Sunday, September 15, 2013

Back by *Popular Demand (Training 9/9-9/15)

This week's post should be pretty easy (I took two days off).

Hip Update
All better, thanks to resting the first couple days of this week. I have issues with my hip flexors and hamstrings from time to time typically when dehydrated or when I haven't taken the time to roll out my quads.

Efforts/Duration
I'd like to recap my workouts in effort/duration in order to remove some of the metrics that people often get hung up on like pace and mileage. I received a number of comments on the pace and volume of the work I did last week which was a lot of fun, but I want to make sure these posts are inspiration/education for personal running goals. I think it can be easy to look at workouts and get totally psyched out because the paces and the volumes seem so unreachable.

If workouts are presented in terms of efforts and duration, it is easier to see how they might be applied to any given person's running goals.

If I'm not making sense, maybe Fluency's Folly puts it more clearly:

"I think A LOT of age-groupers, specifically newer distance runners tend to aim too high on mileage goals not realizing how relative these metrics are to each runner."

Same goes for pace in my book. How many high school athletes and age groupers run 7 min/mile day in and day out while underachieving on race day?

9/9 Monday
Off completely. I think I rode my bike to work if you want to count that. After my run on Sunday with Emil and Verdo, I tried to stretch out my hip and I think I ended up over stretching as I had pretty acute pain around the hip throughout the night into Monday.

It was certainly easier to take a day off after reading Matt Flaherty's training update for 9/2-9/8 which described the liberal use of time off in order to recoup from a biking accident and very long, race-specific effort. Matt uses days off in his schedule like any other workout.

9/10 Tuesday
Woke up to marked improvement. Iced a few times throughout Sunday night/Monday.

Worked a very warm Mather Invite #1 in the afternoon and ended up just taking another day off in order to make sure the hip was well on its way to recovery.



Colin G. ready to fuel the next generation of Chicago runners!

9/11 Wednesday

Tour of Albany Park - 1:10 Easy
Morning shake out after 2 days completely off. Hip feels much better, but still a bit funny. Saw Brian and ran him home then past the old house up to Skokie Valley Line trail.

Additionally, I was very tight (my back most noticeably) all day after this run.

1:02 Easy
Decided to do an hour or so after work. Felt much more smooth than this morning! Ran into TTAU and dailymile friends; Scott L., Evan R., and Justin J. A pleasant surprise!

A relief to feel smooth on my second run back.

9/12 Thursday

1:03 Easy
Felt tight (dehydrated) most of the run. Ate meat for dinner and also ate late. I blame it on both of those things.

INOV-8 FFS Staff Functional Fitness Workout/Footwear Launch Party
It feels silly to include this but I did 2 x push ups, air squats, sit ups, burpees, and kettle bell (water jug) swings as many as possible for 1 minute?


This workout left me sore as hell for the next few days. I even sandbagged the push ups in order to not be as sore.

I also didn't get home until 11:30 pm from this workout and was so over-stimulated I ended up not going to bed until well after midnight.

9/13 Friday

TGIF - 1:33 Moderate
I had hoped a moderate effort would help me work out some stress and shakeout some of the soreness for Saturday's key workout. No such luck. It was a good run though.

Ate some quinoa, asparagus, and turkey sausage. Note to self: don't put so much apple cider vinegar in next time!

9/14 Saturday

5 x 11 minutes - 1:52 Half-Marathon Effort
Not sure if this was really HM effort, but I wanted to give some sort of description of effort.

Wanted to do alternate ks, but my watch wasn't cooperating. Settled for this strength workout. Warmed up for 29 minutes to meet Kyle and Mark at Irving Park then 10:47, 10:55, 11:00, 11:09, 11:18 w/ .5 mile jog between. On my cool down, made it to Irving and Clark with Mark, but then started walking. Thursday night's workout caught up to me (see above). My abs, back, quads, and hamstrings had enough.

Cool Down continued... - 0:20 Beyond Easy
Mark dropped me at Clark & Irving Park and I decided to walk for a bit. I told Lakefront Runner on dailymile, my body was like, "Yeah, you need to walk, bro." Some GI discomfort paired with muscle soreness was too much at this point in the run.

Walk-jogged the next mile then ran (20 minutes) from Damen & Cullom to home very slowly. For perspective, running down Wilson I spotted a guy running with a baby jogger. I didn't catch him until he stopped to walk. Not saying guys or girls with baby joggers are slow, but he was not running hard and was actually pulling away until he stopped to walk.

Extremely sore not so much from running as from Thursday's workout on top of running. The good news is the quality work was done and the pain wasn't acute nor asymmetric. 

9/15 Sunday

1:05 Very Easy
Unfortunately my abs are still very sore (my legs and back not so much). I feel like they are tightening and causing me to hunch over so I decided to scrap trying to run medium-long today. It was also difficult to breath deeply so I just ran easily the whole time.

All in all, an okay down week. I spend about eight hours running this week (not counting stretching/self-massage or other activities) down from around 11 hours the last five weeks. I traded acute hip pain for acute muscular soreness in the abs, back, quads, and hamstrings. Hopefully I'll have relief soon!

Just about 4 weeks until BoA Chicago Marathon! I'll be looking to a couple key workouts over the next couple weeks to inform me of my marathon fitness as well as a course run (last 16 miles) and some hill repeats at Roosevelt and Michigan.

How did you like this week's training recap?

Did the switch to duration/effort make sense?

P.S. If you haven't already check out my Running History page! It is kind of interesting. At least I think so!

No comments:

Post a Comment