Bridge Run on Blustery Day (#runforsteem post)

This is my #runforsteem post. If you want to make cash for a weekly run follow @jumowa and see his Weekly Run for Steem Challenge Mar 13th - Mar 20th & Payout For Last Week.

Also check out @runningproject where I am leading a 5k Training Program. We are just finishing up a four-week prep period and the real fun starts next week.

Alright so here's the deal. I am a straight up 20 pounds overweight. I don't know how it happened. Okay, that's kind of lie. I know it had something to do with the quantity of beer I've consumed over the last couple of years, but other than that, I don't eat sweets or junk food, and I don't snack much between meals. What just seems so crazy about this is that for years I couldn't gain weight if I tried. This extra ballast is much more noticeable since I am working to go from casual jogger/walker back to runner/racer. So, I am now using MyFitnessPal (yay - now I can obsess over food and weight on an hourly basis), and I will be using public self shaming to try to stay on track. As of this writing I weigh 190 pounds. The goal is 170.

Okay, so no big deal. I've dropped weight before. When I first began running again seriously about 13 or 14 years ago, I wasn't quite this off the chart, but close. It took some effort, but once I got on a program, I chipped away steadily until I was back to 5 pounds over my college weight, which suited me just fine. The key was that I was sprinting a lot, and doing at least one fairly intense middle-distance interval workout per week.

Fast forward a couple of years, and now I am trying to get back into shape after too long of a break. I have hinted at this in some posts and comments, but if anyone actually cares to hear this narrative, here it goes.

A few years ago I started having intense pain in my groin in the middle of the night. On the pain scale from 1-10, it was an 8. I have felt 10+ pain before. This pain would cause me to bolt up in bed from deep sleep. The really strange thing about it was that simply walking around the house would relieve the pain. The only problem was that it would be 3 or 4 in the morning. At the time I was in decent shape. Not top racing form, but close. I was doing workouts like 12x400 at decreasing times from 1:30 to 1:00 on increasing rest intervals. Pretty much all out efforts, and I wouldn't feel a single bit of pain during or after such workouts. To make a long story short, an MRI showed that both of my labrums, a tendon that keeps your hip in its socket, were torn, along with having impingements in both hips, a birth defect where the hip socket grows too much around the ball joint.

I consulted with a surgeon that does a lot of work on NHL hockey players. He laid it out to me plainly. He said I needed surgery, but that it would be a year before I could run again, and another year minimum before I'd be racing again. I just couldn't go there, at least not right out of the shoot. So I went with his second option, deep rest for 3 months (literally, I didn't even kick a soccer ball with my kids), then cortisone shots, followed by 6 months of rehab. It actually worked fairly well. A couple of years later, I only experience a very small amount of pain now and then. The only problem is that the rest and rehab completely broke my routine, and I haven't been able to pick it back up since. It's amazing how things change. My kids are a couple years older, and there are that many more activities to keep up with. My wife, on the other hand, continued her own running routine and hasn't skipped a beat, but in numerous subtle ways the intricate balance we had in supporting each other shifted. It is so easy to take things like how a couple supports each other's running routine for granted.

So here I am, more or less demoralized as I try to do a continuous run of more than 20 minutes! How did this happen??? When did it get so hard?! For now I am going to chalk it up to that extra 20 pounds and how much harder my heart and lungs need to work to get enough oxygen to all that blubber.

In the midst of this sorry state, I started getting more active on Steemit, and who new that social networking could have any actual human value! I read these great posts every day from people crushing it like I used to, and it seriously helps. And then there is @jumowa with his awesome #runforsteem challenge, which is honestly making a difference.

And on that note, enough gazing at my navel. Here is my #runforsteem submission for this week. A very blustery day, but all the more of a challenge to get over the bridge from Pennsylvania to home state of New Jersey. It's a great route. I can do several different distances and hop on the train to get the rest of the way home. This run was 3.36, but I can make it 4.5, 6.5, or 8.5 by hopping on the train at different stops or just running all the way home. The Broad Street Run 10-miler is coming up in May, so I will definitely be doing the full route a couple of times in the coming weeks.