Tag: training

Marathon prep: injury updates

Blogging about not running is almost as bad as blogging about how you haven’t been blogging, but here goes: my name’s Jason, and it’s been about three weeks since my last real run.

As I get closer to the marathon, I’m getting more and more nervous about my lack of training, but my team’s assuring me I’ve still got lots of time, and I’m still working out three days a week, just not on the road, so everything should be fine.

Anyway, about three weeks back my ankles died.  No idea what caused it, but the nerves or tendons or magic beans under my outer ankles flared up big time, to the point where I was walking with a limp and couldn’t run a quarter mile on the treadmill without pain so severe I thought I was going to fall off.

Luckily, my trainer knew a good chiropractor and I was able to schedule a meeting that same day.  I’d resisted going to one for years during injuries because I had these two assumptions: they’d put me in orthotics (which won’t work in Vibrams) and they’d tell me to stop training (which would wreck my whole belief system.)

As it turns out, I’m not a good candidate for orthotics, and my treatment is designed to get me up and running (literally) as fast as possible with more exercise, not less, to fix the issues we identified.  As they say on eBay, A+++++ great service will buy again!

So what started in my ankles led to some work on my left knee which led to some work on my left hip.  And in the process I got to find out that I’m not as broken as I thought – I’m a little bow-legged but it turns out it’s just cosmetic – and I’m learning a bunch of biomechanics that’ll be a big help down the road.

Now if we can just find some tape that doesn’t call even more attention to my feet…

My ankle, all taped up

So with any luck I’ll be running soon, though with Tough Mudder next weekend I’ll probably limit myself to some light 5-10K sessions to build my confidence a bit without risking too much.  In the meantime, crossfit is going well, and I even got my name on a WOD board this week for the first time – scaled and I hit the time cap, but it’s great to see where I’m headed!

The Long Run

One thing I realized pretty quickly as I started to mentally prep for the Scotiabank Marathon is that I actually don’t have a lot of time in the week to train specifically to running, and even though the race isn’t until October, I don’t have that much time to build up a solid weekly mileage base anyway (Brendon Brazier suggests adding 10% a week for three weeks, then doing half of the average of that on the fourth.)

I also don’t want to cut back on my current gym sessions that I do three times a week.  They’re giving me some solid strength, developing core muscles and fixing weaknesses that’ll lead to injuries, and boosting my VO2 max nicely in the process.

So my plan for the marathon?  The long run, pretty much exclusively, at least until I get my legs used to covering the distance.

Basically, I’m aiming to average one long run per week.  Some weeks will have two if the schedule lines up, but others might not have any (for example, if I have a race like Tough Mudder lined up.)

I’ve been doing the runs with a heart rate monitor (the Nike+ GPS Sportswatch, review pending,) keeping my heart rate in the low 150s so I stay in an aerobic state.  This has been huge for me, and it’s really increased my distance.  That’s been at the expense of speed though, and that’s the toughest part of the long run: you will go very, very slow.  To keep your heart from going too fast, the only thing you can do is give it a rest by slowing down.  Which means people will pass you.  You will have to run your own run, and not theirs.  I found this very, very hard to do.

But on the flipside, the heart monitor kept me going where I would stop in the past, when I felt like I was going so slow there wasn’t any point.  When that happened, I was able to look at my pulse, realize I was still doing work, and kept going.  And pretty much every time, that feeling would pass and I’d get faster again.

I’m also finding my pace is getting faster even as the distance increases.  At roughly the same heart rate, my average pace per kilometre has been speeding up with every run (on the same course, anyway. That time with the hills and heat was a different beast entirely!)

I’ve been thinking about a marathon like a super-high volume, super-low weight workout.  If you were to do, say, a dumbbell curl with a 1 pound weight, it wouldn’t feel like much.  But 10,000 reps would introduce problems and issues that you couldn’t have foreseen.  Long runs are helping me identify these issues.  Here’s an example: I run with an iPhone in my front pocket (for music and in case of emergencies.)  On my last 24km run, I actually got a bruise on my thigh from the light tapping it made with every stride.

Joints, tendons, and everything in between get tested in new ways over really long distances, but the fastest way to get to those levels, for me, anyway, has been with the heart monitor keeping me from going into the red zone, so my body doesn’t die before it’s been tested with these new challenges.

That’s the theory anyway: get far, then get fast, then get far and fast.

One three hour run per week is a lot easier to find time for than several days of mixed training, and I figure I’ve got more time to recover and avoid injury this way.  It’s still a challenge to fit in sometimes though – more on scheduling the long run next time.

Photo by Angela Del Buono