Sunday, July 5, 2015

Heat, overstriding, and rust

June 8-14
Mo: 30 min. easy
Tu: 5 x 1k @ 3:58 w/ 1 min. rest, then 4 x 200m @ 41 w/ 200m jog recoveries
We: 6 easy
Th: off
Fr: 5 easy
Sa: DNF @ PRR Twilight Festival 4 miler
Su: 90 min. @ 7:59 pace (11.3 miles)
Week total: 37.5 miles

June 15-21
Mo: 5 easy
Tu: off
We: 5 mile step-down tempo from 6:46 to 6:23
Th: 8 easy
Fr: off (injured)
Sa: off
Su: off
Week total: 22.5 miles

June 22-28
Mo: off
Tu: 4 easy
We: 4 easy
Th: off
Fr: 5 easy
Sa: Fartlek: 3 x (1, 2, 3 min.) w/ equal recoveries, skipping the final 3 min. interval
Su: 11 miles @ 8:25 pace
Week total: 32 miles

June 29 – July 5
Mo: 5 easy
Tu: 5 x 1k @ 3:59 w/ 1 min. rest
We: 7 easy
Th: off
Fr: 30 min. easy, plus 6 strides
Sa: PRR Firecracker 5k (3.17 miles) in 19:11 (mile splits 5:47, 5:50, 6:22)
Su: off
Week total: 30 miles

A lot happened during these four weeks runningwise. The first two weeks were oppressively hot and humid. My last preliminary track workout before what was supposed to be my summer tune-up race went fine, but the race itself was a dud for me. After running 6:00 pace for 10 minutes, my stomach felt like it was going to explode, so I just stopped. Perhaps it was due to a combination of having too much in my stomach (it was an evening race, which I’m not used to) and the hot, humid conditions (around 90 degrees with a dew point over 70). I felt dumb dropping out but wasn’t too disappointed since it was just supposed to be a rust-buster anyway.

A few days after that, however, a 5 mile tempo run and then an easy run on the following day precipitated a general revolt of nearly all the muscles in my right upper leg. I ended up taking four days completely off and missing what was supposed to be my first more challenging track workout. It’s common for speedwork to cause injuries like this, but my coach eased me into it very gradually, so I was surprised this happened. I suspect that bad running form was at least partly to blame, exacerbated by the steamy weather. In early 2012 I injured my right upper hamstrings doing speedwork, and that injury has continued to plague me ever since. A year after that, in early 2013, I injured my right outer hip doing speedwork but recovered well and haven’t had problems with that area since (except in Pisa). This time it’s the right upper hamstrings again, along with hip flexors. All of these injuries are on my right side, and clearly I have some strength and stride asymmetries that both underlie and result from these injuries in a vicious cycle. I went to see Dr. Stephen Pribut, who gave me some exercises to do and recommended that I concentrate on shortening my stride by increasing my cadence to around 180 steps per minute (spm). The chronic hamstring injury is the most significant one, and that’s associated with overstriding. Who knows why my right and not my left hamstrings got injured in the first place, but my stride probably also becomes uneven when my right hamstrings tighten up and I compensate for that in various ways. Shortening my stride should help both to protect my right hamstrings and to eliminate a probable cause of this asymmetry. And the way to shorten my stride without slowing down is to increase my stride rate or cadence.

I hadn’t even noticed that my Garmin Forerunner 220 can monitor cadence until this happened. It turns out that prior to this injury my cadence had typically been in the 160s – the low 160s when running easy and high 160s, maybe just over 170, when running faster. So immediately after my appointment with Dr. Pribut, I set my watch to show my cadence as I run and set out on a 4 mile easy run, attempting initially just to get my cadence up to 170-175, to be increased to 180 later. Nothing hurt, but my form felt completely different running 10 spm faster than I had been used to. The shorter stride generally took stress off my backside but wore out my hip flexors more. Over the next week I gradually got used to this new form as my cadence crept into the upper 170s when running easy and over 180 when running faster. My hip flexors gradually became stronger and less sore. On June 30 I did the same 5 x 1k workout that I had done three weeks earlier, at the same pace but averaging 183 spm vs. 167 spm the previous time. That’s not a hard workout but it felt much smoother running with the higher cadence.


Feeling stronger but still without having done any more challenging workouts, I finally got a rust-buster in on July 4. I knew that I wasn’t ready to run a fast time but decided anyway to go out at my PR and goal pace in order to get a sustained taste of it for the first time in a while before blowing up, as I fully expected to do. I was pleased that I managed to hang onto 18:00 pace for two miles, even though I was fried after that and the last 2/3 of a mile were uphill anyway. The course was long and my Garmin had me at 18:49 at 5k, but the overall time didn’t matter to me on that day. What matters is that I shook off some rust and showed that I’m still in a good position to take a crack at my 17:58 PR in four weeks, barring further injury problems.