I took Oliver for a solid 45 minute walk this morning. (That’s my cover for saying that I went for a 45 minute walk this morning.)

It was great. The mornings have been fresh and crisp around here lately and it’s such a nice time to walk. Plus, it makes me feel better knowing I have walked my little buddy a good distance, and have worked my own heart, too.

It’s funny; when I walk at a brisk pace, lately I have felt more aware of my body than I do when I run. I can’t quite explain what I mean, but it’s almost like my body talks to me more when I walk for exercise. I think it’s a function of running more for exercise than walking and that I’m honestly probably more cognizant runner than I am walker.

What a thing to think about! I walk all the time, every day, but when I walk for exercise, with the intention of raising my heart rate for a period of time, the whole scene changes for me. I am able to Gather chi by enjoying the vista and the sounds of birds and water running. I feel less able to issue that chi back through my body back into nature.

I still need to work a lot on my core engagement. And my upper body posture and alignment. Often I catch myself slouching (even as I sit and write this now) and constantly have to remind myself to get tall again.

So when I walk I want to think more about leading with my shoulders and really letting my legs lead. I am going to try using a visualization when I walk for the next week or so (whether it be to the printer or around the park) that my shoulders and eyes are what lead my body rather than my legs (the second one is Y’chi). So when I get out of my chair next (in 20 minutes when I leave, for example) I will imagine that my shoulders are the driving force behind my movement, rather than my legs.

I’ll let you know how it goes: core engaged, leading with the shoulders and eyes, legs relaxed and cooperating with the floor/road.

Certainly, there are days that are easier than others. Today, I had planned to run 10 miles, but it appears from the map that I cut it a little short. About 9.69 miles in 1:45. Not great, but a little better than last week, I think.

This route is all uphill and then all downhill. I’ve done it in the past, and ran it at lunch (long lunch!) sometime last winter. I remember it going a bit better than today.

The going was steep at the beginning, and so I just took it very easy, really let my legs just get warmed up with small steps. I used my arms as much as possible and really tried to keep my core engaged for the whole run. My heart was pumpin’ pretty good, but I felt really pretty good. I practiced focusing my y’chi and it is amazing how it just simply pulls you in. I felt good until about mile 5.5, when the steady downhill just started to do a number on my knees. I tried to really make my lower legs move in circles, and landed on my heels a bit more on the steeper parts. I think the real problem is the lack of total mileage I have put on my legs in between my long sets of running. The circular heels helped for a little while, but eventually I just had to slow way down and take it easy.

The last part of the route is flat, and I felt better during that part. I was able to really stretch my legs out and right now, my knees don’t hurt too much. I did sit most of the day after my run on the back of a motorcycle, so I got a little stiff, but the sharp pain I felt before in my right knee is no where to be found!

I suppose I am not the best model right now for how to train for a 1/2 marathon! I will say that as much as I do love to run, I love other things (hobbies) as well. Things around the office have been extraordinarily busy and I have been poor at managing my time to get out the door for mid-week runs. I feel very confident about my abilities as a runner now, though signing up for Seattle was probably not the smartest thing I have ever done. I am excited about it anyway, and will have a great time at the expo and with all the fellow ChiRunners out there.

Really looking forward to hearing from those of you who are going to be there. You’ll come by the booth, right?

Now that I’ve had some time to let the experience of my 1st half simmer for a week or so, I have a laundry list of observations and thoughts.

• Pasta dinner is essential.
• I was pretty good about staying off my feet the day before the race, and the short 2 miler was a nice way to keep my muscles fresh and happy. I took it so easy, I didn’t want to strain anything or hurt myself, so the jog actually felt great and made me feel better about the race the next day.
• Getting good sleep 2 nights before the event helped. The night before is important, but for me, Friday night’s rest was more important than Saturday’s. By the time Sunday rolls around, it seems to me that enough sleep the night before is fine, but if you’re running on fumes anyway, a few extra hours the night before won’t help. That’s why I usually try to get a good night’s sleep two nights before a big event: travel, triathlon, undergraduate thesis defense, etc. Most of the time it works…
• I was curiously calm the day/evening before the race and even on race morning. I can attribute it to just being happy about whatever my results would be, about being prepared with all possible clothing/food combinations I might want, about having some fans who were so positive around the whole thing.
• Getting to the race with plenty of time was a good idea. I really dislike being late, so it was good to be early… but there’s a fine line between getting there TOO early and getting there with enough time. I think we did well.
• I ate three GUs during the race, though I wasn’t quite sure I needed them. During training, I usually only ate 1 GU during my 2 hour runs, but on the race I took 3. I’m not sure if that was a good idea or not. I imagine it didn’t hurt me, but I just don’t know if it was necessary. I’ll have to play with that a little more as I train for the next race.
• I didn’t stop to have water (and didn’t carry any with me) until the 6 mile marker: I didn’t feel I needed it and certainly trained on longer runs without any water at all. So from mile 6 on, I slowed to a fast walk at each water station and just drank 2 cup of water. I messed up at the 2nd to last station and got a cup of Gatorade, which I wasn’t expecting. I think I had an espresso GU and lemon-lime Gatorade. YUCK.
• The walking at the stations helped. It gave me time to get my bearings, feel my body at a slower speed, get some water in my system, etc. It felt very strange to go from run to walk, but starting back to running was easy: I just leaned!
• My right calf at the beginning of the race was a little bothersome. Just a little bit. Right in the middle of my calf, the mild pain was running vertically along the muscle. It started to creep down into my ankle and I think by mile 4 it was gone. All I did was focus on not using my lower legs: i pretended my feet were just like dog ears or something that were just floppy as could be. No tension, no stress, no strength. I think it worked because it was gone from about mile 4 till now. Hasn’t bothered me since.
• Miles 9-11 were difficult for me. I ran the race in my newer pair of 790’s, which I’d not had for a week. (Bad, I know.) I think they just hadn’t melded to my feet yet and were still a bit ’stiff’. I use that term lightly because these shoes are nice and flexible, but you know what I mean. In any event, the sides of each of my feet at various alternating times. It was sort of strange, but I just really thought about my column and tried to lean enough that I wasn’t using my calf muscles, and lean enough that I could keep my feet hitting at the bottom of my column, behind my hips.
• My knees started to ache about mile 9 and that was a little alarming to me. In the past when I run about 9 miles, that’s when my knees start to ache. I did the same focus as I did with my feet, just trying to keep my column straight, my core engaged, and my feet hitting behind my center of mass.
• As you’ll see in these pictures, sometimes I had a great lean and foot strike and then other times (Sigh) I was just totally heel striking. Strange!
• I sent these pictures to my parents, who have watched my play sports since I was very young. Dad called this morning to say, ‘You know, Elizabeth, you look more relaxed in these pictures than you ever have while exercising. Your face isn’t even red!”
• The crowds were amazing. Truly amazing. Between tootsie rolls, Kleenex, blaring boomboxes and supportive shouts, I was a smiling fool. There’s a really funny picture at the finish line from the event photographers’ site (above) where I am crossing the finish line and my head is up towards the sun, eyes more or less closed and a huge grin spread across my face. I think it’s hilarious.
• The finish was truly incredible. Really, I thought the crowd was cheering for me! For the group I was running with! Oh yeah, these people love this stuff! WOW… and then I just started to realize that it couldn’t possibly be me that they were cheering for… Maybe it was a person coming full tilt behind me? Maybe it was a special needs coming to a blazing fast finish? Maybe it was… OH my GOSH! it was the MARATHON winner, Deriba Merga blazing past me in the adjacent lane, taking his last turn before his 20-year-record-breaking finish of 2:07:52. That’s so fast! Anyway, he was running past us and I just started screaming along with the crowd and got all sorts of excited and finished the last 200 yards or so in a full out 4th gear, at least in a 4th gear that I had left in me.
• The last 1.5 miles felt SO LONG. I thought it would go fast, but really it seemed to take forever. When I saw the sign saying ‘Only 1.5 to go!’ I was like, “Oh, I’m gonna run this so fast!” but it felt like it took forever. Probably it was my fastest pace, but that’s just the way the brain works, doesn’t it?
• When I was finished and walking back inside to be showered with ‘Congratulations!’ and the medal stuff by the volunteers, I was in a daze. I didn’t feel particularly tired, and I think at one point I actually thought, ‘Well that wasn’t so bad after all.’

I never thought the day would come that I can honestly say I can’t wait till the next race…

Stay tuned… I’ll keep posting here, with all sorts of new breakthroughs and lessons.

Thanks again to everyone’s support for making it possible.

So, I ran yesterday with Danny. And we did hills. And he rocked it. And I didn’t

But you know… He’s Danny Dreyer and I’m Liz Frost and there is a distinct difference between us…

Namely: about 25 minutes into the run, we checked our heart rates. I was hovering around 180. Danny doesn’t wear a heart rate monitor, but he felt his pulse, and lo and behold! The man’s heart rate was barely 120 bpm. WHAT? I mean, talk about crazy. He barely broke a sweat! It had rained earlier in the day and was quite humid: I of course was the slobbering dog version of me, but a bit more red-faced and wet with sweat. Awesome.

We ran 48 minute in a loopy-loop around the neighborhood hills near the office. I’ve tried to recreate what we did, but it was random, so it’s approximate.

I didn’t really think of any focuses, but Danny sure guided me during the run… Here’s the latest on my form:

• My chin is way too high up… still. I need to work on it, ‘Like ridiculously low, more than you think is normal’ says Danny. Dang!
• chin down chin down chin down. annoying. After all these weeks and here I am still with my chin up in the air. Nicole had a really great idea the other day: what if I stand in posture and get my chin where in needs to be and then put of tape under my chin down to the top of my throat. Then, when I go out running, any time my chin starts jutting out, I’ll know because the tape will pull on my skin. That’s a great idea. I need to try it sometime.
• Downhills:I have decent form on the downhills, as long as I keep my chin down and keep my y’chi focused. My heel lift/rotation was good, i just needed to have the focus of this: the moment my foot touches the ground, imagine that it’s already moving to the rear, and that is being facilitated in part by the pelvis rotating backwards. I got a cramp at the bottom of one of the first hills: to much bounce. Danny said to keep my y’chi really focused by keeping my chin down and that will take care of bounce because it will focus my energy forward instead of up and down. It worked.
• Arm Swing: I guess my arm swing was more like 45 degrees instead of 90. When Danny pointed it out, I realized that I’d been running that way for a long time. Blargh. So crazy, it feels so different and I really had to focus on 90 when we were on the flats. Dang2!
• Breathing: When we got about 1/2 of the way through the run we were on a long uphill and I was feeling pretty labored and my HR was about 181. Danny listened a minute to me and then said, ‘You’re breathing too slowly. I know you’re trying to breathe out as much as possible, but you’re taking too long to do it. If your heart rate is that high, you need to double-time your breath. It’ll really oxygenate your body and you won’t get so fatigued.’ So on the uphill we started with ‘Out-two, in one/out-two, in one/out-two in one/out-two in one’. That really did help, and I couldn’t really do the out-breaths with my mouth and in-breaths with my nose because I was stuffy in my nose, so I just opened my mouth and breathed in and out with my mouth. Then on the downhills and flats, I breathed on this count as much as possible: ‘out-two-three, in-two/out-two-three, in-two/out-two-three, in-two/out-two-three, in-two”. Try it, it’s great.
• Uphills: the hardest for me. I hate going creepy slow. My big fat ego gets in the way. Plus, I have a hard time body-sensing what it means to virtually not use my legs, but still keep the heels ‘up’ and making circles. Then there’s the issue of arm swing. Danny said that he’s been really focusing on his arm swing when running up hills: to really get them back as far as possible with the 45 degrees, and then when swinging up the hill, to really SWING up with good force, and make sure that his elbow doesn’t go beyond the side of his body and then do it over again. His visualization is that there is a punching bag in front of you and you want to hit it, but your elbows can come forward of your body’s midline, so all the force of the arm swing has to be from the rear-most point of the arm’s swing to center and do it over and over again. The idea is that there’s already an upward for because your arm is at 45 but the force is coming from your elbow going from point to point with as much directed chi as possible.  And of course, there’s always the issue of a smaller stride. I’m somewhere around 5′9″ and I have a lot of leg to deal with… SO, smaller stride is difficult but essential.

Near the end of the run, my feet were starting to scuff a bit. I really needed to take smaller steps. Once I did that for a little while, I felt better and like I was efforting less. At the end of the run, we had a mini downhill, and Danny likes to always end a run as much as possible on a downhill really opening up as much as possible. It was probably less than 400 m, but you know when you end a run in good form. I think I did. It felt so nice to just stretch out and leg gravity take over. I kept my y’chi focused, my chin down, my arms at 90, my heels up nice and high, a quick turnover and a good pelvic rotation.

Scale: 7/8. I have a lot to work on, especially if I am going to be teaching people!