In addition to going to yoga a couple times this week, I also had a deep tissue massage yesterday after work. I find them to be helpful every so often, and I'm actually debating making them more regular in the upcoming months, especially because my training will be increasing not only in volume, but intensity. I'm still mulling around in my head how to best approach it to minimize chance of a setback or injury. Originally, I was thinking that I'd have three quality workouts per week, and do something like alternating bike-heavy and run-heavy weeks. For example, one week have two quality bike workouts and one quality run, and the next week have two quality run workouts and one quality bike. However, it may be that two quality runs in one week would be too much to add a quality bike in as well.
My original thought was to follow up the six week base building with Daniels Phase II (initial quality) for both the bike and the run for six weeks, but another thought might be to spent that time (basically from mid-March until end of April) concentrating on running with two quality runs per week, with the bike workouts being less intense. Then, from May until mid-June, which would normally be Daniels Phase III (transition quality) I could concentrate on quality bike workouts. This accomplishes a few things:
(1) By putting the running first, if I do have a set back, I have more time to absorb it;
(2) Cycling carries over to running more than the opposite, in my experience. The cycling will maintain the aerobic capacity, and therefore all I would need to do for running is maintenance - long runs every so often to maintain endurance, and threshold runs to maintain speed.
(3) The weather will be nicer with the bike quality phase being May/June instead of March/April.
Anyhow, back to massage - it occurred to me that I might be well served by reintroducing myself to the roller. Now that I've had a few massages and have a better idea of what they target in terms of knotted tissue, I might have better luck with using it.
Moving on to today's run -
I wasn't convinced I'd actually go for a run until shortly before I went. I was hesitant because I want to do a long run this weekend, and I want to be better about not doing too much on successive days. On the other hand, I wanted to see how things felt, as it's been several days since my last run. Normally my lunch time runs are six miles, but today I did a shorter 4.3 mile loop as somewhat of a compromise. Overall things felt pretty good, but this run was in the NB minimus shoes, which I've been wearing during most of my runs over the past couple weeks. As I mentioned earlier, I've had some tightness in my left knee earlier this week, and today I think I determined that a potential cause is the minimus shoes. It may not be the shoes themselves, but rather the degree to which I've been increasing the mileage in them - it may be too fast. During the last 1/2 mile or so today, I started to get the ever-so-slight feelings of the IT band rubbing again. I had this happen once during the summer when I had to cut short a 20 mile run, and it went away fairly quickly and easily. But in looking back, the coincidence of how my left knee has started to feel tight and the timing of using the new shoes cannot be ignored. So for the next couple weeks, I'm going to go back to the Free Run's and see how things go.
In the evening, I hopped on the bike and did the TrainerRoad Geiger workout. Like all these base building workouts, it's just an interval workout at about 90% FTP. In this case, it was 3 x 12 minute intervals. I took advantage of some of the recovery/warm up periods by getting some ILT time in.
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