As promised in my post about the long run, a few words on time management as it pertains to training. For the Scotiabank Waterfront Marathon, my main plan is to do one long run per week in addition to the weightlifting and CrossFit WODs I was already doing. This means, at this stage in my development, that I need to find about three hours in a row to run 25-30km.
Of course, the run is only a piece of the puzzle. There’s the warm up, and more notably, the recovery. I’m slowly getting better at the end of each piece as my legs get used to the new demands I’m placing on them, but I’m still pretty much a wreck. It takes me an hour or so for my body’s cooling system to adjust when I’m done, so I’m not doing much but rehydrating, and then my legs sometimes, well, hurt an awful lot. There is limping, and the couch becomes very attractive.
Owning my own company means I have some flexibility of schedule (I get to choose which 70 hours a week I work, sometimes!) but there are still limits to how I can structure my week for a long run, especially if I want to avoid injury or overtraining that conflicts with my gym work. Right now I’m faced with two options:
- Run in the morning, and plan to not do much else until 1:00 or so in the afternoon while I recover, or
- Run in the evening, and risk not being able to sleep.
The advantage to both? Less exposure to heat. It’s insanely hot in Toronto right now, so early morning or later at night (pre-dusk, for me) are generally nicer times to train.
Getting to sleep after an evening run has been interesting. I found that I was dead tired from the exertion, but my body’s hydration was messed up, and I didn’t want to have to get up to pee in the night if my legs were going to be really stiff. On the other hand, the evening run means I get 8 hours of recovery before I have to actually do anything else with my legs, which has been a big advantage.
The other challenge, for both, has been discipline. I’ve read numerous studies that suggest self-discipline is like a battery, and if you use too much of it, you need some time to recharge, and in the meantime you don’t have much self-control. This makes it harder for me to commit to a long run at the end of a hard day, but on the other hand, if I run in the morning I don’t have much left in the willpower tank for the rest of the day where I’d like to get some work done.
Oh, and as for my other workouts, I usually train Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, so my optimal run times are working out to be Tuesday night (stacked after a session, but with a few hours rest in between) and Saturday morning. This maximizes my recovery window, but so far I’ve felt like an extra 24 hours rest would help top things off. For now, I’m sticking to just one run out of the two possible sessions, but hopefully as my body adjusts to the load (just as it did for the gym stuff months ago) I’ll be able to try for two runs in a week followed by a lighter program the following week.
My training as a whole is very 80-20 focused. I know people who put in a lot more miles, and part of me would love to do that, but right now it looks like 3 hours (plus recovery) per week will get me where I need to be, and it’s actually achievable without much risk of burnout, so that’s the plan for now!