September Olympic Training

I am still training for the 2009 Maine Games. Over the last 3 weeks I've ran every other day, except for one two-day break when I went camping and to the Aquarium in Monterey with Breanne.
The running is getting easier. Plagued by knee problems since high school, I realized that it has been over 10 years since I've been able to go for so many runs in so short a stretch of time. Usually, when I decide to try and get back in to running, I go for a short run and then I can't walk for a week. My brother has the same problem- maybe it's genetic. Either way, I started running two months ago when I got to San Francisco and I've slowly been increasing the run-load. Eventually I'd like to be able to go whenever I feel the itch, four days in a row if I so desire, but I'm not quite ready for that. This morning, upon waking up, I instantly felt like running but I stopped myself because I went for a particularly long one last night, inadvertently getting lost in the Presidio barracks area.

I'm not sure what it was that made the difference this time with my knees. There are several things I'm doing differently than I had in the past. For starters, I'm eating better. I eat a load of proteins and my diet is better balanced, giving me more energy. More importantly probably, I took a few years off from running and rebuilt my leg strength during that time. After every run, I do squats and lunges and calf exercises. Also, I'm not pushing myself too hard yet. My natural inclination when running is much like a dog's: I see something or someone ahead of me and I must pass it. In a city like San Francisco, with it's active population, this would be a serious folly. So instead of running myself in to the ground, I purposely put rhythmically slow music on my Ipod and try to ignore other runners.

Of course, just going for runs isn't going to allow me to medal in the 2009 Maine Summer Olympics. One of the four preselected events is the mile run, and the 100m dash is on the ballot. So I'm concentrating more on speed than endurance, though the latter still needs work. To account for this, I've been going on runs of varying distance with interspersed sprinting. There are plenty of enormous hills around my place and two of the steepest ones have stone steps running along the sidewalks. Every run I end by sprinting (or something close to it) the two sets of steps on Fillmore and Webster. My plan is that, when nearing the end of the Olympic mile when I need to turn it up a notch, I'll have trained specifically for it.

As for other events, I've been doing Sudokus in case that is selected. We bought another World map shower curtain so we can have one at our next place but I've yet to start studying countries. I don't have a ping pong table to practice on and other than weight training I can't really train for the tug-of-war. All other events will be decided in late October after all the ballots have been returned. The Olympics are still 11 months away but I intend to be in the best shape of my life next August.