Break a Leg

About ten years ago, Tony Adams (a very well known English football player) was suffering from a very persistent ankle injury that threatened to prematurely finish his career. Eventually his manager sent him to a specialist in France. The first thing he made him do was to jump one-legged up a staircase – on his injured foot! When Adams reached the top still in one piece the doctor told him to go home, he was fine. Within no time, he was playing again in the Premier League. In his subsequent autobiography Adams said that he felt the doctor was deliberately trying to break his ankle, and when it withstood the pressure he realised the problem was mainly in his head.

With that story in my mind I deliberately tried to break my knee yesterday.

This pain in my left knee has been a constant companion for three weeks now and I while I have managed some heavy mileage in the meantime I have been avoiding any hills because running downhill hurt a lot.

Yesterday I did hill repeats.

That wasn’t just out of self-loathing. When I drew up an outline of my training cycle I pencilled in the week beginning on 23 Jul as the first week of a hill phase. Since it’s advisable to introduce that kind of training gradually I planned one day of hill repeats in each of the 2 weeks before that, and therefore I was due one. But with my knee issues I wasn’t sure if I would be able to do even one hill run, never mind a whole set of them. Consequently, yesterday was primarily a way to see if the knee would withstand the workout.

I got a pleasant surprise when I arrived at the base of said hill. Last year that was a road in desperately bad condition, with potholes every few meters that on more than one occasion nearly made me go over my ankle. Not only have they filled the holes in the meantime, they even covered the entire surface with a layer of compact dirt. Perfect! How did they know? After that good start things could only go well. I started out with two ascends of steep hill running, concentrating on lifting the knees as high as possible. It felt surprisingly easy. On the third repeat I added a few steps of bounding into the mix on 3 occasions, and the HR immediately shot up by 10 bpm. I took it very easy on the downhills (no need to overdo things), and did 3x200 strides at the bottom with 200m of jogging in-between before starting the next set. After three sets my knee let me know that it had enough, and since you are supposed to take it easy on the first workout of that kind I said goodbye to the hills and was content to run the rest of the workout on flat terrain. I added a few miles at the end to boost the mileage a little bit.

The last time I tried that workout my calves were almost comically sore for 5 days afterwards. Today I felt mostly fine, but there was definitely some soreness at the top of the calves. Nevertheless I headed out for my long run. My normal long run day is Friday, but I will be in Valentia on Friday, and with the extended commute from there I would have to get up at 4 am for 22 miles. I decided to swap Wednesday and Friday around to take advantage of the fact that Niamh and the kids have already left Caragh Lake and I didn’t have to come home in time for family breakfast, which allowed me the luxury of a lie-in until 5 am. The weather was perfect today, cloudy and mostly calm, and I headed out for the first of 3 loops. I decided to start with a flat 5-mile loop to Ard-na-Sidhe, then a hillier 10 mile one along Caragh Lake, with a final loop on the same road again but with a closer turn-around point for 7 miles. I also resolved to ignore the pace and be content with whatever the legs would be able to deliver.

The first loop went okay, if a little bit slow. I mostly managed to suppress any urge to speed up, but the next 5 miles took exactly 40 minutes. After that the wheels started to come off. I wasn’t quite sure quite where the legs started to grow those extra weights, but it was getting increasingly difficult to keep going. The miles, which had been flying by until now, started to get more and more drawn out (don’t you just hate it when that happens?) and I had the feeling of slowing down a lot. In actual fact the pace only dropped by a few seconds per mile. I was quite weary when I reached our driveway, but headed out for the third loop anyway. “The turn-around point is just 3.5 miles from here”. That made it sound easy; 3.5 miles are always manageable, aren’t they? They were, but I was definitely feeling quite low. However, the point of running a loop like this was that I wouldn’t be able to bail with a mile or two to go. There is no option but to keep running until you’re home, and that’s exactly what I did. To be honest, running seemed to become a bit easier again on that stretch, but I put that down to being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I definitely had had enough at the end.

I didn’t hit the wall out there. I know what (suspected) hypoglycaemia felt like in the final miles of last year’s Dublin marathon, and today wasn’t anything like that. My glycogen stores might have been slightly low to start with today, but I think the legs were just a bit weary after all the running I had done over the last few days, and especially with that hill workout only 24 hours earlier. Besides, running 22 miles is supposed to be tough. That’s pretty much the point of the exercise. Next week will be easier, I hope.

10 Jul: 12 miles, 1:42:13, incl. 3 hill repeats, avg. HR 146
11 Jul: 22 miles, 3:01:12, 8:14 pace, avg. HR 147, 5/5/5/7 splits 42:26, 40:00, 40:46, 57:59 (8:29, 8:00, 8:09, 8:17 pace)