The second week always sucks, from what I remember. You're not as rested as the first week you start, but you're just as weak and out of shape. Thankfully, the second week has been survived, as have a few runs approaching 40 minutes.
Now, this is where it gets interesting. This third week will tell, whether there's a few MORE weeks of grueling slow progress to go, or if my body has managed to shift into the next gear and I can continue making the trek towards real training. I'd like to think it will be the latter. I feel like I put in a good 3 or 4 weeks of painful, slow slogging before the Europe vacation, and the layoff after that was only about 2 weeks, so perhaps some of that progress will have been retained.
I'm not aiming to make a huge increase in total minutes this week, but I'd like to see how the foot with the orthotic handles some "longer" runs. We've been okay with runs in the 35 minute range now, up from 30 minutes a month or so ago, but I'd just feel a ton better if we could make it consistently to 40 minutes. 40 minutes is almost a real run. Almost.
Sunday 11/25: 34:55 Monterrey to rock. All things considered, not a bad start to the week. First halfway-decent run on a day after core strengthening. Feet did not hurt, stride felt good towards the end, did not feel tired. Feeling cautiously optimistic about this week. A little worried about the transition back to morning running, means < 24 hours of rest for the toes in addition to just not enjoying the morning cold, groggy and tired.
Went rollerblading with Peter at the RB. Was fun, but kind of harrowing. Discovered that I am not very competent at this activity, as per having a poor sense of balance and lack of gross or fine motor skills. Did not fall on face though, and a good time was had :).
Monday 11/26: 42:07 Monterrey to the second bridge, loop by the casting pond and back on the other side of the Arroyo. Hard to get up in the AM, but bright and sunny, felt like a good day to try a longer run. Actually it was kind of not an optimal day to try a longer run. This is the 7th running day in a row without a rest day, plus <24 hours since the last run... both conditions that my feet have yet to deal with. The run itself was actually pretty good, felt a bit groggy and stilted in the beginning, but it all settled down nicely into a smooth stride and comfortable breathing pretty quickly.
Unfortunately, after PT and shower and a few hours, the bad toe is feeling less than delighted. A lot more soreness than usual, not horrible but a little bit concerning. Probably wise to cash in the off day tomorrow, even if it feels alright in the morning. Lets see if I'm disciplined enough to stick to that.
Tuesday 11/27: off. Feet felt fine in the morning, but didn't get finished with core strengthening and errands until late yesterday, so decided it would be a good day to catch up on some morning sleep. Probably really should stick to taking an off day once every week or so anyways, so I guess this is okay. Nothing today other than PT... and getting fat.
Wednesday 11/28: 46:20, 3 x Arroyo Tempo Loops plus a little extra. An experiment, some learnings, and the conclusion that sometimes, ignorance is bliss...
Woke up feeling crappier than I expected. Both hamstrings felt tight and sore, presumably the second day after effect from some new exercises added to the core strengthening program. Still not adjusting to the going to bed early, waking up early thing, so felt tired and bad in the morning despite having gone to bed early... because ofcourse, I couldn't fall asleep for a few hours. Argh. Nevertheless, I figured, I wasn't going to feel any BETTER tomorrow after core strengthening again today, so might as well keep on going with the plan.
Broke out the old HR monitor to test the theory that various people have put forth, that injuries feel better after a very, very low intensity day. Since all of my days are low intensity, this means slowing to glacial speeds, and I figured the only way to do that without going nuts is to set the HR monitor to 150. I thought I was enough weeks in that I shouldn't see any exorbitantly high numbers... but boy, was I wrong. I decided in the interests of finishing this run... today... to reset the expectations to a HR of 160.
The conclusions of today's experiment is as follows:
1. I am still horribly out of shape if a HR of 160 corresponds to about 9:30 min/mile pace.
2. My new hypothesis is that how happy my L foot feels is a function of total # of footstrikes... and not of intensity or distance, or even duration. Its sort of like a starting pitcher, you can only throw X number of pitches before the form breaks down and quality declines. On average, my feet are good until 35-37 minutes. Running faster, my feet feel good for 40 - 42 minutes, on today's ultra slow run, my feet felt crappy after about 32-33 minutes. The slower you run, the smaller your stride, the more footstrikes are expended per minute.
This kind of derails the idea of decreasing intensity in hopes of increasing overall training time/distance... the variable that is less well defined is minimum recovery time before next run can safely be attempted. That does, preliminarily seem to scale with intensity and not duration.
Conclusions: I think, there's just no getting around it. I have to stick to a majority of ~35 minute runs and gradually work my way up at a rate that my foot allows. I'm also leaning towards accepting the Kangway HR calculation methodology: % difference between max and min... vs. straight up % of max HR. By that calculation, 160 HR is about 65% effort, which is about what today felt like. It actually felt like my stride was really stilted, bc its hard to find any rhythm at all if you're constantly making an effort to slow yourself down. Meh...
Thursday 11/29: 34:08, California to RB. Shaking off the bad day and getting back out there. Did an extra set on the bad leg of hamstring/hip strengthening yesterday, so didn't feel all that fresh this morning. Took it real easy, but was happy with the effort level, and stride felt more natural, feet didn't hurt. Put in the squishy orthotic again, its been working pretty well to take a few days off of the podiatrist orthotics every once in a while when the first and third toes start to feel sore from the extra redistributed pressure.
Friday 11/30: 37:12, many, many laps around the soggy track in the PM. Tried hard to deal with the wet grass for the benefit of my feet, but it was just too squishy and suction-y. Interfered with a nice stride. Felt excessively cantankerous about the rain, but it turns out the run was very relaxing and of optimal temperature. Very easy per having eaten some food before heading out.
Felt conflicted about being at the track for the first time in many, many months... it was kind of bittersweet and painfully nostalgic, like seeing someone who had broken your heart many years ago. Ran opposite direction in the outermost lane, which is about as impersonal as you can get with a track, almost perfectly 2:35 per lap. Very strange to run on an even surface. Feet felt sore on and off due to unfamiliar impact. Not delighted about this turn of events, hopefully there won't be any fall out tomorrow.
Stayed for some core strengthening at the gym, mostly went well, except for the hip/hamstring exercises. Then went home, had stomach ache, and dropped a bottle directly onto my bad toe just past the joint... felt VERY disgruntled.
Saturday 12/1: 33:45, California to RB. Butt felt unpleasantly sore after yesterday's hip exercises... also, felt irate about the fact that the rain has packed down all of the dirt in the Arroyo into a jarring, hard surface, and the bad toe felt sore where the bottle fell yesterday. In addition, developed a stomach ache halfway through due to 1,000 calories worth of cashews consumed earlier in the day. Ran what felt like very, very, slowly, but was encouraged to find that it wasn't much different from any other day's run. Really annoyed about the whole bottle thing, but I guess there's not much to be done at this point. The bruise isn't so bad, but it feels like the whole toe became kind of inflamed after the incident.
In other news, KB won the Tiger Run, keeping the title in the Caltech family. Pie 'n Burger (aka, a lot of cashews) afterwards. Fun discussion about many odd and possibly inappropriate topics. Felt inspired to keep on chugging along, so that someday I too may race again...
Target training: 3 hours 45 minutes
Actual Week's Training: 3:48:27
6 comments:
Hey now! Since when is 40 minutes almost a real run? I always thought 30 minutes was the mark of a real run...
In any case, I'm so happy that you've been updating 1) because it means that you are running and making progress, and 2) because it gives me something to read and think about.
Good luck! You'll get back and healthy soon enough.
Morning runs are tough. Today was even rougher since 13 or 14 hours earlier I had done ~10 miles feeling sort of tired at the end of that.
It's sort of funny about your 40 minute rule because that's almost exactly the same way my 30 minute rule came about. I used to think that 4 miles was the minimum (I guess you were much more hardcore, with 5 as your min) amount of work to get some benefit. At the time I loosely translated this to 32 minutes (~8 minute pace), but it worked its way down to an even 30.
megumi,
do you actually believe that your stride rate gets SLOWER when your running pace gets FASTER? by about 30%?!!!
no way. i am willing to bet there is not one human being alive who would fail to take more steps in 42 minutes of fast running than in 32 minutes of slow running
a general rule is that people do vary their stride length much more than their stride rate as they change speed. however, when going to a higher speed, stride rate and length will both increase to some extent.
also, if you are trying to figure out what might physically make your foot get sore more easily when running slowly, running slowly will generally:
decrease the number of footstrikes per minutes
decrease the peak force on your foot at footstrike and at pushoff
increase the contact time between your foot and the ground
alter the space and time distribution of forces on your foot in some complicated way which i cannot predict
my guess would be that it's the last of those that would cause your foot to hurt more easily while running slowly. the mechanics are simply different, and you're stressing your foot in a different way. Even though the total stress is less overall, the stress on some particular area of your foot could well be greater.
Mark's right about the stride thing. Except at the extremes most people have pretty consistent stride rates. I don't think I vary more than by three or four strides per minute between 7:00 pace and 5:00 pace. But when you get to doing really fast stuff (like sprinting) or really slow stuff (shuffling), that's when you'll see more of a change.
So really, if the difference in your pace is between like 9:00 and 7:45, I doubt it's changing that much. Then again, I'm not watching you run.
You can test this out by just counting yourself sometime.
ohhhh, oops. i think what i was meaning to emphasize was that running slower drastically increases the number of footstrikes per unit distance (vs. i wrote "per minute"). i don't think its *that* unreasonable to say that stride length is 30% shorter for shuffling than real running.
so more total footstrikes will be required to cover 3 Arroyo tempo loops at 8 minute pace than 9:30 pace. and within that delta lies the turnover point where my feet start to hurt vs. not. which i agree is probably an overly simplistic model... but i thought of that as a factor in trying to explain why running slower felt so much crappier for my feet.
on more reflection, its likely that the idea that the distribution of impact is just worse for my foot even if the total force is less is more of a factor than that the taking of excess footsteps is an issue in this particular situation... though in the big picture sense, currently the number of optimal force distribution footsteps that I can take without hurting my feet kind of IS the limiting factor to everything right now.
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