Quads

I have been feeling a bit strange that last couple of weeks. Obviously it's not that unusual for a runner to have hurting quads but my quads are only hurting when I am sitting down for longer than about 30 minutes at a time. As long as I am able to get up and walk around they will be fine again within a minute but I was doing a course at work for 2 days last week and had to stay put - it was agony at times! They are perfectly fine when I'm running, which I find just baffling.

Anyway, after the disastrous attempt at a speed workout last Tuesday I have been trying to dial back. I stopped cycling to work, reasoning that this was the biggest contributor to the pain in the quads, though I'm not so sure now. I also stopped most of the strength training, which may have contributed to a general feeling of exhaustion. Obviously I know that the underlying reason is that I am not recovered from the 24 hrs race, still only 4 weeks ago, and that will take longer still . My basic muscle fibres are fine but my upper fibres take a lot longer to recover, which is why I blew up so badly when I tried to make use of them in a speed workout while running at a slower pace feels perfectly fine.

I did a hill repeat workout on Thursday, which actually felt perfectly good. Short use of those muscle fibres seems to be okay, only prolonged use causes problems.

On the plus side, my pace for the easy recovery runs has increased significantly while still remaining under the HR limit. My HRM crapped out on Friday and I ran entirely by feel, obviously erring on the side of caution. All was back in working order on Saturday when I basically managed to run at 4-hour marathon pace while comfortably remaining under the 136 threshold. I know that's not particularly fast - it's a lot faster than my 24 hour race pace, though!

The sun came out on occasions on Saturday and Sunday, which I used for some badly needed time to work in the garden. This should explain why the legs felt battered for my longer run on Sunday - that and the pretty heft headwind I had to fight for pretty much the entire 7 miles back home from the turnaround point. At least I was not trying to stay at some sort of pace despite the adverse conditions, which is a mistake I've made often enough in the past.

I do hope my quads will settle down soon. Due to being unable to remain seated I can't even write long blog posts any more (Ewen will be happy to know!).

21 Jul

6 miles, 1:00:23, 10:03 pace, HR 143

   10 x 20 sec hill sprints

22 Jul

5 miles, 51:51, 10:22 pace, no HRM

23 Jul

7 miles, 1:04:17, 9:11 pace, HR 132

24 Jul

14 miles, 1:56:22, 8:18 pace, HR 148

   7 miles @ 8:27, 7 miles @ 8:07

Weekly Mileage: 45