Road to 32k
I ran a 32k today, but the journey to makes me wonder, why is it easy to focus on hard work itself, and not the auxiliary work of caring for ourselves?
This week has been a good one; it’s the first full week after Ramadan, and it comes off the end of a two-year(ish) long personal project. I felt really good running through the week, that I dreamt of hitting the 30km mark on my Saturday long run. Why not? I had eked out 16k at the end of a fasting day less than two weeks prior, and ran a decent 21.1k last weekend feeling like I still had a bit of fuel left in the tank. What’s not to do?
The day is Thursday and I plan to do an easy 10k, rest on Friday, then pull out the stops for Saturday. On Wednesday, I ran the last kilometer or two feeling a little pain in the back of my knee. One of those freak things, I thought and thought no more of it.
Most of the run on Thursday is glorious, and if you’re wondering why I use “glory” in describing a run, I’ll explain. When I set out to do an easy run, there’s a feeling I’m trying to capture. It’s the feeling of gliding along, legs moving so fluidly that I feel like they’re on autopilot and I can take in my surroundings. On easy runs, I notice the sidewalks and the houses behind them, thinking about what I like about the houses and what I don’t. I notice the posters on the walls and read them, understanding what’s happening in the neighborhood. It’s like a walk, but with a little more sweat. That is what easy runs are. What made Thursday’s glorious was that I had all of this AND I was going relatively fast. It made me so confident about my ability to complete a 30k on Saturday that I was thinking maybe I didn’t need the Friday rest after all. A tune-up 5k, perhaps?
At the tail end of the run, around the 9k mark, the back-of-knee pain starts again and this time, it’s dead serious. Every time my right foot hits the ground, a stabbing pain shoots from back to front of my knee. By the 9.7k mark, I’m limp-running. It’s too painful to land full-force on my right foot but I’m adamant about getting to 10k so I limp the 300 or so meters that’s left. 30k dream gone?
One of the things I’ve had to learn as I run more is to distinguish between “my body is a little sore from training” pain and “this is quarter-to-injury” pain. In the past one year or so, I’ve been able to diagnose accurately enough that I haven’t been sidelined by any major injury, while improving my running by a big margin. This back-of-knee pain felt like a horn blaring “injury alert”. In cases like this, first thing to do is to you know, stop running. Give the body time to right itself. So Friday run off definitely, and potentially the Saturday run.
Next stop, try to figure out what’s happening. When I was having shin splints last year, I was able to diagnose the cause as weak calf muscles. Weak calves hand off the work of springing up and forward (more on that below) to the tibia, hence the splints. I did some calf strength drills regularly and voila! splints gone. So I sit on the edge of my bed and press the right side of the back of my knee gingerly. Nothing. This felt weird. I stood up, bent my knee and shifted my weight to my right foot. The pain is definitely still there, so I sit back down and start pressing in and around the area. When I feel a little more pain, I move more in that direction like a little homing beacon. I finally land on this area at the top of my calf muscle, to the right and boy (or girl), was it PAINFUL. It felt like I was touching a guitar string, hard and tight. I know very little about physiology so I wasn’t sure if there was supposed to be some sort of tendon in there. I figured the easy way to find out was to check the other leg and see if it was string-ey. It felt like there was the beginning of a string, not as tight or as hard or even half as painful and I laughed to myself. I don’t know what was funnier, realizing the problem, or knowing that I caused it.
When we run, we spring our body forward, one step at a time. At no time do our legs lift our body at the same time. The hand off to each other left, right, left, right, until we stop. Each time a foot lands on the ground, the knee above it bends to absorb the impact, then it straightens, propelling us up and forward. At the tail end of this propulsion sequence, our full body weight rests on the forefoot of one single leg, the best position from which to launch our bodies into the next step. If you stood on your toes, you’ll easily realize which muscle you’re engaging the most. Some women don’t even need to do this now, they do it every time they wear high heels. It’s the calves.
Every time I run, say a 10k, I take roughly 10,000 steps. That’s 5,000 steps on each leg. 5,000 propulsions by each calf muscle, each one achieved by the contraction and relaxation of the same muscle. When I do a 20k, that’s 10,000 on each side. A side effect of repeated muscle contractions and relaxations is that the oft-used muscle (calf in this case) doesn’t completely relax. After a particular threshold number of relaxations, the muscle relaxes a tiny bit less after each contraction. The antidote to this is easy; stretch well-used muscle groups after each run, while they’re still warm. Even better, have stand-alone stretch sessions to improve the range of motion of these muscles so that they’re longer to begin with.
I love running. To run better, I need to run more, something I’m only too happy to do. To run longer and better, I also need to do some work outside of running; strength work to make my muscles stronger, and mobility work to relax my muscles and give them a better range of motion. These, I’m not so keen on. I don’t mind them, but I don’t exactly like them either and in the past two months, I’ve done strength work occasionally and done almost no mobility work. The end result was calf muscles so tight that they made my knees hurt.
Now that I knew the problem, the solution was simple, really. I needed to massage the hardness in those muscles away. String-like hardness in trained muscles don’t respond to light touches, so I had to bring in some aid, in the form of a stick roller — a baton-length bar with handles on its edges and hard rolling beads in the middle. It did its job rather simply — hold it by its handles and roll it over the muscles you need to pay attention to and the beads roll the muscles into submission. It’s not a pretty sight but it (usually) works.
The calf muscle is however in an awkward place where I couldn’t use the roller on my myself. Good that I don’t live alone then. I called my wife to help and let’s just say she took too much pleasure in doing this. To be fair, there’s not much to dislike about it. Roll a stick over someone’s muscles while they squirm and try not to cry, something you can use to taunt them later? Bonus points for the person always winning you in a pillow fight? Maximum pressure all the way.
Two sessions later — one each on Thursday and Friday and I thought I should attempt to run. If I felt some pain, I’ll just stop. Here I am, writing this 32 km (20mi) later. It wasn’t easy; by the 25k mark, my legs started to feel heavy. By 30k, I was just trudging along. But I was 2km from home, I wasn’t going to walk, I came out to RUN and run I will. Makes me start to dream you know, 10km more and it’s a full marathon.
