Training And Recovery

My feeling is that you are running too much during the week. Your legs / body needs time to repair after the Dublin Marathon. I would suggest that you do a run every second day. Your body is used to the marathon / ultra endurance now and all you need do is to keep your body "oiled". Give it time to recover for the next long race.

I freely admit, I sometimes tend to struggle with the optimum amount of training I should be doing. I have erred plenty of times. I try to read various signs and signals and adapt my training accordingly, but it's as much an art as it is science and I am no expert in either.

I do take note of the feeling in my legs. This has been very up and down since Dublin, on some days it feels like dragging a pair of concrete pillars along, on other days I am effortlessly floating across the road, and on one occasion both happened in the same run.

I record my heart rate, both during the runs and resting HR, and both sets of values are actually very encouraging at the moment, my heart for any given pace has gone down since Dublin, though it's not quite back to pre-Dublin levels yet.

I will do another evaluation workout next week, like the one I did before Dublin.

In short, I am trying to keep an eye on things. Maybe I am indeed running too many miles, but my thoughts went as follows: I would not take rest days for 20 or 22 or 24 mile training runs, so why would I do so after a 26 mile training runs, especially one that has been slower than almost any other training run? I am sure others can find a flaw in that argument, but then again, I am trying to get to the point where 26 miles is just another mile marker along the way.

Conditions on Friday were downright scary, heavy rain coming in horizontally, at times actually stinging the face from sheer force of impact. Hardcore stuff. Loved it. I had been awake since 4 am, up since 5 am and running since 6 am, so I did 11 miles before work.

Much better sleep and perfect running conditions on Saturday left the door open for a better run and I did my one "stretch the legs" run of the week where the effort goes higher than on previous days but is still very reasonable. I was quite surprised to see the pace faster than for the equivalent runs before Dublin, only 12 days after the marathon, which made me wonder if I am recovering particularly quickly this time.

I was proven wrong on Sunday when we were back to the concrete pillars stage, though in all honesty I put that down to the 10 miler on Saturday rather than the marathon 2 weeks ago. I knew from the word go that this would not be all fun and games so I just jogged my way around Caragh Lake, fighting the strong gale force wind that seemed to want me blow off the mountain at times. It was one of those runs where you just put your head down and get it over with. The legs pushed a faster pace than I would have expected, maybe they wanted to get home to be done sooner. That's 79 miles for the week and if you think that's too much, well, I was regularly doing 82-85 miles at he same stage when training under MC's guidance. Having said that, I will take it a bit easier next week in preparation for Sixmilebridge.

11 Nov

11 miles, 1:22:46, 7:31 pace, HR 147

12 Nov

10 miles, 1:09:04, 6:54 pace, HR 152

11 Nov

16.6 miles, 2:07:17, 7:40 pace, HR 149

Weekly Mileage: 79+