Report from rehab - I

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said, 'No, no, no.' (Amy Winehouse)

Last week I wrote about the five phases of rehab I have been experiencing since April 22: relief, acceptance, resignation, change, and determination. I think it is even more important to name the phase before the rehabilitation finally starts: denial. For a long while one experiences pain and discomfort which actually gets worse and worse, but still one chooses to ignore the signs and believe that there are ways to run which will make the whole thing go away. You can easily see this in some of my earlier posts, when I truly (and with a lot of hope) believed that there was nothing wrong with me, I just needed to run uphills and terrain for a while. Well, in the end everything became so painful that it was simply not fun to run anymore in any way. Still I kept doing it until as late as April 18, looking perfectly happy:

It turns out that the denial phase is extremely common, perhaps most among new beginners, but also among surprisingly many experienced and even professional runners. Just look at the story of Tom Goom, who is an experienced runner and racer, as well as a physiotherapist! He ended up with exactly the same injury as myself, going through exactly the same stage of denial before he had to accept the situation and start rehab. We run as long as we can even as the pain increases, until we simply cannot anymore. If we could stop a little earlier, perhaps the recovery would be quicker as well. What is for sure it that giving advice to others is so much easier than following that advice ourselves. Tom Goom had seen hundreds of patients doing the same mistake, and had given them advice and guidance which he did not manage to follow himself. What I know from my own experience is that we are not willing to take advice that comes lightly or appears to be not thoroughly enough thought through.  Of course I received the advice of taking a few weeks off running and resting more many many times, but I did not trust it because I did not have the impression that people who gave the advice had complete understanding of my situation. There were two people whose very clear advice finally made me see the realities, agree to stop running and to go into a complete rehab program. My running friend Eva, and my current physiotherapist Ane.  Their advice was the same: you must stop running. In every possible way. For as long as it takes to fully recover.

So why did I take their advice and not others'? First of all the two advices coincided in time and I was in more pain than ever. Secondly and more importantly they both showed a great deal of real empathy and true compassion. Just after my first consultation with Ane, I got a long message from Eva, where she explained how she had been observing me over time, how she could see how much pain I was in, how she has experienced similar things, how she actually feels very uncomfortable to give this advice because I might take it the wrong way, but how she must say it because she really cares. I cannot describe how much I appreciated this advice. I had got the similar advice (well, rather instructions) from Ane the day before, and it was great relief to get a confirmation from Eva, as well as having somebody who understands and cares, at the time when I was feeling the most depressed about the whole situation. When it comes to Ane, she was much more strict and clear in her instructions than any other therapist had ever been to, but more importantly she understrood exactly how I felt. She forbade me to run, but she also explained to me that she knows that I will feel very sad about this, that it can even be compared to a depression, because running has become a part of my identity, an ingredient of what defines me. No therapist ever had understood me to this extent. She also did several things that she did not have to, like posting a letter to my doctor herself (rather than leaving it to her secretary) to speed up the start of the process, and to send me motivation and encouragement through text messages. This kind of understanding and care (especially outside of scheduled visits and office hours) from a therapist is really rare I think. It builds trust, which gives courage and motivation to continue the rehab and not fall into the temptation of starting to run as soon as the pain feels a bit better.

What also really helped me through the difficult time was the care and compassion that I received from friends. For example, when we were in Oslo for the Holmenkollstafetten, the day after the race, my friend Tone went running very early in the morning before breakfast (although it had been a very late night), so that she could keep me company when all the others went for the scheduled running practice after breakfast, which she knew I would not be able to join. I cannot describe how much this meant to me. Tone has been supportive in many ways during this period; she has a similar story with a hamstring injury, and I have learned a lot from her experiences. Her caring but direct way of telling me what she thinks is extremely helpful, and I appreciated a lot when she (and in fact her whole family) kept me company when I had to cut short of a long hike with friends last week. 

As you know, I am now in the determination phase, and things are in fact going much better. After the four weeks of complete rest for the legs, I started the heavy slow resistance (HSR) training and got back to uphill fast walking. I have, already after two weeks of HSR, noticed a significant improvement of the situation and I am in much less pain than in a long long while. I am also surprisingly fast up Stoltzekleiven and Ulriken after such a long break, so my spirit for the time is really high and I am feeling better and more optimistic than in several months.

Yes, I've been black but when I come back you'll know, know, know. (Amy Winehouse)

Extreme is my normal

Another race went by with me as a spectator. I am getting used to it now. Shoulders down; I am determined not to participate in any race until after the summer.

On Saturday was the Ulriken Opp race, which I had signed up for a long time ago and was really looking forward to. On April 19, Frank and I did a test run of the short course, and completed it in less time than my race time last year, although we kept an easy pace and did not at all push it. So I was expecting to improve my race time by a couple of minutes, at least. But then came my "no running, no uphill walking, no strength training at all for legs" period of four weeks, starting from April 22. That is fortunately over now, and I am into some heavy slow resistance (HSR) training and allowed to walk uphills if I keep them not too long and not too fast. I will come back to the details of this in the next post, but the important part here is that I was able to walk up to the top of the mountain and be a part of the Melkesyre cheering gang to help our friends and all competitors up.

Not being able to use my legs (except for two short relay runs) for four weeks has been an interesting experience to put it mildly. I wrote earlier that I think this will make me a better runner, and I truly believe it. It has made me put everything into a new perspective, as sometimes looking at things from the "outside" can give a clearer picture. However, one should not push perspective too much. At some point I was losing my perspective, in fact the whole picture. Fortunately I am surrounded by great people who were quick to grab me back into the state of mind that I should have.

During these four weeks I went through some stages that could perhaps be categorized as relief, acceptance, resignation, and change. Relief because all kinds of running had become so painful, and I was still doing it in variations which I thought would be fine, that finally not being allowed to run was in fact a relief. Although my mind was very unhappy about this restriction, my body responded very positively. My resting heart rate went down significantly, and my leg muscles felt much better after a few days. I realized that I had actually not rested properly during the past 12 months. Then came the acceptance phase, where I tried to make the best out of the situation. I increased the number of my strength training sessions from two to three or four times a week. I was also fortunate enough that this whole period coincided with an extremely busy period of work, so it was easy to accept and even appreciate that I was not to run or walk. Resignation came when I realized that this rehab period could actually be very long lasting, and it could take months before I could start running again. I gave up all hopes of participating in any of the races that I had signed up for until after the summer.  

Change was when I started to think and feel differently. And different was not good in the end. I started to enjoy lying on the couch after a long day at work. I felt glad that I did not have to go out in the bad May weather that we have had this year. When I saw pictures on Facebook from the training sessions that I could not participate in, I did not feel anything; I was simply indifferent. I did not have the feeling of missing it or being a part of it; it all started to become distant to me. Perhaps the worst was that I started to think in a different way about my goals. I wrote in an earlier post that many people found my goals and training extreme; they used to tell me not to overdo it, not to exaggerate. At that point I did not let this slow me down because I had enough of motivation from great runners with extreme goals and habits, and the "let's not get carried away" advice usually comes from people who do not themselves have the same kind motivation. But during the change period, I started to think that they were right. I started to question what the point was, and to discard my earlier goals. However, the goals for me are so closely related to the joy of achievement that running gives me, that in the end I started to lose the will to run... At the end of this period, when I was finally allowed to start walking uphill, I almost cancelled my planned first walk up to Stoltzekleiven because the weather was bad and I was tired after a long day at work. It was so strange. I was expecting to be so eager to get started again after this long period, and instead I found that I had to force myself to get out and get going. That really scared me. I thought I was losing my edge.

In this state of mind, I was at Barry's Bootcamp this Tuesday morning for my PT session with Ketil, when an old acquaintance, Petter Vallestad, passed by and waved at me with his huge smile as always and shouted "Go Pinar!" I know Petter from when we were both regulars at Barry's bootcamp classes. From a normal bootcamper he went to the extreme;  he is one of two guys from Bergen who participated in the Jungle Marathon in Amazonas in 2013: 254 km in hot, humid weather through the jungle with all sorts of vegetation and insects. Only very few people completed this course, and all the others were professional runners. I have been following Petter's achievements online but it had been a while since we had met. It turned out that he has also been following me via my blog. He invited me to a lecture on Thursday, and we ended up texting a bit during Tuesday. And bang my motivation was back! He was able to draw me out of my negative thoughts and make me remember that extreme is my normal. I can never be moderate when it comes to things I am passionate about, no matter what they are. However, I had a question to Petter: How do you stay injury free? It seems Petter has a recipe for that, and he will tell me all about it over lunch in a few weeks. I will tell you more about him, his achievements and his recipe after that.

Such a simple thing was enough to be reset and get back on track. After this I was clearly more responsive to positive impulses and grabbed every opportunity to get my act together. The first Stoltzekleiven walk was great. I went at a pace which I consider slow and easy, there were hundreds of people on the path all of whom I passed, nobody passed me, and I reached the top just 2 minutes behind my personal best. I was really happy to see that my form had not decreased much. Then on our Thursday PT session, Ketil was more a psychologist than a trainer, and he had all sorts of tricks to get me laughing, screaming and hungry for new goals. Look what he made me do:

Balancing on four fitness balls and doing push ups. It looked impossible. Are you sure this is actually doable? Did anybody try it before? I asked him. Somebody must be the first, and you are the strongest I have, he replied. Ha ha, he knows exactly what to say, and I choose to believe him. It did work after a bit of falling down and getting up. In the beginning he had to hold the balls under my feet; it was like learning how to bike. I kept shouting Don't let go, don't let go, you're still holding, right? But then he had to let go to be able to take pictures. I also got as homework to make a training plan/log so that I can see my progress, which is important now that I am not racing and timing my runs.

Then came the evening before the Ulriken Opp race, and my Melkesyre friend and big idol Jeanette asked me whether I wanted to walk up slowly with her so that we could cheer on our husbands and all other friends when they came racing. This was the last in a sequence of positive impulses to drag me out of my comfortable hole of laziness. To be honest I was not planning to go and cheer this time, but when Jeanette asked, I immediately wanted to go. She is also injured these days, with very similar restrictions to mine, and it was great therapy to chat about these things. She is an athlete at a completely different level than me, and I look so much up to her and find great motivation in her achievements. Although she is one of the best, she is also constantly chasing to improve herself. This, what many people find strange and unnecessary, is what I so totally understand and find that it is something inside me so strong that it is not really a choice.

So, thanks to these wonderful people who, at exactly the right moment, found and grabbed me, I am back on track. No running still for a long while, but enjoying all the things that I actually can do, seizing the opportunity to do more strength training and get stronger, and meeting my running friends again although I cannot join the full training sessions. Maybe I can name this period determination.  I am determined to get rid of my injuries this time, be patient and stay out of running as long as it takes, so that I can be back stronger and faster than ever before.

Coming soon! To a racing arena near you ;-)

Ja vi elsker dette landet: Borgafjellet

It is the national day of Norway! What is more appropriate than writing about the beautiful mountains of this wonderful country?

Many of us who live in Bergen go to seminars, meetings or family gatherings at Solstrand Hotel in Os every now and then. If you are at a meeting for work and spending the night there, there is the danger that you will be sitting still and and eating a lot all the time. The hotel has a swimming pool which is very popular, but the outdoors are actually much more interesting and fascinating. If your schedule has a couple of hours' break after the day's program before dinner, here is a spectacular run/hike that you can try. Borgafjellet is very similar to Stoltzekleiven in length and altitude, especially if you take the correct path up. I did it for the first time myself a few weeks ago, and enjoyed it immensely:

Start from Solstrand hotel and take to right from the main entrance door. You will be on the coastal path. Take to left at the first opportunity to reach the main road. Cross the road and continue on the road to Samnanger on the other side. Continue until you reach Borgaveien on the left. Take to left on Borgaveien and continue until you reach a sign that says "Borgafjellet". At this point there are actually two signs. One says "Borgafjellet" and points to right, and the other says "Borgafjellet 100m". Do NOT take to right at this point; continue 100 more meters on the road, and then take to right at the first road that you see. Unfortunately there is no sign at this point. This small road without a name looks like it is only going to the few houses 50 meters up, but the path starts right after those houses. In a very short while the road ends and you are in the wilderness.

The path is quite steep all the way up. It continues on soft grass for a while, and then there is a sharp turn left. From there on you climb on rock steps all the way up, very similar to Stoltzekleiven. Really really pleasant and very beautiful path. Once you reach the top (where the tower is), you are a bit disappointed that the view is blocked by trees.

However, do not despair. Just continue just a few meters further, and you arrive at the real top, with an amazing 360 degrees view which really takes your breath away.

To make a round trip, continue further on the same path, but look all the time to the right so that you will be able to find your way down to where you want to end up (otherwise you will be continuing on the plateau). If you are paying attention to possible ways to go right, you will not miss the junction where there is a steep path down on the right side (and the main path continues straight ahead). Take to right and go down. This part is as steep as the way up, but it is on much softer ground so it is quite pleasant to go fast down with small steps. Once the wilderness ends you will reach some streets; just continue straight ahead and you will be back at Borgaveien (at the first sign showing the way up to the mountain). From there, you take left and either take the same way back to Solstrand, or take another road for variety. I ran on some soft ground which turned quite muddy at the end. You can find the gps details in this map. (You will see that I ran a bit back and forth before I found the correct way up.)

Gratulerer med dagen!

The conquest of the capital

Veni vidi vici!

We came, we saw, we conquered! It has been an incredible weekend. The ultimate Norwegian national relay event took place yesterday: Holmenkollstafetten in Oslo. Around 3500 teams from all over Norway participated with in total more than 50000 participants. It was a historic event for my club Varegg: we participated with four teams, and traveled from Bergen to Oslo with a group of around 50 runners. For the first time in history Varegg participated both with a men's elite team and a full women's team. In addition we had a mix team and a men's veteran team. The achievements of all four teams were above all expectations; in particular the men's elite team came in number 6 of 20 elite teams, who are composed of the best runners of the country. This is an amazing result, considering that the team qualified for the elite class just last year! However, I will be writing mostly about the women's team which I was a part of: we came in as number 6 of 27 women's teams in the senior class. This class comprises of runners between 18 and 34 years. It is the ultimate competition class where the age group is supposed to represent the time a human being is at his/her strongest, and thus both younger and older runners are allowed to race in this class (the opposite is not possible). We raced in this class with ten out of fifteen runners above 35 (in fact most of them above 40), and did so well! We finished in 1 hour 10 minutes, and we were 50 seconds away from qualifying for next year's elite class!!

Let me start from the beginning. We traveled altogether from Bergen to Oslo on a completely full late afternoon flight on Friday. After arrival to the hotel and checking into our rooms, we went for a light meal before getting back to the hotel for the night. We stayed three or four people together in the rooms, and you can imagine how much laughter and fun (and how little sleep) there was - it was almost like being back at school. Saturday started with a light run to the Palace gardens before breakfast, and after that we had the briefing and pep talk meetings with our team leaders, where everybody got their start numbers in a ceremony.

Then it was up to each of us to find our starting points and get there. My leg was one of the furthest away from downtown, so I decided to take the metro to make sure not to get lost or too tired or too much pain too early. I arrived there well ahead of time, and I had plenty of time to run through the leg several times and test my speed. My leg was one of the shortest, just 630 meters, and it was mostly slightly downhill, so it was a very very pleasant leg to run. However, I was really nervous beforehand as I was studying its description on the web pages of Holmenkollstafetten. In particular it said that the "normal" completion time of this leg was between 1:30 and 2:30. This really got me stressed. Running 630 meters in 2:30 means that you have an average speed of 15.1 km/h. I just recalled that I used to be able to do two minutes on the treadmill in this speed, but I did not remember whether I could do longer. I comforted myself saying that this was long ago and I am probably a better runner now, but on the other hand I haven't had speed training for months, so I was really not sure whether I could finish my leg in 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Getting more and more nervous at the start line, I was thinking that at least I was very lucky with the weather: it was wonderfully sunny just until 5 minutes before I started running. Then, several minutes before I expected to see her, my team mate Gro already showed up in the distance! I got the baton and started running. I ran faster than I ever did before in my life, and it was the most painful 2 minutes 20 seconds I could remember in a long while (aferwards I was coughing for at least an hour). Yes, 2:20!!! Well within the "normal"! With an average speed of 16.2 km/h!! (3:42 in pace.) In fact, none of the runners in my class did better than 2 minutes on this leg, and several of them were behind the "normal" schedule (I wonder how they calculate this "normal"). I had been so worried that my injury would slow me, and really afraid of letting down the whole team. Thus you can imagine how relieved I was when I passed the baton on to my team mate Sara-Rebecca, and not the least when I got back to Bislett Stadium and learned the results.

From that point on, it has just been a long long party. We are all so happy and pleased with our achievements, and so proud of ourselves and of each other. As always we are so grateful to our team leaders Johs, Hege and Trygve, who took care of all the organization, preparations, practical matters and gave us this amazing experience. I was really looking forward to this weekend and thinking that it would be great fun, and it was actually even more fun than I had imagined.

Go Varegg!

Relays are fun!

The season has started! Actually it started already a month ago. I had a vague idea of what "the season" meant, but now I know that it is the period that starts at the end of Easter.  Things change when the season starts, and there is a race scheduled almost every week, sometimes several a week. What really marks the start of the season, though, are relay races. These seem to only take place in the season and never during winter. On Friday I participated in the shortest relay race I'd ever heard of: only four in each team and just about 7 minutes for the whole race!

My leg was 200m, which is really perfect right now, as I have a break from running these days. If you are connected to me via Facebook, you might get a different impression as there are about 200 race pictures of me (one for each meter I ran :-), but I have actually not made a single running step (except these 200 meters and some slow warm up) for the last two weeks. I cancelled my participation in individual races, but I am allowed to run a few hundred meters every now and then at relay races. Of course, since I don't get to train, I am getting slower, and I cannot describe how grateful I am to Varegg that they still let me race. It must be the most welcoming and including club in the world, and it feels wonderful to be a part of a club and team, especially when one is injured and on alternative training.

I was very happy and proud to be invited to join the women's relay group of Varegg a couple of months ago. I have the impression that they have intensified recruitment of women recently. Looking at race pictures from only a few years ago, I see just very few ladies among a huge number of club members. Now, however, we are many, and at the last race we had four women's teams.

Running such short distances is very different from what I am used to in races. Fortunately I have quite a bit of experience with short and very fast intervals on treadmill from Barry's Bootcamp, but when you are racing and give it all from the start you get to experience new things. During the first relay race of the season, right after Easter, I ran 300 meters, and I was very happy with my speed during the first 250 meters. The last 50, thought,  gave a very special experience. I had the strength, the breath, and everything needed to continue, but my legs suddenly felt like covered with concrete. I almost started laughing due to the strangeness of the situation, at the same time as I was doing all I could to keep going.

Afterwards, I learned that this is very normal. The clue is to start a little bit slower. But when you only have 300 meters to do it, how slow can you start? The whole things is just about a minute after all... Well, hopefully, as soon as I have recovered, I can continue my plan to become a good runner at all distances (and better at some :-). Varegg is so incredibly nice; they make up the teams for each relay race in such a way that all teams are more or less at the same level in average. I think the plan might be that as we get better we might start making more specialized teams for our age groups. Until now I have been racing in young women's class, as there are always at least one of two young (below 35) friends in each team. I must admit that it feels pretty cool to race in this class, but it is also easy to get discouraged when you race against a bunch of 19-20 year-old girls who make up the other teams.

In fact I have a relay experience even before Varegg. In 2013 I participated in the Bergen City Marathon relay race with nine of my colleagues. We were two women in the team, there was only one team member who was older than me, and we represented in total six different nationalities. It was a great team building experience to train together for this. We had weekly training sessions around the Store Lungegårdsvannet, which is situated right next to our work building. The distance around the lake is exactly 3 km, which is perfect for this training, as the laps are between 1 and 3 km.  We always started with a slow warm up round altogether,  followed by a race lap where we ran as fast as we could and tried to push and catch up with each other. We ended up as number 46 out of 162 teams in the race.

At the relay races of this season that I have been participating in, Varegg has been quite dominant in the number of participants. We register with as many teams as there are people who are willing to race, which makes every race event great fun, almost like a feast. You run your leg, and then you join the others and cheer for the ones who are still racing. And you laugh and laugh and laugh all the time (except when it's your turn to run).

Of course all this fun is possible thanks to our fantastic team leaders Johs and Hege. They take care of everything, and tell us exactly what to do, so that all one needs to do is to just show up and race and have fun.  They are just incredibly kind these guys, and they try to accommodate in the teams as many people as possible who are willing to run. They also organize social events at the club house after the races, so that the fun can continue. In the last race also Frank was invited to join one of the teams, and he enjoyed it so much that he raced with a Varegg t-shirt also at the Fløyen Opp race the following day!

Today I paid my annual membership fee.