Wrong Sport

If I weren't a runner I would think I am no longer injured by now. The discomfort after sitting is virtually gone and even the chairs in the office's meeting room that were just pure poison on my hip only a week ago are now perfectly tolerable. Unfortunately there is still one activity where I can clearly feel the effects of my injury, and that just happens to be running.

After 12 miles had turned out to be too much last week (well, running 4 and 5 miles on consecutive days was too much) I have been much more careful this week, just running 2 miles on Monday and then 3 on Wednesday and Friday. I cycled on the other days and since cycling does not cause any discomfort (in fact I feel better after it, though that's probably down to endorphins) I got permission to extend the duration of the cycling, so I did a bit over 30 minutes on Tuesday and about 40 on Thursday, with the plan of cycling for an hour on the weekend. I expected the cycling HR to be lower than what I usually do when running but I averaged as much as 151 on Thursday. This may be down to a loss of fitness; I didn't think I had been working particularly hard. When running a HR of 151 would probably be a tempo run and my cycling effort was definitely not an equivalent of that.

Cycling is actually quite fun at the moment, I do enjoy it, especially after being starved of exercise over the past few weeks. How much of that exercise will be relevant to running remains to be seen. I know there is a certain amount of cross over, but the specific fitness to run at a high level can only be gained by running.

I almost certainly ran too fast on Wednesday. I was too pre-occupied monitoring my hip to pay much attention to anything else, and by the time I realised I was breathing rather hard I was almost back home. There is a silver lining in that as well - a 7:47 miles might not have been a good idea in my present state but the mere fact that I was able to run a 7:47 miles is actually a sign that thing are improving - last week I barely managed 9-minute pace! However, the one number that jumped out at me was not the pace but the cadence - a whopping 193, at least 10 steps per minute faster than normal. It's because I cannot (or at least I subconsciously feel that I cannot) stride out properly and stride length is well down, so the cadence is up in compensation. Friday was a little bit calmer, with a cadence of 190 - this time I made sure to take it a bit easier.

I keep doing my exercises, though I am wondering if they are a waste of time, especially the isometric ones, because they feel so easy. I will see Derek again on Tuesday; let's see what he says.

My weight keeps shooting up. I'm not sitting on the sofa all night pigging out, but I've already gained more than 5 pounds since the start of the month!

Shit, it's only 9 weeks to the Spartathlon. Things are not looking good.

22 Jul

3 miles, 24:22, 8:07 pace

24 Jul

3 miles, 25:03, 8:21 pace, HR 148