It wasn't the season I expected (is it ever?), but it was the most solid training & racing I've had since the fall of 2013, and that leaves me feeling hopeful.
It was also good because I trusted myself to make some adjustments on the fly, both to my training and to my racing schedule, and those changes worked well.
And you know what else? It was just plain more FUN to be a runner than it has been in a while.
TRAINING highlights and lowlights:
- January sucked. I made a concerted effort to consume more iron from food sources, overdid it, and suffered through a couple weeks worth of digestive woes before I could get myself back on track. I lost a couple of weeks of mileage and workout progression in my early season build, and canceled my early February rust-buster as a result. Not a great way to start.
- During the season, I made a couple of small but powerful adjustments to my training and they were pretty terrific.
- I had noticed that I was no longer physically comfortable running at fast speeds. I felt awkward and sluggish, despite doing strides twice a week and running a good mix of speeds in my workouts. I just felt slow. I decided to try 200m repeats. My idea was to do them in sets, mostly to avoid boredom, where I would run one set on the track, then jog up to Terwilliger and do one set uphill, and then jog back down to the track for the final set. The first set on the track was dismal (200s in 42-43, which I believe is about my pr pace for 5k). I felt awkward and slow and the effort wasn't right. I was already discouraged when I jogged up to Terwilliger for the uphill set. But then a funny thing happened. The uphills were great! I was running them only a couple of seconds slower than the flat ones, and my body was being forced to get itself back into speed form. All of a sudden I felt a million times better. When I dropped back down to the track for the last set of 200s, my times dropped to 38-39, still not terrific but at least better. And it was actually FUN to run fast again. I've never been a believer in any particular workout being a magic bullet, but for my exact circumstances, this workout was just that. I repeated this workout twice more during the season, adding repeats each time, and getting faster and more comfortable each time. Hallelujah.
- I added doubles two days a week, in the form of a very short (3 mile) early morning run. It's harder to pinpoint what specifically prompted this, I was mostly following a hunch that I needed a few extra easy miles per week, just a little extra endurance stimulus, in order to absorb my workouts better. I tend to be an all or nothing kind of person when it comes to doubles, meaning my mileage will either be in the 80s when I'm running twice a day (during marathon training), or high 50s when I'm running once a day (the rest of the time). Twice a week doubles seemed to work out pretty well, though, it was a good balance. My long runs finally started to come around, and everything felt just a bit better.
- I added a new strength routine twice a week. This one: Dobert strength routine. I kept all my usual routines (dynamic warmup, yoga, myrtl, foam rolling, stretching), but adding this short new strength routine did a bang-up job of getting some more intensity to my core and upper body. It was challenging yet manageable, and I could feel it working. I will definitely be carrying this over to my next training cycle.
- I weaned myself off the TCM herbs I'd been taking. I did this gradually, and as I did, I felt better and raced better, but my ferritin also dropped. Jury's still out on that one. Not to get too far off track here, but I think this is something I will always struggle with. I have to remind myself sometimes that I was a 17:40 5k runner before I ever started getting IV iron. That's still pretty good. Sometimes I think the best solution going forward is to eat (and be) as healthy as I can, and accept, at least to a degree, the limits of my physiology in regard to iron uptake. Like I said, jury's still out.
RACING highlights and lowlights:
- My racing plans changed significantly during the season. Originally I had only 3 races on the schedule: rust-buster 5k in February, Shamrock 5k in March, and Vernonia Half in April. I skipped the rust-buster and significantly under-performed at the Shamrock 5k, and then all bets were off. I ended up adding 3 races to my schedule on the fly, and finishing my season by racing 4 weekends in a row. And it was ok. It was fun, even. This will probably NOT be a new way of doing things for me, but it feels good to have recognized the situation at hand and adapted accordingly.
- 5ks: I ran 3 of them: Shamrock in March (19:15), Hop Hop in early April (18:45) and Race for the Roses in mid-April (18:33). That's a decent but not spectacular progression of times, and I would still be a little disappointed (workout fitness was pointing to low 18s, not mid 18s) if not for the specifics of the last one, the RFTR 5k. In that one, my first mile split was ~5:50, the fastest I'd gone out in a 5k since late 2013, and I responded to that first mile split by speeding up for the second mile, running closer to 5:45 for the second mile. Those first two miles put me about 20-30 seconds ahead of two miles in any other 5k (again, since 2013), and I wasn't dead, I was just normal hurting for 2 miles into a 5k. Obviously I lost some time in the last mile, but there's also a pretty mean little hill about 600m from the end. On a flat course, I'm sure I still would have slowed in the last mile, but the hill cost me at least 10-15 seconds (it chewed me up and spit me out!).
- Vernonia Half: I wrote a race recap of this one already, so let's just say it was damn good.
- TRACK!! It seems like every spring for the past few years I've been meaning to get back to racing on the track, but it never pans out. This year was looking to be more of the same, but then I found out that there's a 3000m masters exhibition race at USATF Nationals this year (conveniently held in Eugene). That means you get to run at the pro-level nationals meet at Hayward Field. Even though the exhibition races generally take place before the main meet starts, it's still pretty cool. The only caveat is that you have to have a qualifying time to get in. I've only run a couple of 3ks in my life, and the last one was in 2010 (too long ago to count). So I found myself down in Eugene for the Hayward Classic, on what would be the 4th weekend in a row of racing for me. The qualifying time was not particularly fast relative to my fitness, so I mostly wanted to start learning how to race the 3k. I'd been hoping to run 10:40 or under, but I settled for 10:52. My focus during the race was mediocre at best. I got stuck in a little gap behind the fast dudes and ahead of the rest of the field, and I didn't have the mental fortitude that day to run well by myself. I'm ok with it, though. The last 1k went by faster than I thought it would, and that's important to remember for the future. Most races (5k and shorter in particular) are about trusting that you can handle the pace even though it will seem too hard too early. That takes experience and now I've acquired a bit more.
Onward and upward! Hopefully! (Next Season Preview)
My next training block is 10-12 weeks long. I kept my break shorter (2 weeks) and more active (maximum 2 days off per week) than other recent breaks, and I feel pretty good about that. The first 6-7 weeks will be geared a little more towards speed, culminating with (hopefully) a couple of 3ks on the track, followed by a month or so of higher mileage and strength work, leading up to a half marathon. It's a slightly shorter training block than typical, but that's the length that lends itself best to fall marathon goals.
Along the way I'll be making a small adjustment to my transition workouts (first 3 weeks of the block). Instead of my usual casual strides during a run on Tuesday followed by a fartlek on the roads on Wednesday, I'm going to be doing some low volume 200m repeats (uphill followed by flat) on Tuesdays followed by fartlek on Wednesdays.
Unfortunately, I'm already being tested in my first week back. While I enjoyed the back to back "workouts" (both were pretty short) in the first half of the week, I was then hampered by an allergic reaction to the lidocaine hidden in the aloe vera gel I was using on some slightly over-exposed areas of my skin (uh... what?!?!). I was too slow to figure out what was going on, unfortunately, as the more irritated it got, the more aloe I used in a vain attempt to stop the horrid itching. The result was a really gross infection spreading all over the skin on my chest and belly, 3 missed days of running, and general fatigue this morning as I tried to get back into it. Also, I am now on the dreaded antibiotics (oh the horror!!!) and all I can do is hope that they don't fuck me up for an additional three weeks like they did last time I took them.
Ah well, it's never simple, right?
