Tuesday, March 10, 2015

March 1-7, 2015

I feel old. I turned 25 on Saturday. After reading many articles about "the aging athlete" and "speed training as you age" or... Okay, so maybe I'm not quite there yet, and I guess the only real difference now is that I am in the 25-29AG...and car insurance goes down. Wootwoo! I spent my birthday watching a weekend of ski joring. If you don't know what that is, look it up on YouTube.
I'm so mature ^

Anyway, I had somebody ask, "What did mono and the setback with injury teach you? Do you think you came out of both having learned something important?"
This is was a difficult question for me since I tend to be a pretty stubborn person. The biggest thing I learned from mono (and probably injury too) is that recovery is important. I knew recovering from mono would be a long process, but I'm not sure I actually understood how long.
The bone bruise (foot) came from a bad step, followed by 12 miles of pounding. I had already finished 13 miles, but still had 12 to go. Looking back on it, should I have been running 25 miles only 3 weeks after being cleared to run again? But, like I said a few weeks ago, I wanted to go down to FL on my 25th birthday and lay down a solid 50 miler. I do not regret that I didn't get to race, but I definitely think I next time I will make a better choice.
Also, living and training at altitude requires much more recovery. I have a feeling that by living a 10,200ft and still getting over mono, recovery is going to be a huge factor for me. If I want to have any chance at a successful late spring, summer, or fall, then I need to pay attention now.
The other takeaway is that good shoes are key. I realized that I had over 800 miles on my Brooks Ghosts when I injured myself. Normally I am ~400 miles per pair of shoes before I get new shoes. A weakened body + old shoes probably was not the best mix. Right now I am running in the Hoka Clifton and they have been wonderful in getting me back out there.

Training
Workout #1: 1x3, 1x2 @ MP
Warm up, 3 miles at marathon pace, 1 mile easy, 2 miles at marathon pace, cool down. I was going to try 2x3, but the wind and ice broke me down. I still had 5 miles of quality for the day, so it's not like I had a bad workout.
Workout #2 - 3x[2:1/1:2] Fartlek
The purpose of this workout was just to get the legs out and moving fast. The hard sections were hard and the easy was easy. We also filmed part of this workout. There is a short clip of it on IG, and a longer video will be coming later.

Total ~35 miles for the week.

Thanks for reading. Let me know if you have any questions. Happy training!

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