I’ll unveil the red carpet and welcome myself back to the good ol’ blog, which has been untouched since the beginning of June. As per the last post, I’ll keep the trend strong with sending out kudos for the first paragraph. Kudo #1 goes out to my boy Dave Proctor of Black Diamond, Alberta. Dave ran the Sinister 7 ultra marathon on July 11th, winning with a course record 18:21:47. The man is a beast, and such an amazing human being to be around. To add on, he can beat the hell out of you at his sports message clinic in Black Diamond. Kudo #2 (but is really #1 in my heart) goes out to Alissa St. Laurent of Edmonton, Alberta. She also ran Sinister 7 and nearly caught Dave – placing second overall, “chicking” a lot of dudes, and shattering the female course record by about 2.5 hours. Amazing! Kudo #3 goes to a man that is the human definition of superman, Blaine Penny, for something that you’d never expect – being DQ’d in a Newfoundland race. The story is hilarious and can be found here: http://www.nfldsportsmag.ca/community/tely-10-disqualification-of-chris-hanlon/. Atta boy Blaine, keep it up.
Onto some running stuff. I’m currently on beer 2, which is not a lot by any standard, but for a kid that gets mistaken for a stick at times, this could get wild, so grab a bowl of popcorn. The past couple months have been up and down. After the race, I took a “week off” – golfed a couple times, ran a few times, and biked a bit. From there, time on the bike increased and the runs decreased. I was feeling good: demolished, but good. Back in December, I made a large commitment to ramp up the miles and decrease everything else, this including weight training and stretching. At the beginning of July, that commitment finally caught up with me and I developed a niggle in my knee (won’t disclose which side so it remains mysterious). This was a full result of not doing any injury prevention work. As an athlete, we like to glorify ourselves by saying that we do all of the little stuff to make us who we are, but who am I kidding, I just ran for 6 months. I’ve been asked a fair amount “how much core work do you do?”, “do you ever lift weights?”, “do you cross train?”, well, the answer to those is simply no; and I fully regret that.
The past 6 months have been a running lie because I was bound to get hurt and it was just a matter of time. Thankfully it wasn’t before Calgary. The past 3 weeks have been filled with hard work in the treatment office (primarily physio and a little bit of TLC from athletic/sports message) and the gym. When I first stepped into the gym, it was weird! I picked up a dumbbell and started flailing. It looked like I was doing cross-fit with poor technique, hahahaha, just kidding, cross-fit is filled with poor technique. Seriously though, I was an absolute mess with my 3 pound dumbbells. The second day in the gym, I decided to man up and grab some big boy weights – the 5 pound dumbbells, and WOW has that made a difference. I’m huge! Dwayne Johnson watch out, I’m building the gains. With my new found love for the lift, I’m off on a new direction – staying injury free.
As my focus transitions over to the fall racing season, my training has changed up a bit. The miles have been nearly cut in half and the gym work has really increased. Another new thing in there that I’m trying out is called stretching. It’s weird, but it’s working and I highly recommend it to everybody that moves one foot ahead of the next. Initially, I thought the fall was going to focus around a half marathon, but that probably won’t be the case. My focus has shifted to the Dino Dash 5K in Calgary, the Eastside 10K in Vancouver, and the Alberta Cross Country series leading up to Canadian Nationals. My goals are simple – be injury free, be strong, and run with passion. If those align for the next 4 months, I envision myself fighting for a place on the Canadian national team (which would be the coolest!) and it will put me in a good place ahead of 2016. I have some big things planned for spring 2016, so hopefully this all goes well.
The next 4 months will be tough, so as I sneak back into the underground, you can find me on the pathways or in the gym, which leaves one question to be answered: do you even lift? Pffffft, I’ll answer that. Nope.
Trevor Hofbauer 