Defending it.

The past few months, while I’ve been climbing out of the IT Band Mosh Pit, Jesse (the huz) has been preparing to defend his Wildflower Triathlon Title.

Gettin after it, back when one sport was enough for J-Man.

As far as I know, this is the first time Jesse’s ever had to defend anything legit. He won his first state cross country and track titles his Senior Year of high school, and it turns out they don’t let you come back as a college kid and defend. He got to experience the same unbridled in-your-face-ness his senior year of college when he finally won his first Pac 10 Title. Good timing in both cases, in my opinion.

But Wildflower…

When Jesse shocked the triathlon community last year by winning one of the most prestigious and historic triathlons in the world on a borrowed bike and race kit with Walgreens Aviators on, he did so at the very beginning of his Pro Triathlon Career.  The kid was green: Kermit the Frog Green. It was hilarious.

But unlike his hard-earned, dues paid, big man on campus victories that resulted in a school of fist bumps and a chorus of “You earned that man’s!” Jesse’s Wildflower win was met with a lot of WTF’s?! and an amused curiosity. As an unknown in the sport, such an unlikely victory was chalked up by many to be “the race of that kid’s life” or “a good story” or “a weak field,” all of which could very well have been true. One never knows until it comes time to defend.

Bye bye Mystery Man, hello Cover Boy

As the weeks closed in on Wildflower version 2.0, I watched Jesse squirm and try to remain calm as the gravity of the race pulled on him. On the one hand, he was fitter than ever, more experienced, wanted it badly, and had tons of support. On the other hand, the 30^th anniversary of the event promised a much deeper field, his anonymity was vaporized, media and sponsor requests had to be factored in to the schedule, and worst of all, he had to face the demons of having done it before.

When I won NCAA’s my sophomore year for the first time, I had never felt such bliss. I de-throwned defending champ Kara Goucher and took Hayward Field by complete surprise. 12 years later I’m looking into botox treatments for the stretch marks from over-smiling that day [month]. That win changed my career, the way I thought of my potential, and the way others thought of me, but it also set me up for the most miserable and horrifying NCAA’s 12 months later when I went to defend my title. I still get sick remembering the gore involved in that mental battle.

Unlike last time, you know you can do it because you have done it before. You know how good it feels to win. You know you want that again soooo badly. But you also know that your previous win was partially due to lots of factors out of your control. Maybe I won because Kara had a bad day…or because so-and-so ran the 10k instead…or because I had no pressure as the underdog…it goes on and on ad infinitum.

The truth is, in every race, there is the very real possibility that even if you have the race of your life, some factor out of your control can cut you down. Bad luck. Flat tire. Someone else has the race of her life. And never is this more terrifying than when you feel you have something to lose for the first time. Defending a title requires getting comfortable with that and running your nuts off anyway.

Saturday, 30 minutes after the race, when the media finally pressed stop on their recorders, after family and friends in the finish area got their fill of hugs and high fives, Jesse walked away to a quiet place alone.

My phone rang.

“YAY OH MY GOSH YOU WON CONGRATS YOU ARE SO AWESOME YOU DID IT I’M SO HAPPY FOR YOU AND PROUD AND YOU WORKED SO HARD AND HAD ALL THAT PRESSURE AND MEDIA STUFF AND YOU DID IT ANYWAY AND AND AND…”

Jesse responded with a rare emotional thanks that brought tears to my eyes. I wished I was there. I knew I would wish I was there.

“Was any of it fun or were you scared shitless the whole time?!” I asked, remembering.

A laugh burst through a throat thick with emotion, “It was horrifying. The entire time. I was running scared the whole way. It was terrible!”

“But you didn’t let it beat you! You pulled it off!”

“I’m so relieved…I did it…”

As the hours pass, relief turns to happiness, and happiness to exhaustion. Only when the race is well over do you realize how difficult it was. Not just the race, but everything leading up to it.

It will never be that hard again.

To read Jesse’s account of the race, you should really check out his blog here. Seriously. For real.

Q:

Hey Lauren,

How do you fix an IT Band injury?

Bryna

A:

Bryna,

Mine has been a problem since October, so I don’t know if you want my advice. Andrea, a fellow runner I talked to today, told me something that resonated: “Unlike other injuries, IT bands and achilles tendons are on their own agendas.” True dat. They seem to want to heal in their own time. The best treatment is prevention, so to everyone else out there, get on your rollers! Otherwise, people are writing helpful comments and their own experiences with IT Bands on my latest blog post here so check that out.

I would say that deep tissue massage to the glutes, TFL and quads, rolling on a foam roller, and strengthening exercises for the glutes tend to be the most common fixes among people who I’ve talked to. In Eugene, Chance Fitzpatrick is a good resource for specific deep tissue, but I don’t know where you live.

When it comes to figuring out how much to run and when, and what specific things to do to make it better, it can be maddeningly confusing. I’ll have to write more in the comments when I solve this problem, but for now I’ll leave you with this: This video is what it feels like to work with an IT band injury:

(Special thanks to ALF reader and blogger MBS for reminding me of this scene from Forgetting Sarah Marshall).

Lauren

photo credit: Justin Jay

Trying to fix a stubborn injury can be demoralizing.

And I’m not just talking about the crying in public, or getting passed by a nun with a limp while you stagger home from a failed run.

I’m talking about the bare-ass nakedness of your weaknesses getting exposed in the effort to return to health.

There are the physical weaknesses of course, (the reasons you got injured in the first place,) that are uncovered as soon as you go to a doctor or physical therapy.  As strange as it sounds, you go to these people hoping they find something wrong with you, thereby identifying at least one good reason why it’s taking you so freaking long to get healthy.

In no other area of my life will I pay money to have a person tell me straight to my face that I’m terrible at something, but when I’m at the doctor unsuccessfully attempting a “single-legged turn-a-ma-jigger” I want him to say, “You suck at that. That’s the reason you’re injured,” and when he does I want to jump up and give him a big fat kiss on the mouth, but also grab a hanky.

If an injury drags on and on, you get progressively less excited when someone uncovers a new “weakness” that might be the source of your problem: Weak glutes; muscle imbalances; scar tissue; fascia tightness; lack of flexibility; neural misfiring; bad motor pathway habits; lack of core strength.

Before you know it, you have a laundry list of issues and a binder full of strength exercises. After enough time, even if the therapy is world class, you start to feel like nothing works properly and you can’t understand how you ever ran well in the first place.

Sweet.

This is a funny clip from Forgetting Sarah Marshall (thanks MBS) that illustrates my life right now:

And Then There’s the Mental Demoralization

After chasing my IT band problem around for three months, thanks to good treatment I finally put together three weeks of running in February and I start to let myself feel excited and dream again. And then three weeks ago, my knee decides to hurt like a mofo during the cool down of a workout, erasing my progress in one swoop.

I’m faced with a two mile walk home, and while I maintain my composure on the outside (barely), my mind spirals fast. How did I let this happen? Things were going so well. Why did I do that fartlek on the soggy trails with the team after a night of hard rain? What was I thinking? Why didn’t I run on the pavement alone? Why do I live in this God forsaken rain-soaked shit hole?! Why am I doing this stupid sport?! Why am I letting this make me feel so awful?! I can’t believe I’m letting myself get this upset and irrational!

The Olympic Trials are in less than four months and I can’t even jog a 5k much less race one. This is clearly not how I pictured my season shaping up. As I walk home there are no tears. I hate everything. I want to hurt something. The fire inside me makes me impervious to the winter air. I can feel it, the rage, like a screaming kettle building inside me. It burns the backside of my eyes. I want to run over to those fisherman on the side of Pre’s Trail and snap their fly rods over my busted knee and hurl their open tackle boxes toward the river, watching the contents erupt through the sky like fireworks.

Even now, just remembering how that felt makes me panicky inside.

A Change of Scenery

After clearly reaching the end of my sanity in Eugene, I hopped on a plane to Phoenix two days ago to reconnect with JB (Dr. John Ball). I bought a one-way ticket and I’m not leaving until I’m unbreakable. I needed to get out of the grey and the rain and the home of the Olympic Trials, which has a way of sucking out your soul when you are unable to run. I needed to remove myself from it all and summon the healing victories of the past.

My awesome and understanding PT from home, Robyn Pester, (who helped provide the therapy to bring me back from Navicular surgery in 2008/2009 to win the USA title in 2010) sent along all her findings to JB in Phoenix so the transition will be smooth. I felt bad leaving after everything she has done for me, but she and I both knew that it wasn’t personal. No matter how good the cut of meat, it will rot if you leave it in the fridge long enough. It’s time to barbecue this bitch. Phoenix is the place where I am going to get back on my feet.

We did it last year. We can do it again.

____________________________________________

Sometimes it takes a long time to get to the bottom of an injury. Without knowing how to fix it, it’s hard to make a plan. Without a plan, some feel really lost. Does anyone have any tips for how to cope with that overwhelmed feeling when you can’t get to the bottom of an injury?

But as the injury settles in, I slip further and further away. Emails from the team remain unopened (what does that have to do with me anyway?) Therapy appointments get scheduled right over practice times (I can’t run so why be there?) Before too long, a random run-in with a teammate at the grocery store becomes as awkward as a conversation with an ex-boyfriend. By eight weeks in, I might as well be shacking up in the Maldives. I’m totally gone.

Then, eventually, the injury starts to come around. Every few days or so, there is a small improvement. The list of activities I can do grows. Every day I gain a little more trust in my body. Health is somewhere up ahead, calling to me. And that’s when I have the desire to be around my team again.

Today, my OTCE teammates were scheduled to meet up at a remote logging road outside of the rural town of Marcola. This place has a beautiful tree-lined dirt road that rolls along a creek and plenty of steep side roads that are perfect for hill repeats (it’s at the end of Wendling Rd if any of you want to check it out, but it’s only open to the public on weekends). The dirt roads are totally inappropriate for someone with a fragile IT band, and hills are not on my list of activities yet, so there were plenty of great excuses not to drive 30 minutes to meet them for the workout. If I drove out there, I’d have to do my workout all by myself on the flat asphalt road, something I could easily do from my front door instead.

I went to Marcola anyway, and it was awesome.

Being on the team’s schedule gave me structure for my day. Carpooling with my teammates made me feel like no time had passed, and it was nice to be around the energy of other people as we collectively ramped up for a big effort. The five minutes I got to warmup with the team, the cacophony of random chatter filled in the spaces of the otherwise empty forest, and I grinned ear to ear. God I missed this. I’m running right now. I’m on the Nike Oregon Track Club Elite Team. I’m running!

My 40 minute progressive run went better than expected. The course I chose was a 0.9 mile pavement loop, part of which went over a classic Oregon covered bridge, repeated over and over again until the 40 minutes was up. I stayed in my trainers instead of flats, heart rate and effort were my only guides, and only when it was finished did I check the splits on my SportWatch to see how it shook out. 6:20′s to start before settling into 6:05′s for a while, and finishing the last 10 minutes at 5:45 pace. Not too bad, considering!

Finishing way before the rest of the team, I had 30 minutes or so to wander down to my favorite swimming hole to ice my legs. I started to think about how easy 5:45 miles felt on November 6th in NY for the first 19 miles, and then I made myself stop looking behind me. I thought about the hard, smooth granite underneath me. My feet and ankles ached as the frigid water rushed over my legs. I wrapped my hoody tighter around my face and hugged my body against the breeze. The sun peeked out from the grey sky just long enough to ripple the river with tin foil and pull my attention skyward past the cathedral of trees to watch it slip behind the clouds once again.

How can you not do what this woman says?! Just look at her!

Whenever I’m in Phoenix, I think about going up to Flagstaff and visiting my buddy (and Picky Bars partner) Stephanie Rothstein, but it never happens. The drive is over two hours each way, I usually only have 24-36 hours to visit between ART appointments with Dr. Ball, and besides, I’m in Arizona on the serious business of getting well. While fun, allowing a car to press me into a panini two days in a row is not conducive to healing.

Stars aligned last week when I was in Phoenix and I got to visit her after all. We were both seeing Dr. Ball on Wednesday and he was leaving for a four-day trip so I wouldn’t be getting any treatment for a while.

Steph’s pitch: “You don’t have to drive; you can stay with me since Ben’s out of town. I’ve got access to an ElliptiGo, pool, gym, anything you need,” she said. “You’ve got an ART appointment with Kym on Friday morning and a massage with Monica on Friday night. My brother will drive you back to Phoenix on Saturday.”

In typical Steph style, in five minutes she had my whole life sorted in Flagstaff better than I can manage in my own hometown. The chick is an organizer with a capital O! Of course I feel totally guilty because SHE is the one with the Olympic Trials in 10 days and she’s looking after ME. But that’s just how she rolls. Next thing you know we are driving to Flagstaff baby!

Rewind to 2008

Any time I hang out with Steph, I feel better about the world. When I met her in 2008, we were both injured strangers cross training in this crappy apartment complex “gym” on ancient, neighboring spin bikes.

Steph uses visual cues and reminders to get herself in the frame of mind to be successful. Her apartment is like the most positive place on Earth.

After some neighborly small talk, Steph busts out a doozie: She’s going to be an Olympian in the marathon in 2012. As in, “Hi, I’m Steph. I’m going to be an Olympian in four years.” I stare at her waiting for the punch line. At the time, she was quite good (2:40 marathon) but she was off the radar. There were lots of women at her current level, she had no contract and little support, no health insurance, she was cleaning houses for extra cash, she was totally injured, and yet she said it like it was a fact. Not just any fact but a FACT, underlined with barbed wire and surrounded by an electric fence.

I had just missed the 2008 Olympic Team by one spot and was suffering a navicular injury that may or may not heal right. I was struggling just to get my ass on the bike in the first place thinking, “Will I ever be good again? What’s the point?” I was simultaneously licking and picking at my wounds and here comes Steph with a busted back and a huge grin talking about how she is going to be an Olympian. I couldn’t decide if I admired her or wanted to smack her with my spin bike’s broken handlebar.

She told me that the only way to make a goal happen was to say it out loud. Still singed from my dream going down in flames, I tried to caution her about making her career all about one goal or she might end up viewing her career as a waste if it doesn’t work out (like I was doing). Next thing you know we’re debating the merits and risks of making specific, bold goals. I still don’t know how she did it, but somehow her raw optimism and passion penetrated my thickened armor and the fighter in me ever-so-subtly stirred.

“I used to be like her,” I thought to myself. “Can I allow myself to be that way again?”

I decided I liked her. The rest of the hour flew by with story telling and joking around and within five minutes of post-workout stretching, she had organized our next four hangouts. Capital O style. I’m the type of person who blows from place to place saying things like “Whoopsie! How’d I get to the grocery store? Hmmm…well while I’m here…what do I want for dinner in 45 minutes?” Now I had an insta-friend that cracked me up who liked to organize?! With a facilitator among us, we might actually get to hang out!

I gave her a print of the poem I wrote for Believe I Am as a good luck gift and she loved it.

And hang out we did. We watched dollar movies, went wine tasting, danced to Mylie Cyrus in the car (against my better musical judgement), started Picky Bars together, and just generally supported one another. We had the goofiness and vulnerability of high school BFF’s, and it was awesome.

In 2010, Steph reached a dead end in Eugene athletically, and made the tough choice of moving away from everything and everyone she loved to train in Flagstaff, Arizona with Greg McMillan. It was a really hard decision based PURELY on chasing her dreams and once again, her passion both scared and inspired me.

Now as we rolled into her driveway in Flagstaff, Steph was the picture of confidence and fulfillment. Her choice to move to Flag had taken her from pretty good to truly great: a 2:29 marathoner with a legitimate chance of being an Olympian. She was the type of athlete she told me she would be back in 2008.

As we hung out, I tried to play it cool, but she was like this turbo powered Native American dream catcher or something; in her presence you felt anything was possible. She was fit, healthy, beautiful…the spark in her eye made you consider wearing flame resistant clothing for God’s sake. I really felt like it was going to happen and all I could think about was that day on the spin bikes when she got me to start believing again.

Reality

Steph’s dream didn’t come true. Last weekend at the Olympic Trials in Houston, on her birthday, she ran 23 miles of the Olympic Trials and had to drop out due to pain in her hip. In her words, “My biggest dream suddenly turned into my biggest nightmare.” I was following twitter updates (since some genius network decided it wasn’t worth playing the race live) and when I heard the news, something cracked and then splintered inside my chest. My heart ached for her. I cried on and off for two days. I cried for her and for Amy Hastings and Deena Kastor and Magda and Dathan and Brett. And I cried for myself because I’m injured and struggling to get myself into the pool every day and the girl that stirred my armored heart four years ago has just realized what I’ve known for four years:

There is a Herculean price to pay for making yourself vulnerable to a dream.