Posts Tagged ‘Hudson’

That was weird.  I get to the park this morning and find myself in the tail end of a 5K.  Who schedules a 5K at 7am Wednesday morning?  Stinkin’ hot, too.  But on to the good stuff…

My Training Plan
It’s here, it’s here!!  My Half plan for the philadelphiadistancerockandrunhalfmararoll, formerly known as the Philadelphia Distance Run on Sept. 19th.

During my week off, I  Half-fashioned a Half training plan under the guidance of mentor (coach?) Adam/A Muse who patiently refined and shaped it into a really swell, kick-ass plan.  I can’t thank him enough for working on it and hope to do him proud come September.  Thank you, Adam!

The plan is based on an article about periodization (for marathons actually, but applicable to the Half, as well) where Base is followed by a Speed phase, then a Strength phase.

Now, I haven’t followed a periodized plan since I did Pfitzinger’s 18/55 two years ago.  Since then, I’ve used either Hudson’s canned plans, which don’t have real defined phases, or I rolled my own without any thought about that stuff.  I mean, I always knew I should be thinking in those terms, but wasn’t really understanding how to go about it till now.

Base: a no-brainer.  This one is abbreviated because I have a strong base already, just need to build back easily after the heat drama, so nothing hard this week except for a progression run.  The following two weeks include rudimentary quality to get me prepped for the Speed phase.

Speed: this phase features 5K pace interval sessions and tempos mostly at 10k pace.  There are also a couple miler workouts from this great article Adam sent my way.  The tempo intervals on Aug. 6th will be my first taste of Half pace and establishes a baseline.

Strength: this portion focuses on 10k strength workouts. As Salazar says about Half training, “…it’s 75 percent the same as 10K training.”  Also, in addition to the 10k fun, starting in the Speed phase and ramping up through Strength are a good number of race pace runs, very important.

Long Runs: most of these will be on my local trail which gives me a hillier route than usual.

Recovery: this may be listed here after all the fun stuff, but it was the first thing I penciled in.  Recovery (or lack of) has been on my mind a lot these days; my cavalier attitude about it, how I rarely took cutback weeks and when I did, the mileage cut was meager.  No more.

This plan has two major cutback weeks on each end of the Speed phase with a 30% reduction in mileage.  That means taking two days off in each of those weeks.  Seems excessive, but my instinct tells me it’s the right thing to do.

To bolster my point: my friend Jeff is an accomplished, hardcore cyclist, podiums all the time.  A few weeks ago at a bike race, he and the entire 40-45 AG were beat out by a 63-year old, and by a sizable margin!  He spoke to Jeff after the race and told him his success is all about recovery, especially before races.  And he never puts in miles “just to put in miles”, everything has a purpose.  This is nothing I haven’t heard before but this time…I’m listening.

Enough jabber, here’s the plan, full size.
Joking. Click for hugeness.

Two more items worth mentioning, nutrition and sleep:

Nutrition: I already eat cleanly, so no problems with this.  The cookie gorging finished a few weeks ago, then dessert became cereal before morphing this week into fruit salad, which is really weird because I’ve never been a big fruit eater – suddenly I love it.  Yay me.

Sleep: I’ve been as stupid about this as recovery.   I have to stop going to sleep after midnight  if I’m going to get out early to run.  I end up tired all summer.  Will amend this starting tonight.  11pm or bust.

Alright!  333 miles for October, a mileage PR and my body’s behaving wonderfully, no tweaks or sluggishness, knock on wood.  Here’s how October looked (click it for real size):

Now on to today… a “Hard 20″: 1 easy, 18@GMP+20sec., 1 easy.  I’ve been working with 7:30s as my GMP, even though I’ve been waffling about what my goal actually will be.  It’s just an easy number to deal with.  So today’s goal was 7:50s for the 18 portion.

The weather was perfect, 55 and overcast, touch of rain at the beginning and some light wind.  It went swimmingly, ending up with 7:46 avg for the 18, 7:51 avg for the entire run.  With this result, I’m thinking 7:30 is back to being a reasonable GMP, so forget 3:18, sub 3:17 is what I’ll be shooting for.  Yay.

In another reconsideration move, I mentioned I was going to do 90miles this next week.  After some back and forth with one of my favorite posters on MRT, A Muse (whom I consider the Running Buddha at the RW forums with his generous and sage advice) I realized that this was not the wisest placement for a 90.

When I saw A Muse’s peak volume week landed 6 weeks out, I went and looked at Pfitzinger and Daniels and saw that they, too, peak at 6 weeks, so it wasn’t making sense to me to have my highest volume come 3 weeks out, especially when it’s also my hardest quality week.  That’s what I get for following Hudson’s plan as written, I was supposed to think about it and adjust, but was lazy.

So I’m going to keep it around 81 for the third week in a row.  Like I wrote in the Hudson thread, the only reason I’d be going 90 is to assuage my ego and my ego’s not running Philly.  I’ll save 90 for the Boston cycle.  That means I also get to skip the one double in the plan, since I don’t need to split that day up now.

Lastly, I’m subtracting some mileage from my taper weeks because Hudson would have me at 70 the week preceding race week and that doesn’t seem very taperish to me.  So today was my last 20 of the cycle!  Next weekend’s LR will be 17 (thank you,  A Muse).

The week ahead looks like this:
Mon: 8 w/10 hill sprints
Tues: 12 w/8x2min @ HP
Wed:14 last 7 moderate
Thurs: 8 or 9 easy (supposed to be another progression but I’ll see how I feel)
Fri: 14 w/10MP
Sat: 8
Sun: 17

Crossing fingers there’ll be no life drama interweaving said schedule,  just some steady running.   Later, fellow running fiends.

Like the pleasure of fresh undies, this week has got to be better than last.

On the apartment front, the freaks were gone all weekend, both the assholes from upstairs and the crazy loon from downstairs (they’re best friends, so they probably went to a weekend-long sheep slaughtering event or similar…ok, maybe a wedding ).

You’d think this would have eased my mind, but all weekend I kept having imaginary conversations with them which sometimes went my way, other times it ended with the crazy lady pushing me downstairs.   And I feel really bad for the girl who lives in the other apartment upstairs, because every time I’d hear someone going up the stairs I’d assume it was the couple, so I’d vigorously give my front door the finger (I’m mature like that).   Poor girl didn’t deserve such negative vibes.

One thing I forgot to mention is that after I went upstairs the first time and talked to the girlfriend, (and got 3 great mornings of sleep for my trouble) I saw the boyfriend on the landing and even told him “I love you!” and he had laughed and smiled, so it’s twisted how things went so sour in an instant.

Seriously though, I’ve had a really tough couple of days.  Saturday evening Nick invited me over to spend a few hours with his family.  I needed the company desperately and he knew it.  Was good to see them all and eat pierogies and laugh and cry together.

Then yesterday I ran 22.2 miles with the last 11 “moderate” as per Hudson (7:53s), avg. for the run 8:16.  The actual running was great, I felt healthy and strong and got to chat for a few minutes with my friend Lara, who was riding her bike in the park.  But my mind was ugly for the whole of those 3+ hours.

I kept thinking of Nick’s ex-wife and my mother (because this suicide business is an all-inclusive club) and this apartment and wondering how I’m going to deal with it and also, constant deep questions about myself and if I’m more of a screwed-up person than I admit to.  I think I’m about as pragmatic as they come, but with my mother’s history behind me, I’ll always have this fear that I’m not who I think I am.  That my hermit ways are a dangerous thing, though even in my aloneness, I’m vastly more social and lack the paranoia and schizophrenic traits my mother had.

One of the things I remembered during the run were these awful little calendar books I found when we cleaned up her apartment where my mother had written in each day, “bad” “bad” “good” “bad”.  There were overwhelmingly more bad days than good.  I take heart in knowing I enjoy life and if I kept such records, it’d mostly be “good”s.

On a science mystery note, I solved the oddity of the outlets not charging my phone or other battery devices.  I’m such a dodo…the outlets I was using were switched outlets!  So when the light switch goes off, so does the power to the outlet.  Duh.

Had a soaking 16 mile progression run yesterday, so wet I managed to short my Shuffle (the on/off button stop working). Since I’ve already fried one Shuffle, I knew what to do: dipped it in water when I got home and then shook it out – salt deposits are more evil than water. Pace for the 16 started with a 9:00/mi and finished with a 7:32/mi, averaging 8:29 for the run, culminating in a 71.5 mile week.

That wrapped up my first two consecutive weeks in the 70s. I’ve only had one 72mi week while peaking for my May Half, so I’m pretty happy with how normal it feels. I remember being kinda pensive in the Spring when I imagined this marathon cycle with its raise in mileage but like most things, thinking about it is harder than actually doing it.

The mileage plan for the next few weeks is one more 70mpw, then I sneak up to 76mpw for the following two weeks. With this gentle mileage build, the harder workouts ahead become the main physical push without the added stress of a bunch of new miles on top of it. Hopefully this’ll keep my legs happy throughout.

I’m looking forward to this week, Hudson finally gets the party started: Tomorrow’s workout resembles a regular interval session instead of fartlek (4x5min@10k pace) and Friday moves to standard tempo work (2x15min@HP w/1min rec.). His slow build worked out great though, it was exactly what I needed after being out of the “fast running” loop for a couple months.

Today was a 7.5 mile recovery run with hill sprints at the end. The one thing I’m discovering at 70mpw is that I have a real reason for recovery pace – my legs ask for it. In general, I rarely do recovery runs as McMillan prescribes, usually the slow end of the easy scale is enough, but now…slogging feels yummy.

Eeewwww scary…3:16:38.  There, I said it.  At least, that’s how it looks from a big fat 18 weeks away.  My reasoning?  I like 7:30, it’s pretty.  And 26.22 of them = 3:16:38 (edited to get that .02 in).

OK, my outside goal is sub 3:20, which my 5K PR more than agrees with (a useless fact if I didn’t have a 60 mpw base to back it up).   In a couple weeks I’ll be averaging 70mpw and plan to peak at 90.  Add to that 4 months of focused quality work and 7:30s seem quite reasonable.

So I’ve got 18 weeks until D-day…one can do some good damage in that amount of time.  In fact, I just realized today that it was 18 weeks between Jan 1st and May 3rd (my Spring goal race).   Granted, I’m sure I won’t see quite such a dramatic drop as those months brought since part of that was a 10lb weight loss, but still, the trend continued steadily for each successive month after I’d lost the weight, so I’m certain there’s room for another good chunk of improvement before November.

To that end, I started marathon training on Monday.  Yeah, I know, I said I’d start first week of August, but I looked at the plan again (prompted by comments in the last post) and figured it’s pretty much what I’d be doing if I was freeforming, so why not give Hudson the credit and call this week 3 of his Level III plan?  I miss being told what to do.

So…Monday was an easy 8, avg pace 8:19.  Tuesday was 9 with 8 x 40sec. “fartleks” (Hudson’s version) at 10k-3k pace – avg for the run, 8:22.   This morning I had 11 with the last 5 “moderate”, which turned out to be 7:36s for the faster bit and 8:10 avg. for the whole run (trying to keep my easy miles a tad slower these days).

Ah, a fresh training plan – its framework shows potential like nothing else.  It’s like building a bigger and better house every single time.  Exciting to imagine the possibilities.  God, I love it.

I’m so happy, excited, astounded, I could cry. Looking at the calendar, I realize it’s been 8 long weeks since my IT Band made a painful introduction into my runs.

As recap, during this period I couldn’t go more than 2 runs to where I’d feel it.  Long runs (limited to 11 milers) always required stretching stops and because one annoyance isn’t enough, my ankle bursitis from last year reappeared as an underlying bass note for the beginning of most runs during these two months.

Because I’m a 7-day runner, I did take a few days off (5 total), but from reading of how people would take 2 weeks off and return to the road only to find they were right back where they started, I didn’t even consider taking a clump of days off, figuring I could manage the injury as it made a slow exit.

My mileage didn’t suffer too much – June was a lower month, but I was able to average 53 mpw between June and July.  I just made sure to stop and stretch if it hurt on the run, foam roll the shit out of it in the evenings and often took 3 ibuprofen after “long” runs to keep it in check for the next day’s run.

I’d like to say I did my leg exercises regularly, but I lasted about 1.5 weeks till I conveniently forgot to do them (I hated leg lifts when I was a pudgy young thing, I don’t like them any better now).  I’ve been pretty regular with stretching, but was never sure if I was overdoing it, so I tended to go from stretching too much to not enough, and always suspected I wasn’t doing it quite right.

This seemed to work ok, it had diminished greatly, but was still there like a bad cold that never leaves, culminating in a horrible 13 miler last Sunday, my longest run in months, and one requiring numerous stops, mainly because I was wearing an IT band strap that was backfiring on me and causing calf discomfort, but still, I was most certainly not “cured”.  So I took this Monday off.

Now, a few days prior, July 9th to be exact, I’d started the glucosamine/chondroitan/msm combo pills.  After taking that rest day on Monday, I ran like usual from Tuesday on, except suddenly “usual” had a whole new meaning.  There was no ankle bursitis, no IT band shadowing, absolutely no weakness in my legs at all.  At. All.  This was 6 days after taking that first pill.

You guys…I ran 15 miles today.  15 miles without one single peep, shadow, twinge or anything.  15 miles like it was a mid-long run, not the farthest I’d gone since a 16-miler on April 12th (April 12!).  I even stuck a couple faster miles (7:20s) in there ala Hudson.  Average for the whole run, 8:18.

So these pills really are a miracle, because I know for sure that while the injury was sneaking out the backdoor, it was going so very slowly that if left on its normal course, would have continued the wave of 2 days good, 1 day bad, eventually moving to 3 days good, 1 day bad, etc, and all the while with those stupid stretching stops.  Instead, I’ve had 6 days of 59.5 miles with perfect legs the entire time.

I’ve been thinking more about these magic pills and while I know that MSM is still the main hero at the moment till the glucosamine eventually kicks in, I think the glucosamine could eventually benefit ITBS too, even though it’s for  joints and not soft tissue – because glucosamine not only adds cartilage, it increases lubrication as well.  The whole reason ITBS is so painful is that it rubs against the femur, becoming inflamed.  If the joint has more lubrication, it makes sense that your IT band would slide easier against that joint. But that’s just supposition and a moot point anyway, since whatever is working  is working now!

I have suddenly gone from hiding marathon training into the farthest back corner of my brain to pure, unadulterated excitement for getting started again and seeing what this training cycle brings.  As they’d say back in my hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas, “YEE–HAW!!”   (they’d also say “Pig Sooie, Razorbacks!!” because they’re weird like that, but I digress…)

Hope is restored, fun is restored, I am back on the road for real.