Yay! Today I ran the Seven Hills Scholten Awater run in Nijmegen. It's a 15 km run through the most hilly part of the Netherlands. It's a beautiful trail and loads of people sign up for the race every year. Today was my first time competing, even tough I've been living really close to the start/finish line when I was at uni. The name of the race would suspect it to pass seven hills. The race owes his name to the seven hills road that covers a huge part of the track and even though there are a lot of hills on that road, it is not seven of them. This article (dutch) explains why a road with hills, but not seven, is called "seven hills road" nonetheless.. it might have to do something with an alternate definition of the Dutch word "zeven", meaning seven.
On my way! Let's kick some butt.. literally ;)
Today was quite the fight though..
The past few weeks I've been experiencing a nagging pain in my buttock. It severely impaired me in my running and when the pain first started I kept limping slightly for a few days after my run. Weirdest thing is that it really didn't impair me in my climbing...So apparently I'm not using my buttocks when climbing? Why do I feel like I should.. haha.
I let it be for a while, but last sunday, a week before the run, when I didn't notice any improvement, I decided to contact my physiotherapist first thing on Monday. Fortunately she was able to schedule an appointment for me the same day. My mum figured it would be a piriformis syndrome, where the piriformis muscle irritates the sciatic nerve and causes pain in the buttock/hip area with numbness and tingling along the back of the leg and foot. The examination showed however that I have a strained gluteus medius muscle. Remedy: rest and massaging. So my physiotherapist massaged the muscle and explained to me how to massage it myself using a tennis ball. So the next day I had to go into the office telling my colleagues about my strained buttock muscle. They had a good laugh out of it.. especially when I showed them how the massaging worked: put the tennis ball between the wall and the injured muscle and start rubbing it like Jungle Book's bear Baloo rubs his back in "The Bare Necessities". I acknowledge the hilarity of it all, but all joking aside it did improve my complaints.
So when I started running today it felt pretty good. I could still tell the muscle was irritated, but the nagging pain was gone. The weather was a different story.. strong winds and rain, fortunately the temperature wasn't bad at all. At the start line I randomly ran into one of my colleagues and his niece. The three of us ran the race together. The first 10k felt good. I took it relatively slow, but was still well under a 1h 30 minutes finishing time. I loved the variety in the trail. Hill up, hill down, hill up, hill down interspersed with some flatter parts in a gorgeous late fall scenery. At 10k my left side started to get really irritated and I somehow messed up with my energy level as well, because I started to get extremely hungry. The las few k's my colleague and his niece started to accelerate and I had a tough time keeping up. But we managed to cross the finish line with the three of us. Yaay!! So proud of everyone starting this run, it wasn't easy! I'll be back..most likely not next year, since I'll hopefully be in Canada by that time, but for sure the year after. Who's with me?
In the train back home I found I was really craving broccoli. The weirdest thing, because as a kid I despised broccoli, thinking it being the most gross vegetable around. Today however I made my sister and me a large plate of cooked broccoli, sweet potato fries and steak and enjoyed it to the max. Great post run meal! Break Free, Eat Broccoli! Big, Bang, Broccoli!
What did you have for dinner today?
Talk to you soonish! Xo
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