Post #5 | Tuesday, Week of April 13th – 19th

After last week’s pullback (58.5), it was time to bring back up the mileage. Plan was for anywhere between 70-74. Maybe a little ambitious, but I have lots of miles in these legs and 70 is not stressful.

What WAS stressful was 1. The previous weekend’s Sunday long run – it left me wiped out for the earlier parts of this week. I took until Thursday to recover and feel ready for my next speed session. 2. My Garmin's failure on this week’s long run. 3. The tingling sensation in my right foot and ankle that I started feeling on Tuesday of last week... Now lend me your ear so I can bend it.

1. Long Run Wipe Out: The first hard long runs of a new training cycle always take time getting used to and can really drag you down physically. That’s one of the reasons I think it’s so useful to think of yourself as your own ‘body-diagnostician.’ When you’re training hard, you have to carefully monitor your body and take seriously any type of dysfunction or inadequacy.  I did everything I could to recover from Sunday’s long run – rehydration, foam rolling, stretch, some icing, eat & sleeping right, but it still took me to Thursday to be ready for my next workout (and even then, I decided until after my warm up if I would be OK to go ahead with it).  A younger me would have tried to go ahead on Wednesday with a workout, not because I recovered faster then, but because I hadn’t honed my ability to listen to my body over the noisy cascade of my ambitions.

2. My Garmin 620: I’ll try to be brief. You pay a premium for Garmin with the understanding that they offer superior technology. With that, expectations of reliability are higher.  Well, my Garmin is all too unreliable.  It too often takes too long to get a signal lock; during hard workouts it too often gives me erroneous feedback on pacing & distance.  On some occasions, distance is completely off – NYC Half Marathon, it had me running over 14 miles, not the 13.1. I run tangents well, so that wasn’t the problem. Well, on Sunday’s long progression run, it crapped out in the Harlem Hills (10 miles into the run), only to come back 30 seconds later with bad pacing feedback. As this was a progression long run, I was getting close to the business end of the workout. As I started to push the pace, the display got fixed on 7:05/mile pace.  I knew I was going faster but it wouldn’t budge.  In frustration and anger with it’s continually unreliability, I started running basically as fast as I could for the next 2 miles to shake it up and try to get an accurate reading. My guess was that I ran those miles around 5:47-5:50, and yet still, the display barely lowered my pace. Well, I ran myself to the ground and had to jog in the last 1.5-2 miles to complete my long run.  Not what I wanted, but whatever, I ran hard and got in 16 miles.

3. Tingling in the foot: On Tuesday of last week, as my legs were still recovering from the 18 mile long progression run from the weekend, I started getting a tingling sensation at certain times in my right ankle and foot. It scared the crap out of me and I immediately did a search.  Thankfully, it seems that my habit of crossing my legs when I’m on the computer pinches the peroneal nerve by the outside of the knee. That prolonged and continual compression causes the tingling and could progress to a much worse dysfunction. Since I’ve stopped crossing my legs, it’s gone away. Knock on wood.

M – AM easy 6 miles PM easy 4.5  = 10.5

T – Easy 5.1 miles

W – AM Easy 6.25 miles PM Easy 5.25 miles = 11.5

T – AM Intervals: 3m w/u + strides | 8x 600m @ sub-5min on 200j recov: 1:48, 1:52, 1:50, 1:50, 1:52, 1:51, 1:52, 1:50 | 19 min c/d PM – Easy 3 miles = 13 miles

F – Easy 8.25 miles

S – Easy 7.5 miles

S – Progression Long Run: 16 miles avg. 7:24/mile

TOTAL: 70.8/week