Training Log

Training log: 19-Oct to 25-Oct-2015

Training Log

Monday 19-Oct: Off. (Physiotherapy appointment)

Tuesday 20-Oct: 4.4km lunch walk (101m elevation gain) (Strava); then doing my first real sprint training in quite a while at the track in the evening. I was holding back on the speed, but I’ll take whatever the achilles lets me do. 500m – 500m – 5x100m – 300m/200m. (Strava)

1Wednesday 21-Oct: 18km lunch ride on the MTB. 57 minutes, quite a bit on (slightly muddy) trails, 254m of elevation. (Strava)

Thursday 22-Oct: 3.8km lunch walk (77m elevation gain) (Strava); then half of another sprint training before returning inside for a core/back workout. 600m – 600m – 6x100m. (Strava)

Friday 23-Oct: Off. (Physiotherapy appointment)

Saturday 24-Oct: Third Cloef hill running session in as many weeks. Following a somewhat sensible progression: did 1 run and 1 walk the first session, then 2 runs the second week and now did 2 runs and 1 walk on the third go. This accounts for a total of 10.3km on my feet, covering 600m of elevation in 1h35. (Strava)

2Sunday 25-Oct: Off

Training log: 12-Oct to 18-Oct-2015

Training Log

Monday 12-Oct: Lunch-time MTB ride. About 50/50 road/trails split. 49 minutes, 16,5km, 233m elevation.

Tuesday 13-Oct: 2km lunch walk to grab food, then another Rollingergrund stair running session with the club in the evening. Managed 5 repeats this time, starting strong (48″1, 48″6) and ending slow (61″0, 72″3) with an average middle run I didn’t time. I sometimes still confuse lap and start/stop buttons and manage to stop the activity rather than start a new lap. Quite happy that I managed five repeats, even if the last one was right at the limit as far as the Achilles was concerned. (Strava)

Wednesday 14-Oct: Off

Thursday 15-Oct: 3km of misc walking (walk to remote office, and some lunch-time shopping) during the day, then in the evening ran 2km of warm-up before doing various core stuff (ab/back work, medicine ball throws, etc.) indoors. Felt weak during the exercises and had sore muscles the next couple of days, which means I haven’t been doing enough core work lately (or rather, none). I find it hard to motivate myself for any kind of strength work these days.

Friday 16-Oct: 1h02 on the bike to cover 24.5km. Mostly paved surface, and unable to maintain the average speeds that seemed a given a few months ago (on the same segments). A bit surprised at that. Temperatures were fairly low (4°C) and I was getting fairly uncomfortable in my running shoes. I probably need to reconsider my shoe options if I want to keep biking in the winter. (Strava)

Saturday 17-Oct: Second Cloef hill running session for this fall. After doing 1 run and 1 walk without adverse effects the previous week, I settled on doing 2 runs this time. Had originally planned to walk 1 more, but decided against it due to time constraints and not wanting to subject the recovering left Achilles to too much too soon. 1h02, 7.25km, 453m of elevation gain (Strava). Later that day, clocked about 3km of walking on a photography assignment.

Sunday 18-Oct: Off

Osteopathy and base building

Injuries, Training Log

On Monday, I had an osteopathy appointment. Following my 100m race on April 16th, I’d been dealing with a dull pain somewhere in the region of my left hip/adductor that flared up whenever I tried to sprint. It didn’t prevent me from running a half marathon or a 10km race in May, but even two months later I’ve still been unable to sprint faster than 80% to 90% of my normal speed.

So the osteopath found and fixed a misaligned hip and back and told me to take it easy for 48 hours. I did, almost. I went for a run tonight, some 47 hours after the appointment.

Quite a few book and blog authors I’ve been reading lately have been advocating more runs in an “easy” zone, and are saying that most runners do entirely too many runs in the “average” speed category but not enough going slow or going very fast. Right now is probably a good moment to include more slow running in my training because I’m clearly not fit for competitive running and could really use a decent base for any adventures I might encounter further down the line.

For me (age 35, maximum heart rate of around 186), I take “easy” to mean 140 heartbeats per minute or less. So that’s what I set out for tonight. Unfortunately, most interesting trails around here invariably go up at some point, and as soon as I climbed even just a few meters, my heart rate went higher than 140. So I felt like I had to go really slow to accommodate that upper limit, and even then I briefly reached a maximum of 158 when I took my eyes off my watch for a moment, and overall I only managed an average of 141 (rather than treating that number as a maximum).  In the end, I did 12.86km with an elevation gain of 263m and a pedestrian pace of 7:14 min/km. It will be interesting, however, to see how (or if) that number changes as I (hopefully) do a good and regular job of further building a base.