Figured out a good Irvine trail

I've worked in Irvine for a while and haven't found any good trails which would compare with those in Habitat Authority. I'm talking about something like a 10 mile loop (NOT PAVED) with hills in a fairly wild area. The Puente Hills in the Habitat Authority area (by Whittier/Hacienda Heights/Roland Heights/La Habra Heights) are about 700 feet higher than the surrounding area. It's not difficult to find a trail or dirt road with a significant amount of climb - 400 to 500' - in a mile or less. So although there are some hills in Irvine - for instance off Portola Parkway - I had not found any hilly remote areas with accessible trails. The Quail Hills 1.7 mile loop is pretty flat, not that remote (it borders the 405) and it's only 1.6 miles long (boring). I had also run along the crushed granite path that borders Shady Canyon. Crushed granite is nice because it doesn't turn to mud when it rains but otherwise, boring. So I was browsing through the area via Google Earth and started looking at the trail which started across the street from the Quail Hills trailhead on the south end of the sports park. I got around to exploring it this week after work and it's pretty good. The route I took is 9 miles with what Strava says is 1.6k worth of climb, about evenly split between the initial out-and-back and 4.3 mile loop at the far end. I've also figured out another option which would add 2.6 miles on to the loop. The far end goes through the Nix Nature Center in Laguna Canyon (with bathrooms and water and even maps). Coming back from the nature center would have been confusing with various roads splitting off from the one I want to stay except for 3 things: 1) I can usually figure out which road I should take 2) I had my phone with Google Navigation and 3) they have very good signage on the road which keeps you going the way I wanted to go. On Wednesday, I finished in the dark which wasn't much of a problem. The last fairly steep downhill is not perfectly smooth but I didn't have problems with it in the dark. On Friday, I cut 19 minutes off my time and 0.3 miles of detours I took on Wednesday and finished before it was dark.

One thing to mention is that there are plenty of wildlife cameras next to the trail. There's one by the really expensive homes that has a flash which bewildered me (lightning?) on Wednesday. I figured out the source of the flash on Friday so the next time I run through there, I'm definitely going to "moon" it.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had been losing weight on the new diet. That got turned around once I told my wife about it but at the end of the week, I got tired of packing myself with food. So now, I'll eat per my appetite and see what happens to my weight.

Also ran half of what used to be my easy hill repeat workout in Whittier - repeats of a 2.5 mile loop with 689' of climb as I recall. That seems like a good candidate for Thursday workouts when I can get up there with at least an hour of daylight. I used to run 4 washing machine loops (counter clockwise, clockwise, counter clockwise, clockwise) in what I recall was close to 1:50. I'm interested to see how close I can get that to 2 hours.

My legs were sort of dead this past weekend. I had to walk on stretches up the Silverado Motorway this morning. In the recent past, running Silverado Motorway on Sunday set up some good track runs on Monday so I'll see how that goes tomorrow.

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
4.5 miles on track. Just didn't feel like it.	2xS Loop in Whittier, 5 miles, about 1.4k	Irvine Loop, 9.4	nothing (rain)	Irvine Loop, 9.1, allegedly 1.6k	5x1k, averaging about 4:50 (legs dead), "A" drills	Silverado Motorway, 6.2 miles, 2k (legs tired)

137 pounds

I got all the way down to 137 pounds due to the vegan diet. I weighed 145 pounds as a high school senior running cross country and track so that seemed light. We adjusted my diet, eating more potatoes, beans and grain and I gained back 3 pounds.

I repeated a couple of old mistakes 1) focusing on mileage and 2) therefore running a lot of flat road runs. And while I was doing that, I neglected my exercises. After a week and a half of that, my soleus got sore again and the backs of my knees started having some little problems (lower hamstring). So last week looked like this.

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
El Dorado Park - 10	nothing	Irvine Figure 8 Loop - 10	El Dorado Variant - 10	nothing	nothing	"A" exercises

New Year's Resolutions

I have two New Year's resolutions.

1. Post to this blog every week.
2. Start doing eye exercises.

I'm often discouraged by my lack of consistency and so don't post to the blog. However, I think posting on a regular basis will serve as encouragement during the week - like having someone else on the track when I'm running.

Secondly, doing ankle exercises and core exercises outside of running have yielded results: I don't have problems with my right ankle and soleus anymore and I have better posture when I'm running. So I'm going to add eye exercises since I've noticed some deterioration there.

This week's workouts

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
4 miles (track)	10 miles (road)	10 miles (road)	10 miles (road)	10 miles (road/dirt)	Maple Springs Truck Trail - 14 miles paved/dirt, 3000' vertical	Nothing - right knee a little sore

Started vegan diet

My older daughter was home last weekend and my two daughters were watching the Forks Over Knives documentary. I doing things around the house and half listening to the TV. At some point, it caught my attention and I sat down and started watching it. They kept repeating "plant based, whole foods diet" and then detailing various studies that led them to that conclusion and illustrated its benefits. After a while, my thought was "Why haven't my doctors mentioned this?" So the next day, I started on a vegan diet. My breakfast didn't change a bit - oatmeal with almonds, raisins and tea. Lunch was a little different - no eggs in the salad, no yogurt with my fruit and a peanut butter and raisin sandwich. Supper was different. That was Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday were a little difficult. On Wednesday in particular, I was getting frustrated and a bit apathetic at work. On Thursday, I worked from home so I could get something from the kitchen whenever I liked. I kept notes on what I ate. And that night, my wife made fried rice with avocado and that hit the spot. On Friday, I took way too much food to work and was in a great mood all day.

As far as workouts were concerned, first off - this week was somewhat disrupted. The election was on Tuesday and combined with my slow commute home from LA, pretty much canceled the Tuesday workout. Secondly, we were supposed to go sign some documents directly after work on Thursday so that nixed plans for that workout. Finally, we had rain this week in So Cal which means the dirt tracks aren't necessarily usable. In spite of that, I got in what currently pass for my long runs - 10 miles on pavement on both Monday and Wednesday and Harding Truck Trail on Saturday. The first difference I noticed on Wednesday was that my leg (right soleus/ankle) wasn't bothering me. This could have been for a variety of reasons. However on Saturday, the run was definitely better. This run is - generally speaking - a 9 miles climb followed by a 9 mile descent on a rocky fire road. The previous week, I felt worn out about a mile before the top and felt pretty thrashed at the end. In fact, I made a note in my log questioning whether getting thrashed on Saturday was dragging down the rest of the week. This week, I felt fine pretty much throughout, even getting a little knee lift throughout. I felt a little beat up in the last mile but much better than the previous week. Another more subjective difference was that things looked different. Part of this was due to having rain during the week. So a lot of tracks were visible - deer and even what I think were mountain lion tracks. The other thing to note is that I didn't have a particular optimistic frame of mind going into either my Wednesday or Saturday workouts, thinking that it was quite possible in both cases that I might not put in a full workout. What happened though on the Saturday workout at least was that I started the usual monologue in my head about whatever subject and kept my mind occupied that way. So pretty soon I realize - hey there's the 3 mile point and the run keeps going well after that. I didn't time it but I felt like I was moving pretty well by my current standards.

So in summary, I had some expected rough parts figuring out how to implement the diet as well as some (expected) skepticism from my wife. But even within a week, we've figured out some solutions (dishes) for this diet. And finally, I've seen some physical improvements which could be related. So it's going well so far.

Thank Goodness for Triggerpoint Foam Rollers

Looking at my log, I started my most recent struggle on 8/13/2012. I ran up Silverado Motorway and aggravated my sore soleus and ankle on the right side. I injured that soleus in college. I think my achilles is partially detached on that side - at any rate, I can feel a bit of a groove running down the middle of that soleus. So obviously, I've been running on that for years including all of my post-high school PRs. But every so often, it gets aggravated. My daughter came down to SoCal to compete in the Great Catalina Dory Race.

From The Great Catalina Dory Race, Sep 16, 2012

She gave me a Triggerpoint foam roller and also told me to start doing calf raises, pressing through the ankle flex. In addition, I've been doing various exercises for my lower leg - point/flex foot, ankle circles, balance on my forefoot, balance on a ball on one foot. But the critical improvement has been using that foam roller every day.

From Foam Roller

My leg has been getting more and more solid over the past week. I ran a flat 15.5 miles yesterday and it only bothered me a bit between 12 and 13 miles. Then today I ran up Silverado Motorway and it only bothered me a little in the last 100 yards.

From Silverado Motorway, Oct 21, 2012

Date	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
10/1/2012	Larwin 9 laps, A, B	7th, NE loop	Larwin 9 laps, A, B	6xturnbull - 49:32	off	6 on HTT	9xWorkman Hill in 32:38
10/8/2012	Bike commute from IRV	Bike commute from LA	off	2 Signal Hill Laps	off	Maple Springs Truck Trail	9xWorkman Hill in 32:02
10/15/2012	"A", "B", 5x1k (5:25, 5:13, 5:01, 4:49, 4:46)	7th, NE loop - about 70 minutes	5k in 26:14 - 5:33, 5:28, 5:20, 5:07, 4:46	6xturnbull	off	15.5 - 4xhome loop	Bedford

Consistency, Inconsistency, Too Bad

Well I had 3 or 4 pretty consistent weeks but that was a while ago. I really can't seem to push my mileage more than 50 per week for more than a week. But too bad, I'm not going to worry about it. I'm just going with the workouts that seem to work including (gasp) riding the bike. So now most Tuesdays, I ride 29 miles home from downtown LA and Fridays I'm going to ride 24 miles home from Irvine. The latter definitely affects my Saturday workout but oh well. This week I switched my weekend road run to Saturday and did a reduced trail run on Sunday. So I'm going with that for now and still trying to get some consistency. Today, I ran up in the Whittier hills. I saw 7 tarantula hawks - big black wasps with orange wings - and 5 rattlesnake tracks all in the same place, I guess from an indecisive snake. I found a poor little dying lizard that apparently had just been run over by a mountain bike. Those little lizards seem so innocent. I passed 6 mountain bikes on the next climb as a tiny measure of justice. On Thursday, I went back to my usual hill repeats off Turnbull Canyon in Whittier.

Jokes for the week

Just to give you an idea of the sort of jokes I make...

To my wife and mother-in-law (and spoken in Khmer),
"Jovena (the cat) wakes up at 4 am; I wake up at 4 am.
Jovena takes naps; I take naps.
Jovena eats grass; I eat grass."
Almost true - I had been pulling weeds in the backyard and eating the little seedpods of the Oxalis.

When my wife wasn't feeling too great,
me: "Do men have anything to do with menopause?"
wife: "Yes!"

To a co-worker,
"You're at your best when you're sarcastic and abusive."
True. He's been given both my approval and our manager's encouragement to needle me when I get temperamental with the other guys in the group (because I find it useful and it comes naturally to him). That's the abusive part. Then this week when I spammed him by pasting 30 rows of text in a group chat that was useful only for one guy, he replied with "Oh great, now I have crap all over my screen." which I thought was a good comment (in a way) supporting focused communications. BTW, he thought the joke was funny judging by the chuckling.

After crashing my bike and scraping up my hands, side, left elbow and leg ,
to my wife: "Don't worry; The bike's ok."