Tag: running

Events

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I have written before about the Mandalorian, but I’m going to write again (no spoilers). I enjoyed Season 1. It was good, solid TV. It wasn’t gripping because it was episodic, but it was very good for an episodic program. It feels very quality over quantity. Now I’m up to date (S2E3) and I’m really excited about the rest of Season 2! I’m totally hyped.

I’ve admitted defeat with my hip and have a physio appointment next Friday. It’s been very odd. For example Saturday it was fine for about 7-8k then over the next few km the front/side of my hip started feeling very dull and heavy. Yesterday it felt 100% fine for about 4k then very suddenly the side stiffened up, and I could kind of feel it down at the outside of my knee too. I think those are two different things. I think the front/side is muscular fatigue and the side down to my knee is the IT band, though it’s probably more that my pelvis isn’t stable for whatever reason I haven’t been able to figure out myself.

If I don’t get anywhere with this physio there’s another one that’s not quite so easy to get to which looks more promising, as they have a specialist running clinic that has treated Olympians.

In other news, I talked to a recruiter who’s put me forward for something that on paper looks like a good fit. We’ll see what comes of that. I have a lot of recruitment stuff in my inbox but I don’t really want to be dealing with it every day, so I don’t really know how to manage the time I will need to spend on it. If I respond to all of it I’m going to be snowed under with recruiters wanting to speak to me and then at some point some of those will turn into interviews. I don’t want to end up with more than about one interview a week, so it’s a bit hard to know how much to respond to.

This is a good start anyway.

Monday

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I’m in a lot less pain than I was last week since I started stretching my hips out more. My lower back is feeling a lot better and so is my hamstring. Unfortunately my hip is not showing the same improvement and I’m not sure whether it just needs a bit more time or a bit of rest or what. My timing here is pretty terrible as we are going into another lockdown this week, so whether I’d be able to see a physio – who knows at the moment. Though I actually had a fairly pain free 12k run on Sunday by 1. Stopping and stretching every couple of kilometres, and 2. Trying to keep my cadence high.

Cadence (number of steps per minute) is a weird thing. If you ever try running without shoes you will naturally hit a very high cadence because your body will make sure that the ball of your foot is striking the ground underneath you. But as soon as you put shoes on, most people’s cadence slows right down and their heel hits the ground in front of them, with the leg outstretched. There’s a lot of debate about foot strike, but I think everyone agrees that a stride length that has your contact point much in front of you is a bad thing because it puts everything through a greater range of motion than it’s really ‘designed’ for.

Usually my fast pace cadence is about 180, which is the magic number that comes up a lot in the literature, but my leisurely slow runs can drop down to about 168 easily. Anyway, on Sunday my pace was slow but my cadence was 174, which is pretty good and might be why it felt better.

So, job seeking:

Awkwardly, my boss has added me to LinkedIn. I got the email on Friday but I’ve been so bored of the whole thing that I haven’t logged in since then so I haven’t accepted yet. If he’s actually looked at my profile he might cotton onto the fact I’m starting to look around. We’ll see if he mentions this… probably not.

The recruiter from last week still keeps trying to phone me but today he finally left a voicemail. He rambles a bit and then says “I don’t know where you are with your job search, but if you could give me a call back that’d be great”. Whyyyyyy.

The thing I’m noticing is that salaries are lower than when I looked previously and I wouldn’t move unless it was a decent pay jump. Or rather, some salaries are the same, but there’s a lot more at the lower end of the market. Sad though it is, it might just be best to sit tight for a few months and wait for things to pick up. Because, obviously, in a few months, COVID will be over and brexit will have transformed the UK into a glorious, prosperous nation again.

This is what happened last time though. I tried, I failed, I got bored, then a few months later I tried much harder and succeeded. Though I was on antidepressants the second time around.

Weekends

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This week I have felt a lot better about myself and I think it’s because I’ve been doing what I said I would last week – I’ve been rewriting one of my apps in a more modern framework. It feels a lot better than spending all evening reading Reddit. I think by the end of next weekend the first one will be about ready to go.

I am still getting a lot of spam from recruiters but I’m starting to get tired of the fact that it’s all noise and no signal. In some ways it’s surprising that recruiters still exist because most of them could be replaced by bots. I’ve had a few messages this week about roles that are clearly unrelated to me. I also had one message which asks for my phone number so he can discuss some “roles on his desk” which, in his words, I “may possibly” be a good fit for. That’s his sales pitch – “I have something that you might want and if you let me phone you I’ll tell you what it is”. That sounds like a great use of my time 😕

I actually had one that looked interesting but the salary was too low, so I replied and told the recruiter as much, but he didn’t come back. It was actually slightly higher than mine, but it doesn’t make sense to move for “slightly” higher.

Running is going… not great. My hip and hamstring haven’t been behaving. It seemed to improve a bit this week but after a full week’s running it’s going backwards. I have been doing some reading on this though. Apparently, if you have trouble with one hamstring, the place to look is the opposite hip flexor, because that’s what’s activating and pulling your pelvis forwards when your hamstring is already at its most lengthened.

So I’m really going to focus on stretching out this hip flexor for the next few days and see where we are. I hope that whatever fixes the hamstring also fixes the hip because it’s probably just a matter of pelvic stability, or lack of. But if not then I think it’s physio time.

Everything hurts #2

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Not everything. My hip and my butt and my hamstring. Or maybe it’s not my hamstring, maybe it’s just my butt. I don’t really know. I felt it was improving. I was running. Not as much as I wanted, but not that far off. I was doing daily hip strength exercises, planks etc and even deadlifts every couple of days.

Then disaster yesterday morning as after about 20 seconds of running my butt and or/hamstring cramped. Ouch.

So anyway I got a tennis ball into my hip and it now feels a lot better, and I’ve been trying to foam roll the very top of my hamstrings (which is actually not very easy to do effectively, because it’s a big and soft area). I still have some discomfort there but everything feels a lot looser now.

I’ll find out over the weekend if this is enough. If not then I’ve decided I’ll just bite the bullet and book a physio appointment on Monday.

Everything hurts

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Well, not everything, but lots of things do. My foot is twinging again, my wrist/hand is twinging as well (carpal tunnel?), my hamstrings are a pain in the bum (literally) and my hip is still not really feeling OK. Last night when I was lying in bed my lower back felt soooo tight.

I haven’t run since last Saturday and I seem to be in worse state now than I was then. I guess that’s not incredibly surprising. Muscle imbalances often don’t sort themselves out and muscles and tendons like to be worked. And the fact I sit down all day isn’t good. My hip flexors get tight and that’s why my hamstrings hate me right now. I’m going to start running again tomorrow (but only gently) and hope for the best.

Earlier today I got caught in the trap today of looking at the “people you may know” thing on LinkedIn. It was really bad for my mood. I knew LinkedIn was a bad idea. Anyway… I added a rule in my ad blocker to hide those suggestions. I was quite pleased with myself for that.

Saturday

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My hip improved then got worse again. After Sunday, I did a lot of foam rolling and by Wednesday I was running again, mostly pain free. Then a longer run Thursday, which was OK. But by Friday it was hurting again and this morning I had to stop at 10k. I think hills are a problem. I stopped at the bottom of a hill this morning and had to walk home and it was painful just walking up it. It’s weird because it feels OK again now, but now I have a lot of aches in my upper hamstrings and into my bottom. I think that’s probably where the dysfunction is, especially as hills seem to set it off. It’s always hard to know what to do with these kinds of injuries. Obviously it needs rest, but I’m not sure that’s going to be enough.

I’m a bit worried about the COVID second wave that we seem to be experiencing. Or rather, I’m worried by our government’s approach to it. Similarly to March, we have the luxury of being a few weeks behind other European countries, so we can look at them to see a glimpse into our future, and yet we don’t seem to be learning any lessons from that. We know where this goes. I can understand reluctance to lock things down again but I’m very surprised we don’t have some strong messaging on working from home again.

Virtual Great North Run

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The Virtual Great North Run was really two runs in one. The first run was a fast 10k and I would have been very pleased with it were it not for the fact that my hip was getting tighter and heavier and starting to cramp painfully. The next 12.5k (yes, that’s too far) were painful, slow, and interspersed with stretching breaks that didn’t seem to do much. I’d have cut it short if it hadn’t been an event.

The ‘virtual’ side of the race was massively overhyped by the Great Run company and didn’t work properly. I ended up running an extra 1.4km because the viRace app didn’t manage to connect at the start of my run but apparently it sprang into life part way in, so to make sure I actually ‘officially’ finished I decided to keep going after the end. Every so often it tried to play me some official audio, but only worked roughly a third of the time, so what really happened was the music my phone was playing just paused for no obvious reason. I assume I was supposed to hear something as I finished, but I didn’t, so that was a bit anticlimactic. I have found before that the Great Run Company are very strong on marketing and not so good on delivering, so I wasn’t really surprised.

Overall it was a pretty bad run. Actually it was the worst run I’ve ever done, easily, and it’s going to take some recovery now before I can run on my hip again.

I’m not sure what’s wrong with my hip. I had felt it was a bit tight a few days before, but it didn’t seem like anything and I’ve never had any issues with my right hip so I didn’t think much of it. It’s over the outside of my hip so I think it might be the infamous IT band. I was hobbling around the house this morning and couldn’t walk in a straight line, but I’ve been on the foam roller pretty much every hour and it has eased off quite a lot now.

Virtual Great North Run

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On Sunday I’ll be doing the Virtual Great North Run. Which is the great north run from the convenience of my house. So it’s not the great north run at all. It’s just a 13 mile run. I’d like to say I’m excited about it, but I’m not. I am really missing the slightly more competitive side of running and somehow I don’t think this virtual race will scratch that itch at all.

I downloaded the app for it yesterday, which enthused me even less. To be blunt, it reminds me of the kind of thing my last employer used to develop. You’d look at it and think “we’re not actually giving it to the customer looking like this, are we? Oh we are, okay then”. All I can say is I hope it works better than it looks, but in my experience, software often works exactly as well as it looks. So I’m not optimistic. I will be completely unsurprised if it crashes after 11 miles and doesn’t register me.

But then I’m not optimistic about the run in general. I don’t expect to get a good time because it’s just really, really hard to push yourself over 13 miles when you’re on your own. There’s no adrenaline or competition. There’s a reason that Kipchoge was surrounded by other runners during his sub two hour marathon, even though he had lasers projecting his desired pace onto the ground.

But apparently Parkrun is supposed to be returning at the end of October. I really hope so! The last time I ran a Parkrun was way back in March. The run director greeted us all with “GOOD MORNING PARKRUN” and when we weren’t loud enough for her she asked if we had some kind of respiratory illness. Well, ironically, I did, as I discovered the next morning when I woke up feeling like death and pretty much stayed in bed for the next week.

That was a long time ago now.

I miss Parkrun.

Running

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I’ve been running a lot again. Today I did another half marathon distance, because I got to 16k and thought “why not?”. My foot/neuroma has been behaving better, but after the long run this morning it’s been twinging a bit. Not badly, it’s just sometimes when I move my ankle around a lot I get a pin prick feeling in the ball of my foot.

It’s a bit frustrating because I don’t know how to treat it. I don’t want to stop running and I’ve always said that if it gets that bad then I need to get it treated properly. Okay… but actually right now I think that would be a bad idea, because I’m getting other discomfort around my ankle which probably means my biomechanics are a bit off and I should sort that out first. I don’t think that my hip strengthening did much. Well actually maybe it did, but nothing that helps my foot.

I still seem to have a lot of tightness in my inner ankle, which Dr Google tells me is my tibialis posterior muscle/tendon. This is responsible for foot stability during the gait cycle, it holds the arch strong and counteracts foot pronation, so if it’s not working properly, the foot flattens too much. Also, interestingly, this tendon actually connects to the metatarsal heads. Hello. Meaning that dysfunction here could be pulling the metatarsals out of alignment and potentially putting more pressure on the nerve? And not only that, but when I’m sat down and it tightens up, it could be pulling my metatarsals together and putting pressure on the nerve?! Maybe.

And indeed when it was twinging earlier, a bit of stretching of my ankle did seem to alleviate it.

It’s just frustrating to feel like you’re on the edge of injury though. I want to run tomorrow (just a few km slow) but it probably depends how it feels when I get up. Or I could have a lie in?

Weekends

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After taking a few days off running due to my toes going numb this past week, on Saturday I did 10k and was very pleased that everything felt fine. Then in the afternoon I went for a short walk and after 10 minutes my toes went numb. So that wasn’t a great success, but I walked for over an hour this morning and it was fine, which is confusing but promising? I’ve just decided to take a week off running and see where I am next weekend. To some people, taking a week off running is just called a week. To someone who usually runs 70-80km a week, it feels like a gargantuan task. How will I survive?

This is on my left foot and the left side seems to be where I’ve had all the problems lately. The left side of my body is a checklist of minor issues. This foot issue, slightly tight ankle/achilles tendon, shin splints, tight hamstring, achy hip… really I should just blitz my left leg with some strength and stretching work and maybe things will align a bit better and the nerve will settle down again. At the very least, not having shin splints every couple of weeks would be an improvement.

I spent most of the weekend playing Factorio on my PC. Which is a bit strange, because spending hours playing PC games isn’t something I’ve done for a long time now, but Factorio is incredibly addictive so it keeps me entertained. I also subscribed to Google Play Pass, which give you access to quite a large selection of games and other apps on Android, but I haven’t really explored it yet. Maybe I will try a game out before I go to sleep.