Torture

Now that those pesky speed workouts are out of the way I had to find a new way of inflicting immense pain upon myself, I guess. Why else would I have finally caved in to Niamh and visited the sports physio clinic in Killarney? I even took the afternoon off work for the pleasure.

I have to admit, the guy knew what he was doing. After a brief chat about my training I mentioned my cramping problems in my calves, and before I knew it he was having a good, deep poke around, and hit it pretty much where it hurt. He then used some acupuncture needles for a dry needle treatment. It took a few tries for him to find the exact trigger point, but when he found it my whole calf quivered, and I nearly jumped up to the ceiling in pain. That flippin hurt! He repeated the process on the other calf (where an identical trigger point was found on exactly the same spot), and then gave me a rather painful sports massage. Each time he asked “is that where it hurts” I could only confirm, and he kneaded the hell out of it. After a while I was tempted to lie about the painful spots, it hurt so much, but I managed to get through.

He also told me not to run on Saturday, but that I would be ok on Sunday. In the evening my calves were the most sore they had ever been (though, in fairness, I might simply have forgotten how much they hurt after my first marathon or last year's ultra), and with the combination of pain and the miserable weather I wasn't tempted to disobey his orders the following day.

But I felt fine on Sunday, and went out for my last double-digit run before the race. I have by now more-or-less chosen what I'm going to wear next Sunday, but each item has a back-up one, just in case, and today I wore all the B-list stuff, from top to toe. It meant running in a t-shirt, because I wanted to test if I can take the cold on my arms, after running in long sleeves every day since my recovery from pneumonia. All the items passed the test, and I'll wear the actual planned race outfit on Wednesday, just to make sure I get a proper dress rehearsal. The plan for the run was to run 8-minute miles for the entire 10 miles, which is my planned race pace. Initially it seemed harder than I would have liked, and it took about 7 miles to finally get into the groove, but from then on I was cruising, and I felt I could have kept at that pace forever, which is what I was looking for. Of course, doing the same thing 4 times longer is an entirely different proposition, but that's the challenge waiting for me.

28 Mar

6 miles, 46:58, 7:49 pace, HR 148

29 Mar

0

30 Mar

10 miles, 1:19:37, 7:57 pace, HR 143

Weekly Mileage: 44