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.
