Recently in Running Category

Base training done, speedy stuff next

That's 98 days of training done in preparation for the 2012 triathlon season, and so far so good. I've been testing again this week, and results were a bit weird on the running track (maybe too much coffee…) but the final 200m was the fastest I've ever run in that test, my 1000m swim time is only a handful of seconds off my personal best time of last year, and I pushed up my functional threshold power figure on the bike again this morning to a new all time best value. It's all looking good, but I'm feeling the strains of all this training and will have to be extra careful in the next blocks, as the intensity starts to go through the roof.

Training sessions for the next couple of months will be a mix of mostly very hard and very easy sessions. The risk here for me is in the running side of things again. I'm hoping to push on with speed work, but I don't know if my legs can handle it yet. My main aim must be to stay healthy over pushing too hard. Easier said than done!

Take a look at how my training has balanced out as I've been able to run regularly again. Here's the breakdown of time spent in each sport in the whole of my training and racing season for 2011:

And here's the breakdown of time spent in each sport in the first 3 blocks (roughly 3 months) of training for the 2012 season:

Very different!

Time spent in the gym (strength training) will ease off later this season, and you can see how run volume has pushed back bike volume a little. Let's hope this continues!

For fun let's compare this to my off season time:

I was really, really, really (no, really) tired at the beginning of this week and it took a few days to start to clear. I had the same issue at the same stage last year. Yowch, it's awful, and highlights the need for proper, full recovery weeks. Today and yesterday I've been feeling better, and felt pretty good on the bike today.

Next block, bring it on! My first race will be at the end of the next block at the Llanelli half-marathon. That'll be a test in itself!

Finishing my (winter?) base training

This week I'm coming to the end of my base block of training. For nearly 3 months I've been building my training load by increasing volume and workout intensity bit by bit, with an easier week every 4 weeks to allow myself to recover. Most of that work has been aerobic, but more recently some faster paced stuff has been added. My fitness has been building nicely, I'm feeling strong, movement in the water feels good, running is going well (touch wood, cross fingers) and the biking seems to be going well with a higher functional threshold power output than last year.

I am tired. That's normal right now and a good sign, but I'm looking forward to some easy days and some more testing next week. And a lie in or two.

This week has been a bit nuts with a lot of work, blocks of my timetable taken up by various things and training getting squeezed out into early mornings as the sessions have been a bit longer. I swam a 5km session this week too which is the biggest single swim I've done, and swimming makes me sleepy. Up early and in the gym this morning I was already tired, and I had more than 4km to swim later in the morning with a bunch of 400m reps at threshold pace. It went rather well though. A good sign!

My right calf has been a little tight this week, so I skipped the box jumps to help everything recover a little for tomorrow's long run. I'm running 5 days a week so I need to be a bit careful.







Speaking of tomorrow's run, here's an example of fitting training in with working and family. I did a set of hill reps on the bike first thing in the morning yesterday and rode back past my house to pick up my bag on the way to work. I had planned to run in the afternoon and then ride home, but my last meeting was rather long so instead I ran home (with a little extra loop to make up the volume). Once home my day was done & I could eat with the family and put the kids to bed without having to go out again. But of course that left my bike in work and I needed to get into the gym early this morning. Drive? Nah. I rode another bike in this morning, gym, work, swim, work, cycle home, leaving some warm cycling kit in my office and a couple of quid. Why? Tomorrow I'll do my long run from home, over about 20km by the sea to work. I'll get rid of my wet kit, spend the cash in the vending machines and grab a snack, put on the warm cycling stuff and ride the other bike home. Job done!

Jack's got a laser tag birthday party in the afternoon, so I can give myself plenty of time to help with that. Then all I'll have left to do is a long, 5 hour(ish) ride on Sunday with a little bricked run off the bike. I hope it's not too wet and cold - the weather has turned again. Wish me luck.

Sunwise Waterloo

I went out on the bike the other day in perfect testing conditions for the Sunwise Waterloo glasses. It had been chucking it down all day, the roads were wet but the sun came out. It was super bright and low, into my face on the way out (sometimes in Wales we don't see the sun for a week or more so I'm not complaining), but then I was hidden in the shade on a wooded hill to knock out some threshold hill reps. Normally I'd struggle with a single pair of glasses but the Sunwise Waterloo's are great for this. So it was a shame I hadn't taken them as when I'd left the house it had been dark grey and chucking it down with rain. D'oh!

Fortunately I did the same workout a week later under similar conditions and took them that time!

They're a bit clever, in that they have polarised lenses, which cut out the glare from the sun on wet roads, and they're Chromafusion lenses, meaning that the darkness of the lens changes in response to the brightness of the light. Sun in your face? No problem. Shady woods? No problem. Dark clouds rolling in? Not to worry.

I've been very impressed, and I like the styling too. I've got the white pair - white seems to have become a colour of mine since starting racing again. The polarised lenses are great at cutting the glare from the sun reflecting from puddles in the road, but they've never hidden the water on the road (or ice, as I found out coming down the Black Mountain the other weekend) so they seem safe for cycling to me. I can see the puddles and avoid them. They're great for rock pooling too - you can see through the water to spot the crabs and gobies, although I tend to wear my orange Shipwrecks on the beach.

The grey lenses give a very natural tint, and as they adapt to the brightness of the day I usually forget I'm wearing them. They're my favourite for running on sunny days too as they sit well on my face. Light. I often walk back into the house still wearing them as they adapt to the light so quickly. The size and shape of the lenses mean that their coverage of my view is better than some of the other glasses I use. If I'm on the bike and glance down to my bike computer on the stem it's still within the Waterloo's lenses. The polarised lenses give a funny effect to LCD screens too, usually giving the display a little more contrast. Another interesting effect is that you can see into cars. Because the reflections from the glass are cut out you can see quite naturally into the cars around you. The advantage of this for me is in aiding my cyclist's telepathy: on the bike you have to second guess what drivers are going to do as many don't bother indicating (or looking) and being able to see the driver helps with this. And if a mate toots his horn I can look inside the car to see who the hell it is and wave or give a two fingered salute (depending on how well I know the occupants).

This is a top quality pair of glasses that I really like the look of, that work really well, are polarised and adjust to the brightness of the day. And you can pick them up on the internet for under £60.

OK, don't forget that Sunwise are sponsoring me and my racing in 2012, but I've been using and recommending their glasses for years (check back through my Flickr photos and you'll spot them).

Links

Sunwise Waterloo on the Sunwise website

I got there in the end

Don't we always? Keep pushing forward bit by bit and you'll get there. That's what I keep telling myself every time I play golf anyway.

But I'm talking about running. I tweaked my left medial gastrocnemius muscle (calf to some of you) at the end of the 2010 season charging up a steep, rocky hill in a cross country aquathlon of all things. It settled down and I had some work done on it, and then I spent much of the winter working on cross country running and my running biomechanics. I was trying to cut down on my heel striking that slowly appeared when I got tired, like towards the end of a triathlon or a half-marathon. It slows me down, so working on that should speed me up, right? Drills and what-nots all worked, but as with many people moving away from a heel strike my calves suffered a greater loading when I ran and needed to strengthen up. I wasn't jumping directly from a heel strike to a forefoot landing mind you - I've been shifting that for the last 7 years or so (with big gaps in running in there).

With the start of the new training season in 2011 a big goal was to run faster, so the training plan was to run more. The problem was that running more means less resting between runs. My calves suffered, I had tweaks and tightnesses and twinges, and ran through some of it. I had work done, we sussed out the problems. I did strength and conditioning work, stretching, and paid attention to my calves, but nonetheless racing often proved too much of a stress and tweaks and minor tears giving super-tight-tightness of my calves returned often. I missed weeks of running to repair and recover, I cut my running load, and I missed a race. My running wasn't in good shape, but as part of a triathlon it was good enough to keep me in the standings.

Late in the summer after fairly significant damage to my flexor hallucis longus and flexor digitorum longus muscles in my right calf (and possibly others) I reassessed what I was doing. I sat down (good start), thought about the problem and its causes (good idea) and the possible solutions (getting sensible).

The new plan was to aim to run three times a week every week until Christmas, to perform daily stretches of not just the calf muscles but also hip muscles and my lower back, and to start a daily strengthening routine using Alfredson's heel drops off a step to strengthen the muscle-tendon complex.

The aim of running three times a week over a period of 5-6 months was for a couple of reasons. Consistency builds fitness, and in my case I needed to build the fitness (i.e. strength, aerobic endurance, fatigue resistance) of the weakest links of my running muscle chain. Aiming to run every week for a long period meant I couldn't injure myself. If I damaged a muscle I wouldn't be able to run and I would fail. So just running for 20 minutes for 3 times a week would count. If I felt a tweak or a tightness or a pain, I could stop and walk home. That run still counted and I would be able to run again in a couple of days. If I kept trying to hit longer run targets I would probably damage something and fail to run again that week. Fail. It forced me to be sensible.

So getting three runs a week in felt like a success. Repeating this week after week felt like a success. It also made me cut my mileage right back to a very low level. I stopped running first thing in the morning and started running later in the day when my muscles and tendons had warmed up and lengthened a bit.

Slowly, the volume increased. Very slowly. To start with I'd feel the tightness in my calves within 15 minutes, so a 20 minute limit was the maximum I would run. Then on some runs the tightness would only come on a little later. Then I could start to extend the run. Slowly I became able to run for 30-40 minutes with little tightness. Then no tightness at all. My achilles tendons were also sore, but the soreness would kick in at the start of the run and then the scratchiness would die away, and some soreness would only return later.

I added weight to my body weight for the heel drops and that seemed to kick off significant improvements. In the gym I'd hold a 10kg weight and then weeks later a 15kg weight. At home I had a rucksack with weights in it. I made sure to stretch troublesome muscles (calves, hips) some time before a run, let them settle down and then run. I found that stretching my lower back with rotational stretches seemed to help. Focusing on running tall, keeping my pelvis forward, keeping my pelvis level (particularly when tiring) and pushing with my hamstring muscles all seemed to help my running in terms of less pain and soreness during runs.

One of my long term problems is my left hip abductors tiring and allowing the right side of my pelvis to drop, causing over pronation of my right foot and added stress to the tibialis posterior muscle and others. Adding a variant of a single leg squat exercise with weights in the gym helped strengthen up both sides. This squat is done with one foot on a box, squatting to lower the other foot to touch the floor, and then standing up again with the foot on the box. In this movement the pelvis tilts and the leg on the box uses the hip abductors to drop and raise the other leg. These were the muscles I needed to target and this strengthening occurred fairly rapidly over a few weeks. In a normal single leg squat you keep the pelvis level. I've used other exercises in the past but this one, probably with its ability to add load by putting a barbell across the shoulders, has made a bigger difference to my hip abductor strength than the others. I've been doing single leg squats, clams and the like for years, but they didn't work as well as this.

Take a look at the table above to see how my running volume per week changed through 2011. It started high and then dropped to nothing as I injured myself. It bounced back and died a couple of times and then I slowly, consistently, patiently built it back up to beyond 3 hours per week without pain. It's not a huge volume, but it's pain free.

Eventually I got to the point where I could run for an hour. Whoop! This took months, and by now I was running in dark, wet evenings, but running small hills seems to help. I added hill specific sessions to help strengthen my running muscles. Now, in January and in the third block of training for the 2012 season I'm running for over an hour at a time, I've added plyometric box jumps back into my gym work, I have no pain in my calves or tendons when running (and that feels freaking fantastic) and I did my first mile reps at a lactate threshold pace this morning with no calf tightness or soreness.

I feel fairly robust and healthy at the moment. Running has become easy and fun again, and hopefully I'll be faster this year. I think I've learnt that no level of fitness matters if you injure yourself.

Preppie

I'm into a second week of preparation work before training begins in earnest next week. All this means is that I'm "training" again after a period of 6 weeks of mucking about and doing what I felt like.

What I felt like turned out to be almost no swimming, bugger all cycling other than commuting to work and back, and slowly building up my three-times-a-week running back to 2 hours/week (and hopefully working out what biomechanical faults have been causing my running troubles). I've been in the gym regularly, which after the first week of delayed onset muscle soreness has been very pleasant. Mornings are definitely better in a university gym, as students have never been early starters.

I'm feeling more relaxed on the bike again, and enjoying the view (like the picture above). Getting back in the pool was, surprisingly, fine and my break away from it for the first time in probably 18 months has done me no harm. I'm moving through the water ok, and pace for effort is good.

Next week I begin building my endurance again and developing motor skills in the first of three largely aerobic base training blocks. I hope the cold of winter holds off for a bit.