Strides With A Sting

Ok, so last week I had felt really good and started to wonder if I had finally reached the turning point. This week was fairly crap again, so I guess I haven't. Maybe I need to forget about running competitively again but it's hard for the mind to let go.

Mind, the week could have ended a lot worse, but I'll get to that later.

I ran to and from office once a day Tuesday to Friday, and with Cabinteely Park about to be closed in the evenings I went back to my previous commute route through Kilbogget and Clonkeen Park, which is actually very nice but a mile longer, and on Thursday night it had the added challenge of feeling more like dodging all the illegal Halloween fireworks and didn't feel entirely safe, to be honest, but thankfully it all passed with out incident.

The real drama happened on Saturday, or maybe it would be more accurate to say it almost happened. I decided to do three laps of 30/30 (30 seconds fast, 30 seconds recovery) because I figured one of the problems with my running is the fact that I'm doing an awful lot of slow but very little fast running, so I decided to work on my leg turnover and hope it will improve my efficiency, basically trying to do a neuro-muscular workout.

I'm not biting my lip, that's the original swelling.

Anyway, all was going perfectly fine until early into the third lap when a wasp headed straight for my mouth, kamikaze style. I somehow managed to catch it with my lips, so when it did sting me it was at the inside of my lips rather than the back of my throat, which would have been a lot worse potentially because it immediately started to swell. I even managed to pull the stinger out of my lip there and then, but the damage had already been done. I was a bit shocked but figured I might as well finish the last of my workout before going home, what difference would it have made otherwise?

The swelling in my lip went down after a couple of hours but the left side of my face / jaw line started to swell instead. It's rather uncomfortable but manageable and it looks fairly awful. Two day earlier and I could have made use of it by dressing up as Quasimodo for Halloween without requiring a face mask, but I'd missed that! I took some antihistamines because I reckoned the swelling could have been an allergic reaction but it didn't seem to make any difference apart from making me drowsy for the rest of the day.

Well, no major harm done though it could have been a lot worse, which doesn't bare thinking about it. The legs felt fairly awful on Sunday, which I attribute to the strides rather than the sting, and I cut my planned long run short and finished the week just under 70 miles, which is still a high enough number anyway.

Evaluation

First things first, I'm glad to report that the knees are 98% back to normal. I still don't know what exactly had been wrong and most likely never will, but won't spend any time worrying about it.

I learned quite a bit about my present state on each of the last three runs. They were all very different, but the information I gleaned from each of them was quite revealing.

On Friday I inserted a long stretch at marathon effort into my run. I had done exactly the same workout 2 weeks earlier, before I had gotten sick, and it was a helpful comparator. In short, I managed to cover the 8.5 miles at an average pace of 7:09, six seconds per mile slower than a fortnight ago, and a very similar pace to a workout three weeks prior. It shows how much fitness I have lost in the meantime; and to be honest I’m happy enough with those figures. I can and will make that up again. What wasn’t quite so good was the feeling I had halfway through the run. I had just covered a short uphill segment at pace, and all of a sudden my legs turned to jelly, my HR jumped up and I felt pretty bad. I slowed down a little bit to get my HR and breathing back under control, but it took about half a mile to get back into the groove again. I’m not sure why I felt so bad pretty much out of the blue.

Saturday was an easy run. I had toyed with the idea of running a bit longer to boost my pathetically low mileage figure for this week, but sanity prevailed and I just ran an easy short effort. Mileage totals mean diddly squat on their own, and it’s not worth compromising your real workouts by running to exhaustion on what should be an easy day. Having said that, despite all the goodwill I could muster to run easily, my HR on that run was way too high. I was left scratching my head when I saw the figures on the Garmin. Sure, I had run a bit faster than I probably should have on an easy day, but I would not have expected the average HR to be in the 150s. I presume it means that I’m still not entirely over whatever illness had struck me last week. This actually ties in with the kids’ recovery from the same infection. Even after recovering from the worst they weren’t quite right for at least a week afterwards, and I’m apparently following the same pattern. On the plus side, they seem right as rain by now, and I expect to feel a lot better a week from now. If I don’t, I’ll seriously have to think about resting for a few days, like it or not.

After Saturday’s HR reading I wasn’t sure if I would be able to survive a 30/30 workout today. I programmed the Garmin for 25 repeats, but gave myself permission to bail out at any time. During the warm-up my fears seemed the get confirmed, as soon as I tried to increase the effort above a certain base level my HR would jump by a much higher margin than normal, even though my legs and lungs felt fine. After a bit of hesitation I started into the first 30 seconds sprint after all, taking it a bit easier for the first few repeats and hanging on for dear life from the halfway point. During the repeats it seems to help to count my breaths. This passes the time and it seems to ensure that I inhale deeply rather than hyperventilating my way through the workout. But there is no denying that it is a tough workout. I hung on towards the end, the 30 seconds rest breaks seemingly getting shorter and shorter; I was still gasping for air when the watch’s merciless beeps commenced for the next time. I survived to tell the tale and managed all 25 repeats at an average pace of 5:49. That’s marginally slower than a fortnight ago, but faster than expected in my compromised state. The average HR had gone over 180 on the last few intervals, and I couldn’t have done much more.

Looking at the training schedule, this should have been the last week of my hills phase. Since I have basically lost 2 weeks to illness I decided to extend that phase by a week before moving on to the anaerobic phase. Most of all, I hope to be over the after effects of that sickness by then. Ballycotton is in 3 weeks, and Grellan will humiliate me if I’m not in shape.

13 Feb

10.5 miles, 1:17:56, 7:25 pace, HR 159
incl. 8.5 miles @ 7:09 pace (HR 163)

14 Feb

8.3 miles, 1:05:31, 7:54 pace, HR 151

15 Feb

8.2 miles, 1:02:24, 7:36 pace, HR 162
incl 25x30/30 (5:49 avg)

Weekly Mileage: 55+

Don't Panic

Twice in the last week I got a jolt of fear. The first time was when I heard that the Boston Marathon registration had closed a few days ago. For a split second I panicked about having messed up royally until I realised that I had signed up months ago, and everything was fine. I just hope all of you who planned on running it have done the same – otherwise it’s too late and your plans will have to change.

The second time was this morning at 11 o’clock when I realised that Maia was still asleep. She had woken at 5:30, and I brought her into our bed where she fell back asleep again. She woke a second time at 8 o’clock, and I gave her a bottle and put her back down into her own cot. Three hours later she was still asleep, having already slept for 15 hours, which she has never done before. I had to check if she was still breathing, which thankfully she was. She is presently fighting off an infection, which makes her sleep so much. The entire rest of the family except myself are coughing and spluttering, though the worst seems to be behind us. I’m the only one who is unaffected. For all the talk about running suppressing your immune system, I don’t believe it. Having said that, I managed a lot of sleep over the weekend myself, over 8.5 hours both nights. That’s definitely more than usual.

Yesterday’s run was another uneventful easy one. I was a bit cold in my t-shirt, and maybe long sleeves would have been the better option, but it turned into a beautiful day later on, with plenty of sunshine and warmer temperatures. We have been starved of sunlight around here, and everyone really enjoyed the break.

Today’s workout was a different matter, Sunday is definitely developing into the most exhausting day of the week; the 30/30 workouts are somewhat strange. On one hand, 30 seconds of effort is short enough so that you always feel you can do at least one more. On the other hand, 30 seconds of rest are so short that you’re still gasping for air at the end of it. Anyway, I started struggling after barely half of the repeats but kept at it. The toughest part was at the same spot where I gave up last week, after 3 or 4 uphill repeats against a headwind. However, this time I managed to keep going and was surprised how much easier they became once I had left the gradient behind me. I managed all 25 repeats, albeit a tad slower than last week. There was always the little voice in my head that I could run them just a bit harder, the same one that had admonished me during Wednesday’s hill workout. As I said, in training you always find you can push a little bit harder, no matter how much you’re pushing it already. Then again, pushing as hard as you can isn’t the best way either. All in all I'm happy with my training, and I’m reasonably certain I’m still improving and Boston will see me in better shape than ever before.

31 Jan

10 miles, 1:21:02, 8:06 pace, HR 139

1 Feb

8 miles, 59:00, 7:23 pace, HR 157
incl. 25x30/30 (5:46 avg)

Weekly Mileage: 74
January Mileage: 359+

Speed Matters

With 12 weeks to Boston, the time to start the fun and games has well and truly arrived, as Michael pointed out. Since I started my hill training this week, I’m right on schedule for the hard work. The thing that’s not quite going as planned is the speed I’m running all of a sudden.

And I’m talking about running faster than I normally do, not slower. I already noticed that on Thursday, when my easy run inadvertently was much faster than anticipated, without me realising it until afterwards. Pretty much the same happened on Saturday, but to an even greater extend. I came back from the 8 mile run with an average pace of 7:48, and when I checked the mile splits afterwards I could see that I had gotten faster with each mile until I ran 7:30 on the last, uphill mile. The thing is, I genuinely ran easily and I never pressed the pace, and the fairly low heart rate supports that point. But normally I would definitely not expect to run that kind of pace on an easy run so far ahead of the marathon. I did similar easy workouts before Dublin, but only in the final weeks before the race. I have three different theories. One, I might be reaching my peak far too early. That would be bad. Two, I might be on my way to a new level of fitness. That would be good. Or three, and maybe the most likely, the lower mileage this week left my legs in a much more rested state than in previous weeks and therefore able to run faster with a lower effort. Whatever it is, for the time being I’ll continue as planned; not that I have any alternative ideas anyway.

Today I was out again for another 30/30 workout, and I noticed a huge improvement to last week. It wasn’t easy. I had planned up to 25, and I started labouring hard after about the ninth one; the chart does indeed show a marked increase in the heart rate from that point onward. I kept going on, and by the 18th I pretty much had enough. I kept going on for 4 more, but after the 22nd I was so exhausted that I felt like collapsing at the road side and called it a day. The fact that the last 3 had been slightly uphill and against a headwind didn’t make it any easier, I guess. Even though I felt utterly wiped out immediately after the repeats I recovered very quickly on the way home, enough to put in a bit of an effort over the last mile or two.

When Niamh asked how the run had been I said it might have been my best workout ever, because I had pushed myself harder than possibly ever before in training and yet recovered very quickly. The pace showed a marked improvement to last week’s 6:10, with an average pace of 5:44 for the fast segments. If I had stopped after 18 the average pace would have been 5:37. Maybe I should have left it then, but from a psychological viewpoint those last repeats were important. The coming week will pretty much mirror this one. But it will be yet another week closer to Boston!

24 Jan

8 miles, 1:02:33, 7:48 pace, HR 143

25 Jan

8 miles, 58:37, 7:20 pace, HR 161
incl. 21x30/30 (5:44 avg)

Weekly mileage: 71

Stormy Nights

We are just experiencing the worst storm of the winter so far, and the most important factor in running was to time your run in-between lulls, to ensure a safe return. Yesterday, Saturday, I was quite keen to get out early because the weather forecast had left us in no doubt that a serious storm front was on its way and expected to hit us by lunch time.

I set off on the Caragh Lake road initially, but the heavy wind changed my mind very quickly and I turned around towards the Ard-na-Sidhe road. I just about managed to resist temptation as I was passing our driveway, it would have been so easy to get back inside rather than battling the elements. Anyone seeing me out there would have thought I’m completely mad; but actually it wasn’t the worst weather I have ever run in by any means. 8 easy miles passed by fairly quickly. Considering that I had covered 19 miles on Friday, albeit in two runs, I felt surprisingly fresh. The most pleasing aspect of the run was the realisation that my dead-easy pace is zoning in on 8:00. There’s progress.

The storm did indeed come, and boy was I glad to be inside. Further north they apparently measured wind speed of over 100mph. Here it wasn’t as bad, but we did go past the 60mph point, and today there were a number of fallen trees on some remote roads. Luckily we got away without damage around here, but the storm outside was nothing in comparison to Hurricane Maia inside our walls. She woke at 1 am, just as I was drifting off to sleep, and kept us awake until 4:30! She just kept going and going, and didn’t take too well to us trying to get some sleep. Eventually I managed to rock her to sleep on my chest, but somehow she woke again less than 3 hours later, and that was the end of my night! At some stage during the night I made the final decision not to have any more children (Niamh has come to that conclusion 14 months ago. I’m just slow in catching up). Niamh managed to add a couple of hours sleep in the morning, but I didn’t. I predict an early night for myself.

Bleary eyed as I was, I did manage to get out for a run. For my speed work during this training cycle I’m trying something new, as described here and here. I ran one 30/30 workout last year and decided to give this a proper go. Once a week I’ll do one of those runs. I’m starting out with 30/30 (30 seconds fast, 30 seconds slow, that is), in a few weeks I’ll switch to 60/60, and closer to the marathon I’ll attempt 3min/5min. I believe this is compatible with Ron Daws’ training program. He gives plenty of options for speed training, including steady runs, 400s, or 200s. I only cover about 150m in 30 seconds, but I don’t think that’s a sticking point.

After a false start (it started hailstoning literally as I was leaving the house), I was on my way. (I still got a beaning later on). Today’s intervals were rather slow, about 6:10 pace on average, definitely slower that they’re supposed to be. Since this was my first attempt at that kind of workout, I’m not too worried. I expect to improve as the legs get used to that workout. In fact, this improvement is the entire point.

As Private once pointed out, I like to experiment a lot, and he’s absolutely right about that. This has backfired quite a few times (remember the Red Bull before the Dublin marathon? I do!), and this is yet another experiment. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’ll see how it goes.

17 Jan

8.1 miles, 1:06:07, 8:09 pace, HR 135

18 Jan

8 miles, 1:01:12, 7:39 pace, HR 155
including 21x30/30

Weekly mileage: 87+

Small Changes

Both yesterday and today Cian got up at the same time as me, just like his older brother used to do last year. I really hope he is not going to make a habit of this. Firstly because preparing his breakfast means I’m delayed in getting out of the house (I had to sacrifice a mile yesterday because of that), and secondly because getting up so early invariably means he is absolutely knackered in the evening and turns into the 4-year old from hell.

For some reason I had originally determined that this would be a recovery week. Well, I know the reason – I blindly followed the original schedules from the Brain Training book, and this week just happened to be one of the easy ones. It only occurred to me yesterday that it would have made a lot more sense to have the previous week as an easy week, to aid my recovery from the race. Ah well. Feeling really stupid is a powerful motivator to remember your mistakes and avoid them next time.

I decided to deviate from the schedule this week. I didn’t fancy today’s mixed intervals even though the recovery-inspired easier version of the usual workout didn’t look too daunting. I just wanted a change. I had recently read something about Veronique Billat, and decided to run her 30/30 workout today. I know perfectly well that doing this type of workout just once isn’t going to bring a lot of improvements. I just fancied a different kind of speedwork to keep things more interesting, and that’s the one that sounded appealing.

The above websites mentioned that 20 intervals would be normal, so I programmed the Garmin for 22 and gave myself permission to call it quits earlier. It was a strange workout, hard and easy at the same time. Hard because running so much at mile race pace is tough, and easy because 30 seconds are always manageable, even when you’re already knackered. In the end I did the entire 22 intervals, and probably could have done a couple more. The average pace was 5:35, which is better than expected. All in all, I was pleased.

And my homemade blackberry ice cream (made from self-picked blackberries, of course) is divine. I just thought I should mention that, for no reason other than to make you jealous.

22 Sep

8 miles, 1:03:05, 7:53 pace, HR 139

23 Sep

7 miles, 54:17, 7:45 pace, HR 149
22 x 30/30 @ 5:35 avg.