My last post was the century and 6 mile brick on 5/28. I ended up taking Tuesday as a rest day because I was still fairly fatigued from the day before. I debated going to yoga, but decided against it, planning to go Wednesday instead.
Then Wednesday rolled around and a last minute thing at work came up that meant I'd miss yoga on that day too. Then I started thinking that I'd like to get an 8 mile run in - but by the time I was able to, it was dark out and I didn't want to chance rolling my ankle on a pothole or something stupid, so I decided to get up early Thursday morning before work.
Which I did, amazingly enough. My plan was to do around 8 miles @ threshold pace. Everything was going well until around mile 3.5, when I started noticing some discomfort in my right hamstring. Since it was just discomfort, I kept going, but at mile 4 it got a lot worse, so I stopped. Of course, I was on the dark side of the moon, so I still had to manage some way to get back home without making things worse. I thought about continuing to run through it, but then realized I'd be pissed at myself if I further injured myself just for the sake of making sure I showed up to work on time. So instead I hobbled back with a combination of walking and running. It felt like either a very weird cramp, or a minor hamstring pull. I'm still not sure which it was, but after icing it when I got home, and a day of sitting down and giving it rest, it was a lot better that evening.
Since I couldn't finish the run, that evening I decided to hit the bike and revisit Mary Austin, a workout I tried in the past but ended up bailing on the last interval. This time I finished it, but still found it surprisingly difficult. You'd think that if I can do 3 x 20 minutes @ FTP, this workout with some time under and some time over FTP would be a tad easier, but it wasn't. I can only guess that the intervals right at FTP hit a comfortable steady state of exertion, whereas this one is changing things up every couple minutes, which keeps the body guessing.
On Friday I started thinking about the past few months. I feel like I peaked in my long distance running endurance during Stu's 30k at the beginning of March. After that, I've had successive soft tissue injuries for whatever reason - first it was rolling the ankle at the dog park, an injury which lingered for a few weeks, but I kept running on it for a while before finally taking a full week off. However there were no long runs during that time because of the injury. Then after that was healed, I did a long 17 mile run and hurt the same ankle, but on the outside. That was feeling better about two weeks later, when I did an 11 mile run and blew it out again, requiring another two weeks of little/no running and certainly no long runs. Since then I've been able to build up 'long run' distance to just over 8 miles by staying conservative - but all told in the end the past few months have been a major disappointment in terms of long runs.
While some of the injuries can be explained by my own stupidity (running 17 miles 48 hours after running 9 miles), I'm starting to think a large part is also the lack of leg strength work I've been doing. All last summer as I was building up volume, I was hitting the P90X Legs & Back routine on a regular basis. Over the winter, I did it more. If I recall, I stopped when I got the bike trainer, thinking that my time was probably best spent on that rather than the strength training. That may have been a bad assumption, because the strength training may be a critical component to my staying injury free. Not entirely sure, just a theory for now.
So with that in mind, I decided to resume leg strength work. After a short 3.5 mile run on Saturday - half the purpose was to exercise the dogs, but the other half was to just start accumulating some time pounding pavement - I did a series of lunges and squats. I didn't go with the full P90X routine because I knew from past experience that if I've slacked from that and go back to the full thing, my legs are sore and useless for like a week. So I just did some balance lunges, deadlift squats, single leg squats, calf raises, sneaky lunges step-forward lunges and step-back lunges. Even with that workout load of about 15-20 minutes, the day after I'm pretty sore, and I'm glad I stopped when I did. It'll allow me to recover faster and then a few days later I should be able to do another 15-20 minute session.
In an attempt to help get the blood flowing, I did a quick spin - the TR Geiger workout. This is a 1 hr sweet spot intensity workout. I didn't want to do anything too intense since my quads and glutes were already tight, and further tightening would start to go down the road of ITB issues.
Also, kind of an afterthought - it appears the hamstring has healed up - at least enough that I don't notice it when walking. Yesterday during the short run, I felt it while walking, but I felt it more during the run. At this point, depending on schedule and how things shake out, I may try for something like 10 miles easy on Monday or Tuesday.
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