Never spar before a race!
Sunday, August 3, 2014
Antelope Island 100 - March 21, 2014
I just realized I never wrote a report on this race. I made 62/50 of this race, furthest distance I've successfully completed. My leg gave out at mile 60 due to a big bruise I attained two days before to my quad while sparring. I started have muscle spasms in that leg about mile 13, and it just got worse from there. By mile 50 I was barely moving, had it stripped out and got moving slowly again, but it just gave out at mile 60 and wouldn't do anything more at mile 62.
Deseret News Marathon July 24, 2014
I decided to sign up for the Deseret News Morning Marathon as a training run this year. Did a slow controled downhill run and it was a hot morning!
Squaw Peak 50 report
On June 6th I again set out hoping for my 3rd finish of Squaw Peak 50. This was my sixth start, and I have not successfully finished Squaw Peak since 2010. After starting coaching almost a year ago with Lisa Smith-Batchen, I've slowly started to see glimpses of possibility of running with speed and endurance again. It has not been easy. My POTS symptoms have improved a lot, but I still have some disadvantages. No matter how hard it train, I still have extreme difficulty with speed uphills. I started my journey with Squaw Peak at 3 am, and surprisingly did not get passed by any runners until mile 12. The heat started making me sick around mile 20, but I was slow and steady and able to make the cutoff at mile 33 by 1:45, 45 minutes before the cutoff. The last 17 miles were rough due to the heat, over exerting myself in the heat to make the cut off, and some extreme blistering, but I finished! That's to Gary Wood and Lynne Neilson for pacing the last 17 miles.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Dreaming on Kathoola 50K snowshoe race
I recently finished the Kathoola 50K Snowshoe Race on January 25th, 2014. I have to admit, snowshoeing is not my favorite sport, but of the 5 times I have started this course, my only other finish was in 2011 after climbing Kilimanjaro. I've made a commitment to train hard this year, to push through my anxiety of the past. Push through POTS, push through adrenal fatigue, push through major surgery. That is what has been my last three years. I have been working to improve myself and get back in the game as an ultra marathon runner. It is a sport that I love, but developed some PTSD symptoms over racing after a couple of years of setbacks.We all have things to push through, and this race was one of them. I pushed through it. I broke through a wall when I did 50 miles of the Yellowstone/Teton 100miler, after not having finished 50 miles in over 2 years. I finished 50k on Antelope Island two weeks later. Since then I have been working on nutrition, and pushing through emotional walls in training, making sure my running dreams are not put on the sidelines as my business and practice grows. Running isn't everything, but it is important to have dreams, and to keep dreams alive. Running is about bettering ourselves.
One week after finishing the 50k on January 25th, I did another 30 miles, this time keeping a 5mph average pace most of the time. Not my fastest, but not my slowest either :) My speed is improving, my body is starting to work for me more consistently, and my mindset is pushing through the anxiety of not being able to finish.
I am now scheduled to run the following
March 21-22 Buffalo 100m on Antelope Island
March 28th Behind the Rocks 50m Moab
June 7th Squaw Peak 50 m
August 2nd Katchina Mosa 100 K
September 5th and 6th Wasatch 100m
September 20 and 21st Yellowstone/Teton 100m
And I will probably throw in a 100K on Antelope Island again in November.
I hope to be much much faster by September and complete Wasatch 100m with a strong finish :) I am thinking I want an under 30 belt buckle.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Race Report on the Yellowstone/ Teton 100 miler Running with POTS: A Journey Back Into Ultrarunning
Race Report on the Yellowstone/ Teton 100 miler
Running with POTS: A Journey Back Into Ultrarunning
Back in July of 2010 I wrote a description of POTS and
symptoms that are associated with it. To learn more about POTS look at my blog
archive.
After being diagnosed with POTS in 2010, I thought I would
have no trouble beating it. But it was a couple of years of beating me to the
ground after that. I have recovered from a lot of things in my life. Becoming
an ultramarathon runner was one of the ways I successfully recovered from a
severe eating disorder by changing my mindset around my body and developing
positive self-talk.
Turns out those skills would be necessary to work my way
back into running. POTS diagnoses was followed by a year of adrenal fatigue
syndrome where I literally had to sleep for 12 hours a day. Imagine balancing
sleep with a demanding graduate school schedule and practicum for 12 months. It
is only with the grace of God that I was able to survive and finish school.
During that time I healed enough to successfully summit
Mount Kilimanjaro. To watch my epic recap video visit Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JidL_3pBqbg
Kilimanjaro was a pilgrimage and a prophetic journey of self
discovery. I had to make a choice, finish when half of my family had been taken
out of the journey due to illness and wonder if they were OK, or quit and go
down the mountain with them. A lot of prayer in the decision told me, I had to
finish. There would be nothing I could do for them if I went down with them,
and I needed to finish the journey. I had a guide, Baraka, who journeyed with
me, and when I wanted to turn around just 30 minutes from the summit due to
Oxygen deprivation effecting my thinking and my body feeling like it was
splitting Baraka said “Come on Simba Lady! We will finish this journey
together!” And so we did. Baraka encouraged me, and kept my inner voices
screaming at me to turn around and run at a lower volume.
After I graduated from the U of U with a Master’s in Social
Work, I was not sure what I was going to do with my life. That was another two
year epic journey of trying different approaches to doing the work that I am
good at and meeting the requirements of 4,000 supervised hours of mental health
practice, while also having a new midwifery school emerge under my feet.
During this time, I had a hysterectomy, and have done a lot
of work to overcome the effects of POTS and heal my adrenal glands. I have also
had a lot of success and miracles with business, growing midwifery education,
and maternal mental health. There were a lot of parallel challenges in that as
well, and continue to be, but every challenge that is overcome brings growth
and unseen blessings with it.
Stress, body limitations, has made running difficult for the
last 3.5 years. In fact, the last 50 mile finish I had was Squaw Peak in June
of 2010. It was a tough finish because I was still having a lot of hydration
issues. The body difficulties have added 50 lbs of weight to my frame in 3
years, and I have suffered through a lot of fatigue. But I have gotten a little
better every year, even though I have entered many races and DNF’d all of them
except for The SnowShoe 50 K in January of 2011 where I was dead last finisher,
but the only female finisher and ended up with a first place trophy!
Circa Kat'cina Mosa, August 2013: My speed was slowly improving, but when the race started I
started feeling hopeless and depressed, and lost desire to race. After thinking
about it, and knowing the signs of PTSD, I realized I had a lot of fear that my
body would never work efficiently again. I couldn’t’ put all of my mental
energy into it, because I had a lot of emotions and built up discouragement
about perpetual DNFs, and even though I am pretty good at not personalizing, it
was a big sting in my heart when someone jokingly referred to me as “The famous
DNFer” when I dropped at Katchina and asked to be taken to Big Springs to be an
aid station worker. What the
person who made the comment doesn’t realize, is that it takes courage for me to
start each race knowing that I may not finish, but never saying I won’t finish.
Always starting with the intent to finish, and only dropping when I have to.
What he didn’t know is that the alternative would have been that if I quit
running, my body would have likely continued to lose functionality and I would
have become bedridden.
POTS can be a scary diagnosis. Some people with POTS get so
severe that they can’t climb out of bed in the morning anymore and are
bedridden much of the time. I was crossing that bridge, and through all my
research on POTS I learned that those who fight their symptoms can keep them
from getting worse, and may see improvement. I kept ultrarunning, and starting
races because I needed something big to keep me from giving in to those days
that I didn’t think I could get out of bed.
I have been able to improve my health and through a lot of
emotional healing, work, health and dietary adjustments, I would say that I
barely notice that I have POTS anymore. I have to be careful, and I know how to
read my body and adjust for what it needs.
After Katchina Mosa, I contacted Lisa Smith-Batchen, whom
ironically I had met just a few days after completing Squaw Peak 50 in 2010,
and ran the last of her 6 miles with her at Liberty Park on her 50 mile in 50
state journey. I ran Lisa and Jay’s race in Idaho in 2011, and made 46 miles of
the 100, and then after a hysterectomy 6 months later, running was more like a
walk for about a year.
After a month of coaching she talked me into coming back to
finish the 100 miler. I started again, with the intent to finish, but needed to
drop at 50 miles. But I made it 50 miles, and that was a milestone! And my legs
aren’t sore two days later, even though I haven’t run a lot of distance in two
years!
Now my goal is to win. Next year I will be back, and I am
going to win a 100 mile race J
I have started working on figuring out this metabolism, so I can restore a
healthy weight and hopefully solve some inflammation problems. Me winning a 100
mile race seems like a joke right now. But I am going to do it. I dream big,
and I accomplish my goals. It is more about the journey to see what I am made
of and how far I can go that drives it.
Monday, April 22, 2013
A Marathon For Boston
Run one for Boston, and help out a good cause!
Saturday was significant for many reasons. One, was for the cause I was running for. Many of my ultra-friends ran three marathons back-to-back this weekend, or will be sometime this week. They put in 78.6 miles each, or one marathon for each of the 3 victims who died at the tragic bombing of the 2013 Boston marathon.
Why was this significant when their are bombing, killings, and terrorists attacks everyday all over the world? Well for one, runners are loyal to each other, and distance runners support each other as family. So it seems natural that the running community would band together to help out the family of Richard Martin, the 8-year old boy who was killed while watching his father finish the Boston marathon.
But for me this marathon was doubly significant. Since having some major setbacks with being diagnosed with POTS in 2010, and having major life events and moves, and then a hysterectomy in February of 2012, this was a breakthrough for my running recovery.
The last successful marathon or greater distance I have run was running 50 miles of the Buffalo 100 miler starting at Yellowstone National Park, running near the Grand Tetons and ending in Driggs, Idaho in October 2011. At that time my running was starting to come back to more normal, but still not quite there and we had just moved to an apartment in Springville and broken ground on our new home in Springville, Utah.
A few months after that among starting a midwifery school, moving into our new home, and other major life changes I had a hysterectomy. That surgery left me barely able to run as it took my muscles per 8 months to be able to show some speed! It really weakened my core and upper body. It was a frustrating and demotivating 8 months and I was feeling pretty discouraged about my running life.
Many other great things have happened during that recovery time, but I put on about 25 lbs after my surgery and then decided to sign up for a fitness challenge with Lisa Smith-Batchen and Julie Bryan because I needed a coach coming into my email box to remind me to get moving and to stop focusing on how out of shape I was feeling. Tandi Ogden Suitter, my mean trainer has kept on top of me, and suddenly things began working again. Then I started a local community ladies fitness group, and helping other people helps me to feel accountable to work on myself.
That helped kick me into gear. Then my sisters Alyssa Workman and Katrina Bishop, got me hooked up on Herbalife. Suddenly I have a ton of energy, where I was dragging all the time before. After committing to run 26.2 on Saturday, and not knowing how my body would handle it since it has been so long since I was in gear I woke up to a downpour of trenchel rain, and on a cold morning begin my race at 3:15 am.
I kept a slow and steady pace, wanting to make sure I finished my first recovery marathon of about an average of 5-4.5mph, for the first 17 miles. And then I had to take a 20 minute break to change my clothes because I was getting hypothermic and ran down to a local 5k keeping about the same pace. After the 5 k with about 4.56 miles to go, I had to take a break to eat breakfast because in all of my excitement to finish I had gone too long without nutrition.
But after two pieces of toast with butter and my mom, Ange' Workman's, homemade Peach/Loganberry Jam, and two eggs. I headed out in the cold again. By this time it had stopped raining and was just overcast. I finished the last 4.56 at a slower 4.5-4mph pace, and then finished.
I was tired from the cold, wet, and early morning, but felt great. I was very surprised when I woke up Sunday morning and had no tightness in my muscles, in fact my hips are looser than before I ran on Saturday! I was not sore, and didn't feel like I had run more than 5 miles! Today I feel like I could run another 26.2! I may, and maybe I will completed 2 more marathons this week for the victims of Boston!
Glad to be back into action and I am feeling hopeful about being able to complete the Squaw Peak 50 on June 2nd, and Wasatch 100 in September!
Donate to this great cause:
http://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/EnduranceTrust/westandunitedwerununited?utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=share&utm_source=at-email&utm_content=mainpage#.UW3FTQjFfbI.email
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
April 20th, running 26.2 for Boston and a Good Cause, Join me!
Facebook event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/158318651001637/158508784315957/?notif_t=like
Donate to the Richards family:
http://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/EnduranceTrust/westandunitedwerununited?utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=share&utm_source=at-email&utm_content=mainpage#.UW3FTQjFfbI.email
Register for the FREE 5k in Springvile on April 20th, 2013 or to watch me finish come to the Art's Park before 8am!
Tara Tulley
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)