In an attempt to throw everything plus the kitchen sink at it, I rolled multiple times yesterday (sometimes on PVC, sometimes on foam), I iced a couple times, stretched a couple times and popped a couple aspirin before bedtime. I woke this morning with things feeling closer to normal - not 100%, but at least in the right direction. I still didn't want to commit to a full 20, though - so I set off figuring I'd do my 11 mile loop and see how things went.
Around mile 7-8, I was hit with a realization that made me do a mental 'durrrrrrr'. I realized that over the summer, the 20 mile run was something to be respected - planned for, executed well, and plenty of time allowed for recovery (ie, reduced mileage in the subsequent week). At the time, it was a major accomplishment, and I treated it as such. Unfortunately, I had allowed a conquerors mentality to take over - since I had done it a few times before, I was treating it as though it is no big deal. Or at least not as big of a deal. Today I realized that that attitude was incorrect - something in that range still requires a great deal of respect - I'm not yet built up enough to be so cavalier about it. The past few weeks have demonstrated that.
The best way to show this is looking at my running mileage graph:
Obviously, this doesn't represent the mileage graph of someone following a prescribed training program - so toss aside any rules of thumb about how to progress in mileage. The point I want to make is that it is clear that over the summer, from about May until October, every high mileage week was followed by a low mileage week of half or fewer miles than the previous week. The goal at the time was simply to extend the long run distance, so I was ok with that pattern, and it worked well for me. Then, once the new year hit and I started thinking about base building for July, I started adding in mid-week runs - and after peaking in early February, the subsequent weeks did not see nearly the same degree of drop-off in mileage as was seen during the summer. In my desire to maintain the feel of the long runs, I wasn't giving myself enough recovery time, because I also wanted to add in additional miles throughout the week for a strong base. In short, too much, too fast. Add in doing a half marathon pace test run of 11 miles, followed the next week by the half marathon itself, PLUS the biking workouts during the week - it ends up being a recipe for eventual disaster.
So, the fact that I woke up this morning with the IT band feeling better was a huge relief. While I recognize I'm not out of the woods yet, the train ride to disaster, so far, looks to have been averted. And with the epiphany during my run today, I feel as though I've been able to further hone my approach to minimize chance of a repeat. Or worse.
Originally, I was thinking that Phase I of base building (beginning of Feb to mid-March) would be all about slow and easy miles, with a few runs in the 17-20 mile range and very few 'quality' workouts (ie, anything with speed). Wrong!! What I realized is that a run of that distance is a quality workout. I may not be stressing my glycogen stores or muscle fibers or oxygen extracting capability - but I am stressing my structural systems, which is currently limited by my IT band. So, aside from the 30k in a couple weeks - no more runs of over about 13 miles for me during base building. Suddenly the Jack Daniels rule of thumb of limiting the long run to 2.5 hours makes a lot more sense to me (not that it didn't before, but now it's personal). So at this point in my conditioning - anything more than about an 1hr and 45m should be considered a quality run, and given it's due process for recovery.
The other aspect is that during base building, I'm probably much better off with maintaining consistency and frequency of workouts, as opposed to having the occasional stressful workouts that requires additional recovery time - as the former allows for more overall workout time. I'd love to be able to bang out a 20 miler every couple weeks, maintain another 2-3 days per week of doing a lunch time sixers, plus being able to do the three bike workouts per week - but that is simply too much for my body to handle. If I go out and run 17-20 miles and it takes me about three hours - I get three hours of 'fitness'. However if that requires reduced activity over the next several days because of necessary recovery - I lose several hours of training time in the end. On the other hand, if I can get much of the same benefit (in terms of base building - increased mitochondrial and red blood cell count, improved oxygen extraction capability, etc) by shortening the run and it taking only an hour and a half, I will recover more quickly and then be able to follow up with mid-week runs and/or cycling training session of an hour each, and end the week with more time training, with less injury risk.
So now I'm thinking that in Phase II, which I recently decided would be comprised of two quality runs/week and one quality bike/week - I can keep the running distances on the shorter side doing things like tempo runs or intervals. This actually aligns with the Jack Daniels plan anyway, where Phase II is initial quality. Then, in Phase III, when there is only one quality run/week, I can work on extending via threshold or marathon pace runs, gradually building up the distance of those.
With all that in mind, here are the results of todays run.
EDIT: Umm, wow. I'm glad I didn't do 20. I just realized that Stu's is next weekend! A week sooner than I thought. Yikes!
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