Things do not always go as planned and you have to \"Adapt, improvise, overcome\" (quote from Heartbreak Hill, 1986, yes I\'m getting old). Last week was a mixed bag of good and really bad. When things go really bad you question what you are doing, you ask yourself what did you doing wrong, and how do you recover, change, and get back on track.
Some people have coaches that do all that analyzing and worrying for them. Since I coach myself I get to worry and analyze but get advice from people who are impartial and removed and who can see things more clearly than myself being in the moment. One thing you have to watch out for is changing course drastically, sometimes its still all about having faith in the plan you had laid out. This is why I have had a hard time with coaches, my willingness to put 100% of my faith in them and truly let them lead me down the path. I think there are excellent coaches out there, but I\'m not a professional runner and this is still just my hobby not my career.
You have to keep things in perspective. When all this training and focus is over and I run or don\'t run a good race that will not take away from the joy and relief at the finish line when my kids will come running up and give me a hug and say \"daddy \'o\". Although they might follow that up with a question like \"why were you so far behind the winner\". Young kids are priceless aren\'t they...totally unfiltered.
Back to what went well and what went really bad.
The good:
Tuesday after a day of rest (only a 4 mile easy run) and no PC I finished a good track session of 4x1200 reps with 1:30 recovery in 72 sec laps. I was lucky it was cool in the morning, finally a speedwork day in the mid 50s. It session didn\'t feel that bad either, it was all about cranking it out. During the reps I would keep telemetry if I was suffering, or just breathing/working very hard. Running hard is something you have to get used to, sometimes you mix up suffering with hard effort. I usually equate suffering as I\'m in over my head and hard workout is maintainable. The previous week in 65+ weather I as barely making 73 sec laps. A little more rest and cooler weather really made a difference. I was very excited by this change in weather and a solid workout to see what it would bring later in the week during my MP run.
As I had indicated last week I was planning on increasing the intensity of my PC workouts over the final 3 weeks of the high volume phase. I decided to try 20 min sessions at 110+ rpm with a little more resistance. I was very tired Monday and Tuesday and fell asleep with the kids and I missed the Tuesday PC workout. Wednesday I tried to make it up by doing a hard 20 min PC at 110+ RPM before my 17 mile run. Later that night I did another 40 min at higher resistance with some at over 110 RPM. Thursday I wasn\'t supposed to do any PC and only the 12 mile run. Being obsessed I did another 20 min hard 110+ rpm PC workout in the morning after the 12 mile run. The reason I say 110+ is that over 110 I\'m all over the place. I average about 114RPM but fluctuate from a low of 110 up to 120RPM depending on how much focus I\'m keeping. My HR during these 20 min hard sessions peaks out about 120 BPM compared to the easy PC days at 100 RPM my HR is under 100 BPM.
Its interesting to note that 100RPM now seems normal, and 90 slow. I can usually feel comfortable over 100RPM. The only day where 100rpm seems a tad uncomfortable is is Sundays after all the running for the week is completed and I have to do the final 40 min PC workout of the week. My legs are usually fried by then.
The bad:
You can see already where this is heading before I even start writing. Am I special and able to handle all this increased work load on top of all the things I was already doing. NO...but being in the moment I underestimated the effect the increased PC intensity would have on my running. This is all an experiment, \"Adapt, improvise, overcome\".
For the Friday MP run the weather did not cooperate. In the morning it was 65+ deg with 90+% humidity, fall isn\'t quite here yet. I carried some water with me the first 3 miles due to the heat. I started out putting down the standard starting 5:20 miles. By mile 5 my spilt was a couple seconds off what I had done last week and I could feel the legs tiring. Cardiovascularly I was doing fine but the legs were starting to feel heavy. Mile 6 and 7 both were just a couple seconds off what I had done last week but still under target pace.
You can always feel the crash coming well before it actually happens. Its the little feelings in the body that don\'t seem quite right.
Mile 8 has a little uphill and I was interested to see how bad that was going to feel. It was bad. I dropped a 5:30 mile and I knew it was all over because my legs would not turn over at all, they felt like lead. Being off pace at only mile 8 and fighting it you know your pretty much done. Mile 9 and 10 went down with 5:38 and 5:48 respectively and I threw in the towel at mile 10 instead of continuing to mile 12 as planned.
It was a bad day. I have only had a couple such sessions that were that bad. Both of which occurred when I had a sinus infection and was sick. This time there was no sinus infection but I did loose 4 lbs of water weight during my 10 miles because of the heat which is not good.
I believe now that the reason for such a bad MP run was the increased intensity of the PC sessions the preceding days totally fried my hip flexors. It looks like with all the volume of training I\'m putting in the MP run is more susceptible to the fatigue.
In retrospect it is interesting how much of an impact tired hip flexors had on my MP workout. The downside is that it messed up my confidence pretty bad and forced me to ask a lot of questions of my training plan. Some people said get rid of doing the PC, some said tone it down, some said don\'t worry about being fried now its 3 weeks from now you should be concerned. Its all perspective and no right answer. I know how fast I would be if I just stick to the normal training I usually do. This is about upping the ante and trying something above and beyond what I normaly do one last time before I retire from trying to PR anymore at the marathon.
I had many miles over the weekend to think about what to do next and how to correct what I\'m doing wrong. My 24 mile run on Saturday actually wasn\'t that bad compared to last week and considering the Friday MP run it was way better than I expected. I had a solid last 6 miles of the first 20 and nice jog the last 4. Then I was able to hop on the PC for a 20 hard session later that morning before we headed out camping with the kids. Sunday was about the same. I was fatigued during the easy 15 miles but it was manageable with an easy 40 min of PC in the evening.
My conclusion over the weekend was to try another MP run on Tuesday (moved up from Friday) after the Monday rest day. That would give my body the most rest of any day the week and no PC the day before either to fatigue me. I figured that a shorter speed session on Friday would probably be more manageable than a MP session with the volume I\'m doing. Depending on how this goes I would re-evaluate my training plan.
This week\'s title is called week 5.2 for a reason. I\'ll tell you what happened today on the MP run.
The stars must be aligned today. The weather was in the high 50s, the first time I\'ve gotten to do a MP run in under 65F weather this season. I\'m a cold weather runner and the colder it is the better I run normally for the marathon. All of my fastest marathons have been set in weather under 40F were I don\'t dehydrate as much although I had a great run compared to other runners at Boston in 2004 in 85+ degrees. .
The run started out a second or two per mile faster than my first MP run this season and I was feeling good, solid, comfortable but its a long workout. I let the uphill on mile 5 go slow (5:28) because I wanted to ensure I did all 12 miles on target pace (5:25) and I was clipping off the miles well under this so far. Back down my course and it wasn\'t until mile 10 that I started to feel like I needed to push a little to keep rolling, but rolling was 5:18s not the target 5:25. I finished with a 5:16 on the uphill mile 12 pushing the last 400M home. It was great. I averaged 5:18 per mile and it was under control not an all out race. It was the fastest I\'ve ever run this course during a MP workout. The best thing was I was clipping off at about 5:18 pace for most of the miles and didn\'t have a first mile that was super fast that skewed the average. My first mile was 5:16 then 5:18 and my last two miles (basically redoing mile 1,2) were 5:18, 5:16.
The reason this workout went well can be attributed to many things: the weather was cooler, I\'m only 1.5 lbs away from goal weight, I was rested and didn\'t fry my legs the day before, and all the hard work I\'ve been putting in. The volume of training (running + extra PC) is doing some good, I just need to be more careful how I schedule my MP runs into it vs. all the quality work. In 2 more weeks the high volume will decrease and I won\'t have to be quite so concerned about getting fried legs. It will be interesting if this improvement will be seen on furture MP runs or even maybe some improvement.
Last week was 100mpw running with a 4x1200 session, 10 mile MP run, and a 24 mile long run and the rest just mileage. I was down to 3 hours on the PC due to scheduling issues but completed 4x 20 min sessions of hard spinning at 110+rpm so the overall quality was up.
PS: I also found last week that I can ride w/o hands on the stationary bike going 110+rpm with some resistance. Crazy feeling swinging the arms on the stationary. It cranks the rpm\'s up and the HR.
Lets see what the rest of this week brings during Friday\'s VP workout.
My marathon pace run route and elevation chart can be found at:
Age: 35, Sex: Male, Height:5'3",racing wt: 119lbs, marathon PR: 2:20:54, Occupation: Full time Mechanical Engineer; Family: 2 children ages 2, 4
Background: Ran mediocore in high school. Transitioned to road bike racing in college and was 7th in the collegiate nationals road race in 1994. I graduated and quite bike racing and didn't do much for several years. In 1999 I took up running marathons recreationally with my wife as an excuse to travel. In 2003 I took up marathoning competitively.