Two things kept me from charting my training accountability last week. First off, travel back from CO cost me a day and a half’s worth of workouts. And second, I got really depressed (for me, which may be like normal affect for most people?) over what I seem to have done to my hamstring. I think I finally figured out that I have high hamstring tendonitis. Won’t go into the symptoms, but they all seem to fit that assessment. I’ve been taking intermittent days off from running, and can’t really handle fast (TP type) intervals without a lot of pain afterwards. Oh, and every stride is a pain in the butt. So most of last week, I moped around (mentally) feeling like (a) I was not going to be properly prepared to tackle the Kona run and (b) maybe this is telling me I am ready take an extended sabbatical from Ironman.
Then, this evening, I reviewed what I’ve done over the past four weeks:
- 4 TP sessions running
- 18 running sessions, counting split long runs as 2, which is an avg of 4.5/week. My normal is 3-4/week
- 110 miles of running, not far from my goal of 120-128 for this time period
- To say nothing of 3 weeks of 11,000+ meters swimming, and 41 hours in those 3 weeks biking, a lot of it up and down climbs of 1000-1500 meters.
And this PM, I tried a 13.1 mile run at the local cinder track (not as boring as a treadmill), so I could avoid ups/downs, and be ready to bail at a moment’s notice. While my butt hurt with every stride, it didn’t get any worse during the nearly two hours, and it felt no worse after I was done than before I started. So, I’ve resigned myself to (a) no running on consecutive days; (b) no running at anything other than LRP; and (c) putting up with the pain for the next month, then let things fall where they may. My wife says I should worry about “permanently” injuring myself. “Permanently” is a relative term at my age. I would be just fine if I ran a respectable marathon in 4 weeks, then never ran another step for the rest of my life. I’ve never really liked running, except as a means to compete.
It’s also had the positive effect of making me focus more on swimming and biking the past month. EG, yesterday, I did a local ride, “Tour de Blast”, up the western side of Mt St Helens. The weather was awesome – 55 >> 85F depending on elevation and time of day, no clouds. 84 miles, 7000′ feet of gain in three main chunks: 3500′, 1500′, & 1300′ with some rollers on the downhills. I took my new road bike, just for the fun of it. I reverse engineered an FTP out of the numbers I got (3000 kilo joules), and think I did 267 TSS @ 0.73 IF, with an FTP of 238 (compared to 212 on the TT bike, but those are two different PMs, Stages vs PowerTap, so, whatever). The final 20 miles was into a fair headwind, so that was a plus as well.
And, the Y has conveniently closed its pool from Sep 9-19, “forcing” me into two open water swims, and another in a nearby 25 meter pool, which seems so much more substantial than 25 yards (I get at least 5 yards of coasting every time I push off the wall).
Totals: 1,132 TSS; 21:30 hours (Strava seems to overcount my cycling a bit), current CTL of 128. Swim/Bike/Run of 3:48/11,500m, 14 hrs/215 miles, 3:52/26.2 miles (not a coincidence).
Next week is another “break”. I’m heading to Chicago for a bucket list race, the ITU “Standard Distance” (their name for what we call Olympic) Age Group World Championships. So 2 days pretty much lost to travel, another to setting up the day before the race. I’m looking on the bright side, that I need some recuperation heading into the final 10 day push. My big worry, though, is that I will work the run hard, and set myself back for run training. Somehow, I’ll have to find the proper pace – just fast enough to be respectable, not so hard that I really hurt myself. One bonus – its a perfectly flat run course, along the lake.