Learning to Not Push Too Hard

Run­ning on Steroids

I went for a run last week. It was my first one in almost a week since I caught a bad cold, or pos­si­bly even the dreaded piggy flu (fever, sore throat, hack­ing cough). What­ever it was, I was com­pletely out for a few days and didn’t feel up for much of a walk or run for a few more after that. I don’t sup­pose I was nec­es­sar­ily all bet­ter the other night when I went out for a run, either.

In ret­ro­spect, I prob­a­bly shouldn’t have gone out, or at least stuck to walk­ing instead of run­ning most of the 4.5 miles. The thing is, I got my hands on some steroids and didn’t want to waste an oppor­tu­nity to work out on them! Now, before you go freak­ing out on me, these steroids are doctor-prescribed (yeah, a legit doc­tor at that) to help sup­press a bad break­out from poi­son oak. If you’ve ever had to take these drugs you’ll know that they give you a pretty good kick in the ass. So after not run­ning for a week because of being sick and then hav­ing a stim­u­lant cours­ing through my blood, I just had to get out there.

I also wanted to give my new Ulti­mate Direc­tion hydro-pack a try. I drove up the hill and parked along La Canada road over­look­ing the south­ern of the two reser­voirs along the Crys­tal Springs Trail. It was dark when I got there so I turned on my head­lamp and after a bit of hunt­ing around, found the trail. This part of the dirt trail mean­ders along side of the road. Yet from time to time the trail heads into thick growth and out of sight from the road. I started run­ning as soon as my feet hit the dirt. It felt so damn good to be back in action.

A cou­ple of moun­tain bik­ers came up behind me early on. For­tu­nately, I had seen them go out so kept look­ing back over my shoul­der so I would be able to get out of there way. I was lis­ten­ing to Pan­dora on my Pre so had to rely more on my eyes to catch them. I spot­ted them in enough time to clear the trail and let them pass. Because of this early encounter from behind I kept look­ing back over my shoul­der to make sure no one else was about to sneak up on me. I did this more often when run­ning through the secluded, wooded part of the trail. I like to think it was fear that more bik­ers would come up behind, not because I was afraid the boo­gie man might jump out at me.

Cool like Dean.

After about 2.25 miles out I turned back. I decided to run along the road on the return. The asphalt felt quite good under my Vibram Five Fin­ger soles com­pared with the rocky trail I had been on. It was con­sis­tently smooth and peb­ble free. I was sur­prised that I actu­ally enjoyed run­ning along the road – I nor­mally shun the road in favor of trails. I found that each time a car passed I got a good boost of energy. I imag­ined the dri­vers think­ing to them­selves or even com­ment­ing to pas­sen­gers, say­ing things such as, “Wow, look at this ded­i­cated run­ner! What a stud! Do you think that’s Dean Kar­nazes?” I have to admit that hear­ing these imag­i­nary com­ments made me run a lit­tle faster and raise my head a lit­tle higher. For­tu­nately, La Canada is not a busy road at night so I was spared hav­ing to keep up this pace for too long!

The sit­u­a­tion did make me feel a bit like how I imag­ined Dean Kar­nazes run­ning in the book Ultra­ma­rathon Man. And for some sim­i­lar­i­ties, too. I was run­ning along a back road in the dark car­ry­ing just a back­pack. There were a few notice­able dif­fer­ences, though: My chicken legs, my much slower speed, and the gorilla shoes I was wear­ing. And instead of arrang­ing for a pizza to be deliv­ered to me while on the run, I had mis­tak­enly eaten a cou­ple pieces of the pizza I had made at home before I left. My stom­ach wasn’t feel­ing all that great now either.

Reminders of my ill­ness were present through­out the run as my nose was run­ning faster than I was all night. I went through a whole bag of tis­sues (which did fit per­fectly and con­ve­niently into one of the front pouches on my Ulti­mate Direc­tion hydro-pack, though – a review com­ing later).

What I Learned

The excite­ment of the run died down when I got home and the next morn­ing I woke up with a sore throat again. While it was a mem­o­rable run and a lot of fun, I now real­ize that I pushed myself too far too soon after being sick. The prob­lem was that the old say­ing “Lis­ten to your body” doesn’t actu­ally work when you’re drugged up. It was the steroids in my body that were egging me on, not my body. That being said, I still could have done a bet­ter job of wait­ing longer after symp­toms sub­sided and just walked, not run this night.

Learn­ings:

1. Lis­ten to your body and your mind. I should have known that I was feel­ing more energy than I really had.
2. Assess at what per­cent­age you are at before your run and then exert at that rate, no more. If I had taken stock of how I really was, I would have come up with about 60% of capa­bil­i­ties. That would have trans­lated into much more walk­ing and less run­ning, and prob­a­bly a shorter dis­tance, too.
3. Don’t get caught up liv­ing out your dreams on a sin­gle run. While it was fun, get­ting swept up in run­ning fur­ther on the road was detri­men­tal in the long run. I need to be patient. I’ll get there, but not in one night, one week, or even one month.

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