RunRunLive 5.0 - Running Podcast

Introduction:

Hello my endurance athletic old friends. 

Welcome to episode 5-481.

How are we on this fine fall day? Up here in New England we have set the clocks back and it is now officially dark at 4:30ish, which makes me want to stab myself in the eye with an olive fork… Is there such a thing as an olive fork? 

We like to tell ourselves up, with puritanical zeal, and righteous fury, that all this lack of sunlight and crappy weather makes us harder and more able to transverse this fickle world filled with chaos. 

We say things like, “I was doing hill repeats in the freezing rain,” – wearing that suffering like holy stigmata. 

But, what if it’s all a lie? What if all the adversity just makes us grumpy and hard to live with?

I don’t know – but I do know the best policy is to take it one day at a time, do what you can and embrace what the universe brings you because time is short!

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4-16-2023 Update Well my friends.  Tomorrow is Patriots Day in Boston. And we all know what that means.  That’s right, it’s the Boston Marathon.  I’ve got a few friends running.  The weather looks pretty good. Sara Hall is running and Des Linden.  The fastest man in the world, Kipchoge is looking to complete his sweep of the majors.   Who knows?  Maybe we’ll see a sub-2-hour finish from him!  That would be something.  I am running a bit again.  I have spent the last 2-3 month slowly trying to get myself back into shape.  The knee seems to be ok as long as I don’t work it to hard.  I’m still trying to see where the edge is.  I worked with Rachel and took 15-20 pounds off.  And I got through the first 30 days of the Body Building for Beginners program.  I’m going to stop that right there.  I repeated weeks 3 and 4, but I’m not going to go deeper.  It gets very specific in the second two months and is probably more complex than I need.  And, the big news is that I have signed up for a race.  My friend Ann who we have talked to a couple times here on the podcast has a charity that she is heavily involved in called “Burgers and Bands” which is a teenage suicide prevention program.  She got 50 charity slots for the Marine Corp Marathon.  So, jokingly, I said, if you run it I’ll run it.  And she called my bluff.  I am fund raising and I’m going to try to blog about the process of getting back into shape.  I’ll put a link in the show notes, at the top so you can donate.  Then my coach, who was in the mix, said “Ok if you two run I’ll train you.”  And the rest is, as they say is history.  I am going to toss in some audio from before my run today.  I am going to start podcasting more.  I have some interviews.  I’m trying to put less pressure on myself.  I’ve got a lot of ideas and a lot of content, but less time to execute. I have been plugging away at my other, After the Apocalypse podcast.  I’m just about to finish up season 3.  I’m getting somewhere around 22,000 downloads a month.  There’s 20 episodes in a season, and I plan to make each season into a book.  As I creep ever closer to retirement I’m setting myself up to have a bunch of evergreen publishing content going.  At some point I’ll circle back to all the posts on RunRunLive and try to consolidate them into some sort of order and edit them up into some books.  There are literally millions of words worth of content out there.  Anyhow, figured I’d check in let you know I’m still out here.  A little slower, gimpy-er and grey – but out here none the less.

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10-28-2022 Intro: Hello and Welcome to the RunRunLive podcast. I have some incredible updates for you today. As for format, heck, who needs format?  But as a semi-pseudo-format I’m going to keep dropping these short pieces on self-improvement, and especially how to navigate out of a dark place. I’ll do an intro with a little commentary, Then In section one, I’ve got a piece about self-worth. Then I’ll give you my updates in the outro. … Remember last time we talked about navigating the highs and lows of life?  Why? Because I know that a lot of you get the seasonal blues this time of year when the days get cold and dark.  (For you folks in Australia or Brazil; just set this aside and don’t listen for 6 months) I get these low points too. And the way I have learned to work my way out of them is to practice daily self-attention.  I hesitate to call it self-affirmation, or self-love or even self-development.  It’s hard to find words that don’t carry baggage of some sort.  So let’s just say self-attention.  This self-attention is important.  When we find ourselves in these low or challenging spots in our lives we need to systematically focus on ourselves. It may very well be that one of the reasons we are in this low point is that we have neglected self-attention.  We thought we were safely sailing calm waters and we forgot our practice.  As I said in the first piece, these highs and lows come at us throughout our journey.  We tend to enjoy the highs and suffer through the lows.  If you have a good self-care practice you don’t have to suffer through those lows.  You can see those lows as a gift and an opportunity to reassess, reset and replan. Even when everything in your world, our world, seems topsy turvy and out of balance, you are still you and the one thing you have control over is yourself.  This is the gift of self-attention. The bonus of this self-attention is that it makes you better able to deal with the outside world. … Unfortunately, needing to do some self-work is commonly seen as weakness, especially in the western cultures.  At least for my generation.  I’m happy we seem to be evolving beyond that.  Because this stigma on intelligent self-care is a lie.  80% of successful people start their days with some form of self-care.  Those successful people see it for what it is, the daily sharpening of the saw. I think we can recognize that we have these cycles of emotion and energy throughout our lives that are natural.  Feeling guilty or bad about these natural rhythms just compounds the problem. When I get into these troughs I have learned to get back to basics.  To return to the basic truths of who I am and what my values are and what my purpose is.  Then I work with that every morning as part of my routine.  This allows me to show up with my best self for the people who need me.  You are not doing yourself or anyone else any good by showing up incomplete with bad energy. Being in these low spots can be overwhelming. That’s why it is so important to let everything else go for a moment and commit some specific time on your own needs and go back to the basics.  You build yourself up day by day and step by step. I have often heard people say “Life is a marathon, not a sprint” – To which I laugh because what the hell do they know about marathons?  I know about marathons.  We know about marathons.     Remember that first marathon when you got to mile 18 and thought you were going to die?  Hell. I bet more than half of the 70+ marathons I’ve run ended that way.  The first time you hit that wall it’s awful, but eventually, with training and practice you learn how to deal with and overcome the wall.  It’s still awful, but it is a familiar awful that you have the tools to manage. That’s how these cycles of highs and lows work.  That’s why self-care is important because you can develop the tools to work your way through it. To summarize, carve out some quality time to focus on yourself and go back to basics. For me, the quality time for this kind of work is in the morning.  And the basics start with daily meditation to quite my mind.  The other important thing to understand about climbing out of a hole and the disciplines and practices to do so is that it takes time. When you sit down to meditate that first day your mind will be full of rabid weasels.  You have to keep at it.  The cause and effect of self-attention is subtle.  You may not see it in the moment, but when you look back you’ll be able to connect the dots.  You’ll see the positive impact of your practice.  Like any other training, that self-attention requires ac consistency of effort.  Don’t be discouraged.  Give yourself the gift of a little bit of focus. … Anyhow, I’m going to keep coming at you with these little bits. And you can take them or leave them. Thanks for all the positive feedback on the Watership Down essay. Stay tuned for some running news in the outro. On with the show! … Outro So my friends, the big news is that I have started running again.  I went to see the doctor and we reviewed the MRI results on the knee.  The big reveal is that the bruise on the bone has, for the most part, healed.  There is still some soft tissue degradation in there, but the big bad bruise is better.  I have started running again.  My run was .8 miles with Ollie around the neighborhood on Monday.  Then I ran 2 miles in the trails with Ollie on Wednesday and Friday.  I capped off week 1 with a 3.5 mile outing with my running club.  How about that? How did it feel?  Beautiful fall weather here – great for running.  I was a bit sore after that first trail run! The knee still has pain in it episodically.  But, at this point I’ll take what I can get. It’s definitely a mood lifter! The trick is going to be keeping myself in check.  The universe was talking to me with this injury, and I have to listen. I’m going to be in a new age group one week from today and I need to find a way to run with joy that is sustainable.

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Update: Hello my friends, perhaps even my running friends. Welcome to another episode of the comically directionless RunRunLive Podcast.  I think we’re about 14 years into this podcast journey.  It’s funny how time flies… There really weren’t that many of us back in 2007.  It was a small family of runners talking about running with other runners.  It was me, Steve, Nigel, Nic and Dan, Kevin with the extra-milers and Chopper.  And a few others.  I bet, if you asked any of us we’d say we never expected to make money or become famous from it.  But secretly, we all probably did.  Steve probably came the closest.  I think runners were early adopters of the technology as a community because we all spent so much time alone out on the roads. This meant we not only thought too much, but also needed something to listen to.  The perfect storm for running creators.  When I recorded my first show in June of 2007, I had just run down Mount Washington, after running the race up Mount Washington.  I pulled out my little Sony audio recorder and talked about it.  That Episode One would go up over the July 4th weekend that year.  I interviewed my running buddy Frank, who I still hang out with.  I met Frank on a training run with a bunch of marathoners from Boston in the 90’s.  His story, like mine, and like so many others was coming to running later in life, discovering the marathon, then discovering Boston, then getting hooked. And here we are 20+ years later.  I started an interview show because some of the business podcasts that I was listening to at the time had that format.  From the start I diodn’t want the podcast to be about me.  I wanted it to be about the listener.  I wanted to add value.  I wanted to share everything I’d learned, at that point almost a decade into my journey.  I wanted to share the joy of the adventure.  It wasn’t about me, but ironically, I was the target audience.  I gave myself tips and tricks, I gave myself inspirational speeches, I practiced my writing and presentation skills on myself.  Some of you just happened to be along for the ride as well! I didn’t even know there were other running podcasts when I started.  Really, it wasn’t until later that I met everyone.  I remember going on the Runner’s Roundtable and being so nervous.  It was like standing up in front of a big audience.  It’s still a bit strange to me that I have talked into the ears of probably 2-3 million people at this point in time. By the way, all that content, 400+ shows, we could feed that into an AI now and have a very good representation of me.  You probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.  It’s a tremendous training data set. Anyhow, enough reminiscing.  I’ve got an few things for you this episode.  First I’ll give you an update on what’s going on in my athletic life. Then I have a book review I wrote for my other podcast – After the Apocalyspe. Finally I’ll share an inspirational piece from a series of articles I’m working on for those of us who get stuck in low points and want to grow out of those. … First for the update.  I think last time I told you that I had thrown my back out lifting weights.  Well, that is still hurting me.  I think because I do a fair amount of chair sitting in my line of work.  I decided to not push it by trying to get back to the gym.  Let it heal.  Instead, I’m doing a daily lower back stretching routine – which seems to help.  I’m willing to share it with you if you like.  Very simple.  I believe I also mentioned that I went back for my follow up with the knee doctor.  I’m 18+ months into this knee injury.  It was first diagnosed as a bruise on the knobby part of my bone.  The knee itself was in reasonable shape, but there was this stress bruise on the bone that showed up on the MRI. I went back to the doctor a couple weeks ago and he did his poking around and sent me for another MRI.  He made sure I didn’t go to the cheap MRI place that my insurance company recommended, because it has a larger diameter machine designed to accommodate the more portly among us and because it is larger it doesn’t get as good a resolution on the images.   Another reason not to let your girth get away with you.  (By the way I just typed Girth incorrectly and discovered the “Grith” is an old English word for temporary security.) I went and got the ‘good’ MRI.   Then played phone tag with the assistant lady who is like a doctor, but not the doctor, but the doctor looked at the MRI and told her what to tell me?   The medical profession in the US sounds like a great Ponzi scheme based entirely around my sore knee.   I played phone-tag with the lady proxy doctor.  Because you have to call the office and leave a message then they call you back.  But, they have a special AI-based algorithm that guarantees them to call back while you’re on an important call with a customer.  Then they leave a message that says, ‘tag you’re it’ and the cycle starts anew.  This back and forth went on for a week until my messages started to get salty, like “Hey how about we set a time when I’m available? I’ll show up, you show up and we’ll call it…I don’t know an ‘Appointment’. Wouldn’t that me the adult and professional thing to do here?” She finally managed to get me and it turns out the news is good.  The bruise is smaller.  It is healing (despite me being an idiot and trying to run on it) There is some swelling or irritation of the meniscus around that bruise and this is what they think is causing the pain.  Which makes sense.  I’m going in next week to get a cortisone shot.  That should knock down the irritation.  They will probably want me to go to rehab, God help me.  Waste a few more thousands of dollars and a few more hours of my life doing clamshells with stretchy bands under the guidance of a Sports Sciences drop out.  Which is long way of saying, I think I’m about to start running again.  It’s about time!  I’m overweight and out of shape. Maybe the RunRunLive 5.0 podcast will be me struggling through the couch to 5K? I also found out that there is a new Non-Binary category at Boston that uses the women’s qualifying time, so all I have to do is become gender neutral and I’m in! Just kidding folks.  Don’t send hate mail.  Let’s get started shall we?  On with the Show! …

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