RunRunLive 4.0 Episode 4-302 – Roxanne and Paula

(Audio: link)

[audio:http://www.RunRunLive.com/PodcastEpisodes/epi4302.mp3]
Link epi4302.mp3

Intro:

Hey. How are yah? Welcome my friends. To the RunRunLive Podcast. Episode 4302. How ya been? Maybe you’re a new friend? Maybe you got one of those brand new shiny i-devices for Christmas and you’re just dipping your toe into the podcast world? By the way I like your nail polish. Matches your eyes. But, that tattoo must have hurt, no?

Anyway, this is Chris your host. We have been sharing a podcast in and about running and endurance sport for a few years now. Welcome. I’m coming to you from the grassy steppes of Independence Kansas where I run a feral yak farm in between professional gigs.

The running is challenging out here. The wind cutting across the plains in the winter is a bit biting, but you get used to it. And you know the toughest warriors are from the Steppes, the Scythians, the Huns and the Mongols all rode down on ‘civilization’ from the windy grasslands.

There’s something going on with the yak herd. I think it might have something to do with the Government Neuro Toxin research facility a couple miles up Spring Creek. Some of the yaks don’t look so good. They look disoriented. “Disoriented yak” would be a good name for a ska band…

…

I didn’t make it down to Atlanta for the Jeff Galloway 13.1. I just couldn’t swing it. Sounds like Kevin and friends had a fun time. I’ve been actually getting some decent base building in. I’m too old to run every day without breaking something. I’ve stabilized at 4 days a week which seems like the right balance.

I worry whether I can get the volume of miles in to race well at the marathon distance at only 4 days a week. Coach has extended my weekday runs out to 1:20-1:30 which helps. The good news is that it gets me out long enough to build some base fitness and get the mileage up. Right now he’s got me doing Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. That gives me an automatic base in the mid to high 20’s. Then you lay the Sunday long run on and I can get up into the 40’s.

That’s the compromise. It’s enough to get the fitness I want without pushing me over the edge into injury. The training impact from that extra 20-30 minutes in my weekly runs really makes a difference. It’s a challenge when I’m busy, but I feel like I’m building base that will support me in the run up to Boston this spring.

My friend Brian and I reprised the Groton Marathon last weekend. This is a marathon we made up last year to get a December marathon. The way it works is Brian and I lay out a course around town, invite all the crazy people we know and go run a marathon. I count it as an official marathon because, my game, my rules. That’s my 48^th marathon.

We changed the course this year so it looped through Groton, Ayer, Shirley and a few hundred feet of Harvard Massachusetts. Part of the fun, and the challenge is to create a course through New England towns that stays off the main roads and isn’t overwhelmingly difficult.

It was about 32 degrees with a light snow fall for the whole time. Pretty good running weather. There’s no snow on the ground up here and the roads were clear. We started at 8:00 and got back after noon.

We had a dozen or so people join us for some part of the route and we had one person go the distance with us. A big crew ran the first half with us and cut back. Another couple of our club friends picked us up at mile 17 and ran us in. We dropped water and Gatorade every 4-6 miles.

I’m sorry to report that I didn’t come in first this year. I had gapped Brian by a good 2-3 minutes after mile 20, but I waited for him at one of our water stops and he got a 2^nd wind at mile 24 and took off. I didn’t have the mental or physical closing speed to chase him down.

It was a great run. It always scares me a little to just show up and run a marathon, but this one was easy. We went super slow and stopped every couple miles to get refreshed. It ended up having about 1,000 feet of elevation gain, but nothing horrible. I was able to keep good form and my HR was solidly in zone 2 the whole distance.

I did end up getting some strange chaffing. I got welts on, as Forest Gump would say, ‘My Buttocks’, somehow from the new ASICS tights I was wearing. Never had chaffing there before. It looked like someone took me to the woodshed.

How’d you like the first episode of the 100% recycled RunRUnLive 4.0 Podcast? I’m going to keep tweaking it but I wanted to get it out. Action is better than inaction and progress is better than perfection. It’s not supposed to be professional, but it is supposed to have high enough quality content presented in such a way as not to annoy you!

In today’s show, which, with any luck should drop on Boxing Day, we will have a piece on how to turn your winter doldrums into an investment in your running. I also bring you a rousing piece on how to set Big Hairy Ass Goals the right way to transform your life in the life transformation section.

The interview is a bit of an experiment. Back at the end of the summer I had some guest interviews done by some friends of the show. So today we bring you an interview of Roxanne by Paula. I haven’t even listened to it yet and I know it’s going to be utterly fabulous.

Paula and I go way back to the inception on Twitter where we quickly became virtual friends because of our mutual love of writing and speaking and many things other things. So, we’ve been virtual friends since Twitter was for cool kids. Go visit Paula’s blog at www.BigGreenPen.com and consider helping her fundraising efforts for the NYC half she’s got coming up.

Roxanne is another one of our long time Twitter friends. She is one of those stars of our endurance community. Thankfully, we hear stories like Roxanne’s more each year. She’s a Mom who was seriously overweight, she took her life into her own hands and became a marathoner, an Ironman and transformed into a happier, healthier and better person.

I hope you learn as much from these two energetic ladies as I have.

That’s it my friends. Enjoy your holidays and be nice to your family – you only get one shot at that.

Before I let you go I’m going to give you a quick tip that I’ve been using to get my writing done. You know I wrote a new book, right? Anyhow to get this stuff written I need to hide from distractions like social media while I’m creating. I’ve developed a very simple trick to do this. I just set the timer on my iPhone for 30 minutes and commit to writing without distraction until the timer goes off.

It’s just like working out. The hardest part is getting started. But once you get started it has a momentum of its own. When something pops up or beeps for my attention I don’t take the bait until the 30 minutes is up. At 30 minutes I give myself permission for a little bit of wandering, but, frankly by that point I’m neck deep in my topic and don’t want to stop!

I’ll compliment this by going into YouTube and spinning up some meditation music. It helps calm your mind without distraction.

Give that a try. I know this is not a new idea. There are official methodologies and software solutions for this if you want to go down that rabbit hole, but this is a simple solution for a common problem without over-engineering it.

Which, you and I could stand more of, no?

On with the Show!

Section one – Running Tips

https://runrunlive.com/winter-fun

Voices of reason – the interviews

Interviewee -> Roxanne Camirand

Wife, mother of three, elementary school principal, marathoner and now Ironman. I am 5 feet tall, was once tipping the scale at 225pounds only 8 years ago. I was overweight and sedentary all my life. Then life happened and I decided that I wanted to be around to see my grandchildren grow up. So I started by losing some weight through changes in my diet and that triggered a series of events that led me to live an active healthy lifestyle and be a role model for my family and my students. All the choices I made in my life led me to where I am today. I do not regret one of them. As if I would not have been unhealthy and obese, I would have never felt the need to change my life so drastically, which in turn, made me who I am today: a wife, a mom, a marathoner and an ironman.

Guest Interviewer -> Paula Kiger

Paula is a Fitfluential Ambassador and a Charity Miles All Star. She trains with KR Endurance. She worked for almost twenty years for Florida’s State Child Health Insurance Program. She is currently doing freelance work in the communications industry. Her Twitter bio describes her best: wife of one, mom of two, friend of many.

Blog/Site: Perspicacity at www.biggreenpen.com

Facebook Personal: https://www.facebook.com/biggreenpen

Facebook Fan Page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Perspicacity/255384144580651?ref=hl

Twitter: https://twitter.com/biggreenpen

G+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+PaulaKiger/posts

Instagram: http://instagram.com/biggreenpen/

DailyMile: http://www.dailymile.com/people/paulakiger#ref=tophd

Fundraising Site for Team in Training (NYC Half March 3/15/15 — if there’s any way to work this one in I would be super grateful because I have to raise what is for me a load of $$$$): http://pages.teamintraining.org/li/halfnyc15/pkiger

Section two – Life Skills

https://runrunlive.com/break-your-frame-in-the-new-year

Outro

Well, my friends that was fun, right? It’s different for me to be writing and recording for you at home instead of in a hotel or an airplane! I hope I don’t lose the fun caustic edge I bring when I’m being chased by stress balls out in the world. We’ll see.

Thanks for listening to the second episode in the 4.0 series. I went back to my website and fixed the Index page so you can see and download all the audio I’ve ever produced. The Index is a cool WordPress plugin. You just tell it which categories to include and it rounds up all the links and puts them on one page. It’s an alphabetical sort, which isn’t the best but it’s workable. I suppose I could go out and add some meta-data around guests and topics but, ‘nice to have’ doesn’t usually make it to the top of my list!

If you have any suggestions, love, hate or any kind of feedback I would love love love the feedback. Drop a comment on the website on any of these posts, or shoot me an email or drop a note on the RunRunLive FaceBook page or tweet me at CYKTRUSSELL.

Especially if there is some running, racing or training question you’d like me to write on for the show. I kinda sorta feel like it’s all been discussed but I don’t mind repeating stuff you’re interested in.

The big, big, news this week is that I’m not crazy! Well, not totally crazy. The Cardiologist found a bug in my heart. They think I have exercise induced arrhythmia. That’s exactly what I described to them. Losing power at the end of a workout when I push it.

This particular bug, they think is electrical. One of the little electrical conduits in one of my ventricles decide to short out and cause the arrhythmia when I go hard.

Oddly I see this as excellent news because it exactly maps to what I’ve been experiencing. It means I’m not crazy and I do know my machine. I picked it up as an athlete where they wouldn’t normally.

What it is not is a physical abnormality of the heart. You may hear a lot about ‘athletes’ heart’ where the heart becomes asymmetrically developed – it aint that. It’s also not a blockage like Dave had.

It won’t kill me. This type of thing isn’t the precursor to a massive heart attack. It could potentially cause blood pooling a clotting in the ventricle that could lead to stroke if it were to get bad enough or happen chronically. But the doctor said ‘keep doing what you’re doing, just be smart about it’.

How do they treat it? I’m going to see a specialist in the electro-cardio realm. They will try to isolate the bad ‘wire’ in the heart muscle and potentially ‘ablate’ it. Which means cut that wire so it stops doing the funky chicken with my ventricle when I’m training.

This week coach has me on a rest week. He’s such a worrier. Yeah so I went out and ran 4 hours on the road with my friends, I feel fine! But I’ll take it.

He’s got me doing some bike work and some easy shorter runs. I set up my old road bike, Fuji-san, on the Trainer out on my porch and put a new cheap tire on the back to take the trainer abuse. I’ve been watching my way through Marco Polo on Netflix on my trainer rides. I started watching it because I though the actor was Adrian Greneir from Entourage, but it’s not him, it’s some other pretty boy. I like it. It’s like a Game of Thrones rip off in Mongolia. There are naked women and sword fights in every episode.

I particularly like the fact that Hollywood is using actual Mongolian and Chinese actors as far as I can tell. They have a history of just casting any vaguely Asian looking actors and thinking that we don’t know the difference between an ethnic Chinese or a Philippino or a Korean!

My new book MarathonBQ is taking shape nicely. The editing is progressing apace and I should be able to start promoting it in the New Year. I’ll be asking you folks for help with that.

I’ll be setting up my Boston Marathon campaign training plan soon and with that will come my request for financial support for Team Hoyt. I found out through them that a friend of theirs Dr. Bryan Lyons will be pushing Rick this year. I’m going to try to get him on for an interview.

I’ve got a couple assignments for you. First thing is to give something healthy to your local food bank. The challenge here is that they only want packaged foods, which by definition narrows your healthy options.

Here’s a couple suggestions. Buy a bunch of dried beans to donate, or some brown rice. It’s cheap and healthy. Or some shelf stable Almond Milk. Or a jar of almond butter. Think about it. Something packaged and healthy. There’s no reason we should be forcing the food pantry people to eat crap.

Second assignment is more of a suggestion. You know all your friends are going to be asking you for donations this year. Create an annual donation budget. Maybe for you it’s $100 or maybe you’re one of those lucky people who can set aside $10,000. Then you can decide how many donations you parse that up into. Maybe it’s 5 donations of $20. Then you can donate through the year according to your budget. Takes the stress out of it.

You can see all of this stuff written out in the show notes of the podcast. It’s all on my website (which needs to be refurbished, I know) at www.runrunlive.com. I do have an email list but all it does it automatically send you a notice and the show notes when the podcast drops, actually the day after it drops.

You can reach me at CYKTRUSSELL at Gmail dot com etc. etc.

That’s it for me. Enjoy your holidays. Don’t forget to smile. Smiling makes a great gift.

I’ll see you out there in the New Year.

Episode 4-302 – Roxanne and Paula