Moleskin + Nipples = Happiness

I have made a tremendous discovery in the last few months that I would like to share with the world...

...but first, a public service announcement.  If you are queasy about nipples, this post is not for you.  That's right, we're talking nipples today, as if you didn't read the post title and get all excited.

No, I am not posting pictures of my nipples.  I will take requests, though.  This is not meant to be a titillating post (pun intended) either, but if this is how you get your jollies on the interwebs, who am I to judge?

Here's the problem that I know is shared by many other runners: when I run for a length of time, my shirts start to rub up against my nipples.  If this goes on too long, those poor guys get chaffed.  If I run long enough, chaffing turns to outright open sores, which leads immediately to...

...BLOODY NIPPLES. 

I can handle blood.   What I can't handle is the excruciating pain of my sore nipples getting hit with whatever shirt I happen to be wearing, each agonizing step bringing my pain-nips in touch with an object, making them cry out again with agony.  At this point, there is no joy in Mammilla-ville.  Even if I remove my shirt, the very air against my teats creates more pain.  Complete and udder agony.  Get it?  

Thanks to Thesaurus.com for helping me with the last paragraph, by the way. 

In the past I have used anti-friction creams, powders, and even put band-aids on the trouble spots to avoid this.  But I am a hairy brute, and the band-aids usually fall off after a period of time.  I was seriously wondering what I would do for extended runs, until today.

I was looking in the drawers one morning and found some moleskin that a previous tenant had left behind.  Being an inventive chap I decided to give it a try and cut out two small squares.  My after run analysis?  If I had to condense this post to just five words, those words would be:

MOLESKIN IS BLISS FOR NIPPLES.

I have tried this on long runs of 24 Km, and up to about three and a half hours of running (that distance), so I hope I have this bloody nipple thing licked.  Get your mind out of the gutter, you sicko.

The Color Brown

When I was deployed to Iraq, I tried my hand at writing to pass the time.  I came across these haikus, and thought they were still pretty funny - and valid, here in Afghanistan:

The Color Brown (#1)

Brownish sand and dirt

as far as the eye can see.

At least Mars has hills.

The Color Brown (#2)

It's been two months now.

The same color as doo-doo.

This is getting old.

The Color Green (#1)

Little green bushes,

Why are you growing here, small?

Rain won't come, yet hope.  

The Color Brown (#3)

Here's a brown puddle,

in the middle of the sand.

Defiant, proud, wet.

Namaste!

As promised, I said I would discuss some of the other exercises that I am doing to help prepare myself and most importantly, prevent injury.  In my opinion, the best "other" exercise that I have been practicing daily - or almost daily - is yoga.

In 2009, I was lucky enough to be deployed to Al Asad Airbase.  I had a room of my own, and inherited an old television that showed three or four Armed Forces Network channels.  Lo and behold at 0630 every morning, I discovered a program called Namaste Yoga.  I have always been fairly unflexible, and decided to give it a try in the privacy of my room, where noone else could see me practicing yoga.  It turned out I liked the program, and it definitely helped with my flexibility.  I ended up working the show into my daily schedule.  We also had an XO who WASN'T afraid of yoga, and would got the entire Group outdoors to practice once or twice.  He would get us into a pose and then pronounce, "Yep, you're doing YOGA."

For those not familiar with the series - it was on Fitness TV in the States, and you can get the DVDs from Namaste.tv - it was developed and narrated by a woman named Kate Potter.  Ms. Potter is a Canadian yoga instructor and she has the best narrating voice.  I would love to sit in on one of her classes.  Add to that a great production value, and you have a really good yoga class at your fingertips.  The production for the series was in British Columbia - Vancouver, I think - and the people in charge of picking locations found some of the most beautiful areas to film.  

I have seasons one and two here with me now.  I purchased them for the deployment, and have been using them almost daily ever since my computer arrived.  There is something about yoga first thing in the morning that helps my body get ready for the day.  And I definitely feel that daily yoga practice increases my flexibility and has had a direct impact on the fact that I am pain and injury free, even after the longest runs.  

The trick will be to continue the practice when I get home.  Like so much other exercise and good health sense, after I came home from the last deployment, I stopped practicing yoga.  I tried to follow the yoga classes on Fitness TV, but the timing was off - and we hadn't bought our first DVR yet to record the shows.  I should have bought the DVD set right away, but I blew it off.  No excuses now - and even more incentive to get the latest DVD.  If I continue yoga, there is no reason why I can't continue to train with distance running without injury.

Namaste!

Giving More Than 10%

Technically, I am posting this on Wednesday morning, but it is still Tuesday back home :)...

Confession time: After I ran the Raleigh marathon in 2010, I stopped working out for a solid three months.  In the back of my head I knew that I was still in great shape, and that my fortieth birthday was four years away.  I had only planned on one marathon a year until 2014 to keep me "limber".  Not surprisingly, that plan did not work out as I had hoped.  

By the time I got to Afghanistan, I hadn't run more than twice in four months.  I hadn't run more than three or four times a month in the six months prior to that, and I certainly hadn't been a consistent runner since 2011.  I had joined the nefarious "3 mile club" – for Navy Physical Readiness Tests, a participant only has to run 1.5 miles.  The PRT is a twice a year event, which means that every sailor must run a minimum of 3 miles a year – if they are running.  I won't go into the politics of stationary bikes or elliptical machines, and I have been at the very bottom of fitness categories, so I won't judge.

The bottom line is, I was concerned that trying to do to much, too fast would end up with me being injured.  Experts say that a person shouldn't try to increase their distance by more than 10% a week.  I was certainly on my way towards following that advice for the first month here.  I started off with a gentle 1.5 mile run, something I knew even a fatbody like me could handle. And that was only after a couple of weeks of walking to and from work and chow – at the time, a not inconsiderate 4 miles or so daily.  

I got a cold about a month in, and that set me back a week, but then I ran a circuit and felt very good.  I had done that route a few times without injury or soreness when I decided to pull out a map and find out how much I had been doing.  I was surprised to find out that I went from roughly 2 miles to over 5.  However, my legs, knees and ankles felt great so I continued to experiment with different runs, taking breathers in between the longer ones.  Within two months I've gotten to 9 miles without serious strain on my body, not even soreness the next day.  After I got up to a half marathon in May (four months in) My left patellar tendon has started to complain a bit, so I made sure to include a short run day (around 10K) and I will definitely make sure to include a rest day.  I'm also looking at knee strengthening exercises, besides just hitting more pavement.  There is one more thing that I've been doing which I'll write more about on Thursday, yoga.

Running in Hell

I've had the running schedule planned for two weeks now.  I was running every other day, right up until Saturday...until today.

I got an opportunity to travel to Qatar today.  My goal was to log a long run in, but the moment I got off the aircraft my lungs were on fire.  Literally, when I breathed in liquid fire came in instead of air.  The streets are cleverly concealed pits of black lava, which makes me wonder if their tires here aren't made of a rubbery asbestos material.  I tried to walk down a paved jogging trail, but the material my boots were made of could only take so much before sublimating into charred husks.  

Needless to say, I will probably have to wait until nightfall.  Of course, the last time I was near this place was June of 2009, getting off of a plane to refuel at close to midnight.  I remember a similar feeling of being blasted by heat as I walked off that plane as well - when the sun wasn't even shining.  It really worried me that we were in for a rough time of it during my Iraq deployment, if the staging area was radiating heat in the black of night.  

It turns out that the Arab Emirates are just hot as hell.  I am told that summer months in Phoenix or San Antonio become similar pits of Hades, which means that I will never, never visit those places from March - October.  I would rather get a pitchfork to the backside, which may actually happen if i were to find myself in these magma chambers.  I'm not entirely sure that the Devil herself appears with a tiny pitchfork in these places in the summer months.

I am a man of the North.  A Yankee, if you will.  Winner of the War of Northern Aggression.  What I didn't realize is that we also won the war of comfortable climate.  It pains me that my daughters have acclimated to the burning jungles of Florida and North Carolina, while my northern bones require temperatures slightly below freezing in order to operate properly.  My neighbors still wonder why I walk around in shorts and a wifebeater in late January, whereas I am just happy to not be walking on the surface of the sun.

Better go grab a reflective belt and some water bottles.

Fatty Fatty Fat Fat

One of the goals of this blog was to help me verbalize all of the different reasons I would a) run long distances; and b) write about it.

Of all of the less legitimate reasons I have for logging my miles and words, there is one that stands on its own: fitness.

I have been in varying levels of fit throughout my life.  As a teenager, I didn't run at all, unless chased.  I dabbled with weights like any pimply, gangly teen, but even though I ate like a horse I had a pretty nice figure at roughly 165 lbs in high school.  I didn't realize I could see my abs until they were long, long gone.  

College was where I first was forced to run.  I wish I could go back and appreciate those runs for what they were, but at the time I couldn't appreciate  it all.  My fellow ROTC cadets and I would run all over Pittsburgh - through downtown, by Three Rivers Stadium, up to University of Pittsburgh, even to the top of Mount Washington.  Beautiful runs, although we were running at a pace that kept me wanting to throw up most of the time.  Even with that amount of exercise, I found my Freshman 15, and then some.

I remember distinctly in 1995, going through training at Fort Bragg, that I was gaining weight.  I thought that was a good thing to be so hungry, but in all honesty when I got back I was just heavier (185 lbs).  

Graduate school wasn't a time where I was watching the scale, but at least my metabolism, and a healthy respect for getting into the gym when the lab got to crazy, kept me from getting much fatter.  By the time I checked into OBC at Fort Sam Houston in 2001, I was around 190 lbs.

My time in the Army kept me very fit.  I was hitting the gym, going to PT, and even doing some extra training for things like EFMB, GAFPB, and Airborne school.  Still, I think at this point, I managed to get up to 196 lbs - the first time I ever got taped.  Legally overweight.

Transferring to the Navy, in a very physically demanding billet, didn't stop me from gaining more, especially when work got hectic, things were going on at home, and Grace was born.  The month after she was born, I clocked in at 210 lbs.  At that time, I was grossed out by my weight.  I got 20 lbs off right before I went to Iraq in 2009.  

Iraq was one of those great places where you had nothing but time to work on your physical fitness.  It was also a great place for me to realize that I couldn't just shovel food into my mouth anymore.  I got down to 171 lbs that summer.

However, I knew I had a problem when, on the second day I got back home, I looked in the pantry and found an unopened box of Oreo cookies.  I managed to demolish that box in ONE DAY.  You can guess where my weight went after that.  I was still training for a marathon in 2010, which kept some of the weight off.

However, after running the Raleigh marathon, I lost all incentive to run.  2014 seemed so far away, and I was commuting to work and busting my hump doing it.  Without workouts to help me control my weight, I busted buttons - getting up to 220 lbs by the winter of 2011.  

My best friend Andy's wedding was that summer, and I vowed that I would not look fat in my Dress Blues.  So I did my best and was able to lose almost 40 lbs over the course of six months, bringing me back down to around 195.  But after the wedding I got off track again.

In November of 2012, I weighed in at 221.  Even when TAPED I was having trouble staying within standards.  I knew that a deployment was right around the corner, but I was not happy that it was taking a deployment to get me in shape.  

But, here I am.  As of now, I am back to 180 lbs., and on my way down, a pound at a time.  I know I have to make some serious choices when I get back, but working out in preparation for this 40 miler should help.  But when I'm done, I know that there will always be a plate of cookies waiting for me.  

I Ran Today

So, on to business. 

Ideally I will update on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I am starting early, creating some material in reserve so ultimately I can write when I want to, not when I have to.  Otherwise, I imagine my posts will look something like this:

I ran today. 

I did run on my birthday, by the way...I don't know the exact mileage for a perimeter run (I'm currently deployed to Afghanistan), but it took me almost three hours.  I try to plot out distance on a map in the office...I surprised myself early in the deployment by pulling out a map of the base and carefully plotting my course that day.  I was excited to see that I was running around 11 km, when I thought I was running more like 5 or 6.  That was great news.  My main goal is not speed, or time, but running without injury.  So far - knocking on wood here for effect - I have not even felt sore the day after a run. 

This is even better news because I haven't done any physical activity in the months prior to deployment.  Maybe since my last physical fitness test, way back in November.  When I got here, my only goal was to start walking, which I did for about a month.  I threw in a one or two mile run in there somewhere, but nothing serious.  To say that I am pleased with how far I have come in a couple of months is an understatement.  I thought that I would increase my mileage by 10% every week, but if my body feels good I just go with it.

Not a bad way to wrap it up, really: listen to your body.  Most of the time.   

Welcome to 40 Running 40!

I'll preface this introduction with a warning: I am not a blogger, and have never seriously attempted a routine blog before now.  I don't anticipate that this will be read by anyone other than a few family members and close friends, but that is not really what 40R40 is for.

My bottom line up front: I want to run forty miles on my fortieth birthday. 

The main goal of this blog is to figure out WHY.  Why would I want to subject myself to 40 miles of misery, not to mention the training involved to make sure that I don't maim myself?  Why do I feel the need to celebrate this milestone with an ultramarathon run?  And why do I feel the need to document my progress in the coming year?

The second goal is to define WHAT: what do I really want to accomplish?  What does this benefit myself, and could it possibly benefit others?  What will I do if I can't make it?  What will I do afterwards if I do make it?

The WHERE and WHEN are pretty well established: June 3, 2014.  Starting sometime in the early morning, I plan on running a 40+ mile course I have laid out near Chautauqua Lake, NY. 

And finally, HOW do I intend on preparing for this task?  If you came here looking for running advice, please turn and run in the opposite direction.  I am no running expert.  I have read a couple of books, but other than the experience of putting feet to pavement I am no expert in distance running.  I don't care about personal records (PR), or how fast I go.  I'm not even that interested in what I'll be wearing.  But, occasionally, I will probably talk about my progress and reveal the secrets to my distance running method (hint: it involves a lot of running). 

Anyway, thanks for reading this far.  I hope you'll enjoy the journey along with me. 

Respectfully,

Dustin Huber