while being at full effort to get out of the mud...

My honest performance was good enough to grab the 2nd place of the Master, well behind my teammate Curtis and few seconds ahead of the 3rd.

But the real deal was the awsome performance of David, Colin, Stefano...

They ended up 2nd, 5th and 6th overall with Curtis just few positions behind...

The race was won by the Kenyan Thomas Kiprotich while the Ethiopian Aboye was third.

So David really eventually pulled out a great race, after suffering for months for different ailments...

Our team won the Team Championship by a large margin versus TWAC and WAC , 2 of the most established clubs in HK.

Really a huge pride in winning it... we are a small club, just founded 14 months ago and we really emerged as a top local club in few months, thanks to the dedication of all the runners.

Team podium

Once the pain killers pills weathered off... I felt again awful, but the sweetness of the days really deserved it...

Masters' podium

This is not a torture in Guantanamo...

Acupuncture with electric stimulation...
I guess that relying  to my TENS machine from Compex might be more or less the same effect.

Blog post done live with needles in...

Acupuncture ....beyond belief

Friday The back was aching so much at I eventually decided to pop into the "physical therapy" clinic in Dongguan.
Honestly speaking, my confidence in the medical care services in Chna is low.... Knowing how most things work in China is enough to make me doubtful whether the doctor in charge might have actually gained his degree properly or via some backdoor arrangement.
Also because any public institution cares about avoiding an unsuccessful handling of a foreigner, the response can drift in 2 opposite directions:
- being taken care in an utmost dedicated way and assign the best resources
OR
- at the opposite, the institution will find every possible way to get rid of you ASAP or to even not acknowledge the need of their activity, in order to navigate away from potential troubles and loss of face
These 2 approaches can happen either going to then hospital or to a police station to report a crime (my personal experience on this has been mixed...) or at a building bureau office to buy/sell a property....

Going back to my back... I was just aiming for a light massage when the therapist on duty had actually other ideas... Using the approach #1 Of deploying all the resources, she called 2 other doctors to check on my back, asking all the possible questions on how happened and firmly said that what I needed was acupuncture...
My reaction was kind of "wtf!!!" but I relented after making sure that needles were disposable single use, etc, etc...
I thought they would have places the needle somewhere in the back.....but soon I realised that I will have needles planted in my hands and head...
To make it short, to my absolute horror, I had a needle right in the Center of the forefront and others in the back of my hands...

I was even asked to walk around 15 minutes while "wearing" them...

Well, you would not believe it, but after that I was able to lift by myself from the bed without help (something which was unthinkable until 20 min earlier) and I could say there was a 50% improvement in back mobility....I even tried the bridge position without pain and effort...
I left the clinic almost in shock....

spell of bad luck continues

I do not want to sound a whining kind of person, since overall I enjoy a very good life...
but runningwise, the past 2 months are going from bad to worse...

the spell of bad luck which begun on July 19th continues at full speed...

- last week: run decently while in Europe, the hamstring and glutes were starting to get better even if I still could not handle any fast pace... foot pain had his ups and downs..

- week-end: between the trip, jet-lag, etc.. I decided to skip running for 3 days to give some time to the body to completely heal (foot, hamstring, etc...)
I also feel refreshed by the fact that I have now fairly understood the root cause of each problems, thanks to the excellent running gait analysis done at strideUK (more about that in the next post...)

- Monday: for no apparent reason, my back become very stiff and painful ... I did not lift any weight or did anything strange, but I was completely blocked...

I tried the usual therapy, without much success...

The attempt at a releasing back massage on Wednesday was almost pathetic and funny at the same time: once the massage was over, I could not get up from the massage bed... the massage therapist was in tears fearing that she could have been sacked for screwing up the back of a foreigner; so she called other staff and they together handled me like I was a wooden pole to put me back in vertical position...

Thursday I got some benefit from doing some electro-stimulation of the back and at least I can walk properly...

so... another week of total screw-up and going from bad to worse...

Weekly totals: 0 Km run, 0h0' bike, 0'0' gym....

Due to a lot of time spared from being incapable to run/walk, etc I had the time to read 2 books on Kindle

1)
Charlie Spedding

From Last to First: How I Became a Marathon Champion

This is a real interesting book... Spedding takes the time to write about all his career from childhood race to his retirement. It is very interesting how he describes all the mental obstacles he overcome to become a Olympic medalist. He was for sure a talented runner, but not really achieved much until later in his career when he "changed gear" mentally. It is also very down to earth narration, very humble and without the hype and self-celebration typical of these kind of books
All his ups and downs are well narrated and makes it a compelling read...

 

2) Running For The Hansons: An Insider's Account of The Brooks-Sponsored Marathon Training Group Made Famous by Olympian Brian Sell

Sage Canaday is a runner in the Hanson-Brook team and gives this narration of his everyday life as pro runner who tries to make a breakthrough into "real" Elite running, while having to work to anyway cover the bills, etc
The book is written in the form of daily journal and while it will not win a Nobel Prize for literature, it is a good easy read...
It is somehow interesting to see how just below the real elite level, the life is quite harsh and the guy basically just live around "poverty line"..
We might read about the Alter-G and Aqua-treadmill of some runners, but this guy does not even have time/means to do some gym...
Interesting to read also how their training schedule is based on 2 days easy/1 day hard without sticking to a static weekly schedule...
Lastly, I like how he candidly tells about his personal opinion on several aspects and how it might be difficult for a person coming from West or East Coast in USA to go and live in an area like Michigan with much different set of community values...

My jogging path today

This morning 12k along the "streets" of Venice... Amazing