Right before June started I joined a challenge to run 100 miles in the month of June. Tonight I finished that challenge. Roughly 6 days ahead of schedule.

I’m the type of guy that will dwell on things for years and other things no dwelling at all. I’m not sure where I’m at on running 100 miles. I’m a combination of “so what” and “I’ve never run 10 miles in a month before, this is pretty good progress, five months after surgery.”

How does my knee feel?

It feels fine. I can tell all my muscles are still not there, the mass I have on my right leg compared to my left leg is still a lot different. But it’s growing every week. I’m feeling the strength returning and in some cases more strength than I had prior to surgery. As far as ACTUAL pain it’s mostly non-existent. I mean putting 100 miles on your body will take its toll. So both of my legs have different pain associated with the running. I would not characterize it as the damaging kind of pain.

Where the drill heads went into my bones, I really don’t feel anything. I have some nerve damage on my left tibia where the largest incision was, so that has a weird sensation. As far as the femur is concerned it the soreness is muscle soreness because the muscle is still growing there.

Should I have run 100 miles so soon after surgery?

I don’t know. Maybe not, or maybe?

A short tangentially related story.

I was on morphine and hydrocodone right after surgery, as far as pain killers are concerned they are great. They didn’t make feel good though. There are side affects that suck with those drugs, I won’t go into details. One of my friends told me I should try smoking pot or eating an edible instead of the pain killers. I thought that sounded silly. But I tried it. I took a 10mg edible and the pain subsided, I slept like a baby, woke up with no grogginess or anything that I would feel after a night being on the painkillers. There is an added benefit that I laughed my ass off at the stupidest of things for probably 2 hours. That was great.

So at my follow up appointment with my surgeon, he asked how my pain was. I told him that it was fine. He asked if I was still on the hydro and asked if I needed any more. I told him that I didn’t need any more and felt like I should mention to him what I did instead. He responded with, “that makes sense and I could see how that would be better on the side affects that you didn’t like with the painkillers.” He finished with, “what you should do is listen to your body, pay attention to the signals your body sends you and don’t ignore anything.”

So, should I have run 100 miles in June?

If you asked me, I’d say, “yes” If you asked my doctor he may respond differently, because he has to. Does that mean he’s right? Generally speaking I’m sure he is, but if I listen to my body then I should be fine. So far I don’t regret anything about what I’ve done this month.

I don’t know what my plan will be for July yet, this was a competition and competitions are what I like because it gives me something to aim for. It’s going to get hot in July and August, so I need to be prepared for that. Training will have to ramp up significantly in those months in preparation for the Chicago Marathon in October, which is still on.

Next steps are the half marathon distance, hopefully inside the month of June. We shall see…

Second 10 mile run in the books.

I think this posting will be talking about the pain I am now experiencing after putting in 33 miles over the past week.

This week we really stepped up the activity level. There are a couple reasons. Firstly I need to get into shape if I’m going to be able to run a marathon toward the end of this year. Secondly I got involved in a June challenge to run 100 miles. I am in a heated battle with somebody on who can get to 100 miles first. I’m certain to lose but I’m not planning on losing badly, I plan to keep it as close as I possibly can.

Let’s be clear who I am battling, this person has run several marathons, knows how to manage her breathing, running, pace and anything else I haven’t learned yet. However because we are both quite the competitors in anything, there’s a lot on the line.

As a result I put a lot of miles on my body over the past week, namely my knee. I have roughed that thing up pretty good. But that’s not the only pain I’m experiencing, there are several different areas of pain that I want to describe, which I do after my run summary.

Ran another 10 miles today

My goal for this run was to just get into cruise mode and take it pretty slowly and get a little faster every mile. I wanted to keep my heart rate in the range of 140-160bpm (about 70%-80%). I kind of wanted to see what it felt like to just settle in and get the miles in.

My next goal is going to be a half marathon, even though that’s only 3.1 miles more than what I just ran, I feel like those extra miles will be a different psychological experience.

I typically run laps around Humboldt Park in Chicago which is about 1.7 miles around. This means I put in about 5 miles for a 10 mile run. I will have to add another 2 laps, this doesn’t sound like a lot but psychologically it’s annoying.

I’m trying to get to that “breaking” point where I’m feeling fine from an exertion perspective and my muscles are doing fine, but my mind starts to get annoyed. I did notice I got annoyed with my shirt today, so I had to take it off, it made me feel better and more free.

I also noticed the feeling of my shoes being tighter than I was remembering them being, so I’ll have to keep my thoughts on how that goes as we get closer to trying to do a half marathon in a week or so.

Overall the run was fine, I didn’t want to beat up my knee too much so I stopped at just over 10.5 miles and walked the rest of the way home. So hopefully if I have a rest day tomorrow and then get back on the streets on Tuesday I will feel pretty good physically and be ready for getting to the 13.1 miles on Saturday or Sunday. We shall see!

Description of my pain below…

Outside of my left foot

This is probably the largest source of pain for me right now, it hurts to walk on it. It hurts for the entire run. It comes in waves and feels like I have a tendon that is being stretched to the limits running from just after the heel up to right before my little toe. The area of most sensitivity is right near my heel, on the soft bit of tissue between the heel pad and where the bones of the toes start to push outward on the foot.

This pain is excruciating in the morning. When getting out of bed, the pain is almost unbearable, I feel like I’m going to fall because it makes me want to contort my foot in a weird way and puts me off balance.

Shin of my right leg

This is the second worse pain I’m dealing with, it feels like significant muscle fatigue. The pain starts about midway up my shin, right on the outside edge of my tibia and where the muscle nestles right in there. It feels like bruising pain. The bone hurts and so does the muscle. I can handle this pain and it usually goes away once I’m warmed up.

Lower calf on my right leg

The lower calf hurts a lot, I think this is just because I’m not in running shape. The pain goes most of the way up my calf until the real muscle mass starts. Again it goes away once I’m running but hurts during the day while just sitting or walking around.

Left knee

This is my surgical knee, so I’m expecting it to feel some pain. Most of the pain is on the top left portion of my knee, where the quad muscle starts to connect. This area was a bit swollen last night, so I rolled it out and it made it feel much better. I have all the stability I expect to have, but there are some times where it feels like I am putting a bit too much stress on it.

On the lower part of the knee where the largest incision was is the source of my other pain, not necessarily the bone or anything but the feeling sensation hasn’t completely come back yet, so it feels funky when I’m running.

Glutes

Both of my butt cheeks are sore. That’s about it. I think it’s just over use.

Last Saturday, I managed to get my first 10 mile run in.

How did it go?

It went well, I knew I was going to be running 10 miles when I left the house so it was good to have that psychologically in my mind because I knew I would need to manage my breathing.

The way I went about that is to force myself to only breathe through my nose for the first 6 miles at minimum. This way I could keep my heart rate under control and not push the pace unnecessarily.

There were a few observations, I made about the run. The first was that because I managed my breathing so closely during the early stage of the run, I found that turning it up still kept my breathing under control. Meaning I didn’t over extend even when I was picking up the pace.

Once I hit the 5 mile mark, I felt like I was just cruising. I didn’t think much about the distance for a while after that. I did count the laps that I did around the Humboldt Park loop but really didn’t think too much more about the distance or how much further I had to go.

In the runs I’ve done since then, the 5 mile warm up seems to be the thing. Once I get to 5 miles, I’m feeling pretty warmed up and can begin to settle in. What I’m hoping to do to build from there is to find the warm up at 5 miles, then for 10 more miles just be settled in. The next milestone is to get up to the 15 mile mark. Where I just tempo run for 15 total miles.

I have found my comfortable pace on a 10 mile run, which I believe should be around 8:15-8:25 per mile. My goal for the marathon at this point is to run it at 4 hours or less. If I can extend the 8:25/mile for the entire length of a marathon this should be possible.

I bought some new shoes that I have not done a 10 mile run on yet. I have done a 7.5 mile run as my longest one so far on them. I plan to take them for a 10 mile run tomorrow.

I joined a challenge with my co-workers for the month of June. The challenge is being done through the Nike+ Run Club (NRC) app. I don’t really like using NRC to record my workouts or runs, I prefer to use the Apple Activity app for my workouts. The problem is there is no way to get the Apple workouts into NRC directly.

I didn’t know this prior to the NRC challenge being set up so I was running using Apple activity assuming that I could just sync them up like I do with Strava. This is not the case. I spent way too much time trying to figure out how to get my run into NRC.

I initially thought I could manually add the activity manually to NRC, you can do this but it will not have any metrics and it won’t sync with the challenge. I looked all over the internet and they only discussed how to get NRC activities into Strava or into some other service, never how to get them into NRC from some other app.

So how did I figure this thing out?

Simply put you need to get a couple more apps to make the journey from Apple activity to NRC. Here is a list of things you’ll need:

1. From your iPhone install RunGap
2. From your iPhone install Polar Flow
3. You should already have Nike Run Club app installed on your phone.

What is RunGap?

Run gap is used to consolidate all your activities between all the different services you use. It is pretty cool because you can download and “share” your activities to other services which enables you to sync between services if you use a bunch of them or are forced to use another app in order to take part in a challenge with your friends on another service.

Why do I need Polar Flow?

You need Polar Flow because it is the one partner app that you will need to configure in your NRC app that can write to NRC with all the run/activity details that you need.

How do I actually do the sync from Apple Activity to NRC?

1. Register for Polar Flow
2. Once registered and in the app on your phone to to the More view
3. Select General Settings
4. In the Connect section Enable Nike+. This will bring up a login screen where you will enter your NRC username and password.
5. Go to your RunGap iPhone app
6. Go to Accounts & Settings
7. Set up Health to import your activities as a source
8. Set up Polar Flow to import your activities as a source and also as a destination
9. Once both Health and Polar Flow are configured, go to Activities in the RunGap app
10. Pull down refresh to get all your activities from the Health app
11. Select the activity you want to get into NRC
12. Press the ellipses menu in the top right
13. Select Share
14. Enable Polar Flow
15. Press Share
16. Once that is complete, go to your Nike Run Club app
17. Go to your profile (press profile picture in top left)
18. Select Settings
19. Select Partners
20. Select Polar
21. If required enter your credentials
22. Once that’s complete, you should see the activity you shared to Polar Flow in your NRC app

Seems like a lot of stupid steps, but unfortunately this seems to be the only way I have found to get Apple Activities into NRC.

Why not record your activity using NRC?

I don’t use it for two reasons. It has let me down multiple times on capturing metrics (e.g. my heart rate, pace, splits, etc) meaning none of that data was captured or synced to the activity and I rely on it. Second reason is I am a Strava user and it has a very seamless process for importing Apple Activities into the service. If I were to use the NRC app to record my workout I have to still have a middle man app (like RunGap) to get the activity into my health app and then into my Strava account.