In my previous post four and a half months ago (what a blogger I am!), I congratulated myself for setting a half-marathon PR at the end of March, which was my first non-marathon PR since 2013 and my first PR at any distance since 2015; I wrote about finally managing to run an ok marathon again at Buffalo in May; and I wondered whether my body is still up to the sort of training I'd need to do to seriously target another sub-3:00 marathon this Fall.
Since then I've made some pretty significant changes, or rather I've reverted to some old ways of mine from many years past, and so far I'm having good results. It's not to do with the MRI or PT exercises I mentioned in my last post. I did get the MRI, which sure enough showed all kinds of gnarly stuff in my lower back. But afterwards my doctor repeated what he told me when I asked him for the referral: at my age (44) almost everyone has lots of gnarly stuff in their lower back that will show up on an MRI, but my level of activity is such that none of it warrants pursuing any of the available treatment options, almost all of which are very invasive. So that was a dead end. I also completely stopped doing any supplementary exercises after concluding that I spend enough time running as it is and they weren't helping anyway. But I did not give up on the goal of solving the muscle tightness problem that I've been complaining about for some time. It had gotten bad enough that I decided to try something that for me was more drastic than any attempted solution I had yet considered: I started eating fish again after seven years as a vegetarian. For some time I wondered whether my problem was nutritional, so I tried making various dietary adjustments consistent with my then-vegetarianism, such as eating more plant-based protein, adding more ground flax seed and Udo's Oil to my food, and taking regular B-complex and iron supplements. Yet the increasing muscle tightness and difficulty recovering from workouts continued. Of course it could simply have been aging, but eventually I decided that I needed to find out whether eating fish again would make any difference. This was a difficult decision for me, because I became a vegetarian for ethical reasons, but I've always thought it (ethically) better not to eat meat only if a vegetarian diet can be at least as healthy as a non-vegetarian diet. I still believe it can be, at least for some people, perhaps including me again at some point. But it is impossible to deny that since I started eating fish again this summer my recent muscle tightness and recovery problems have basically vanished. I don't mean, of course, that my muscles never get tight anymore or that I don't need any recovery time after workouts. But these are no longer anything close to the problems they had recently become. For the first time in years, I can do two shorter workouts during the week (usually a short tempo run and some intervals) instead of one (or the other), because I don't need several days to recover from each workout anymore. And I don't just recover well enough from a workout to get through the next one - I feel stronger and run better after recovering from workouts (which happens faster) because my body is actually absorbing the training now. It sounds silly, but I had almost forgotten how it feels to benefit from workouts instead of just doing them as some kind of end in itself. On the weekends, I can also pick up the pace on long runs again and even do long, 10+ mile tempos without my hip muscles locking up. I don't know whether it's because I digest protein from animal meat better (than even whey protein, which is also animal based), whether I needed an animal source of omega-3 (which you can get from supplements without actually eating meat), or what is making the difference. Nor, strictly speaking, do I know whether my vegetarian diet caused the problems I had been experiencing in the first place. But I do know that eating fish again is helping - a lot - to solve them.
So eating fish again is the biggest of the changes I've made lately, and I think it has made it possible for me to handle and benefit from the other changes, which are changes in my training. I already mentioned in my previous post that I intended to start trying to do faster interval workouts in order to improve my speed. Almost every week for a few months now I've been doing this: usually 12 x 400m or 10 x 500m with 1:00 or 1:15 recoveries. I run these intervals at a pace that averages in the high 5:30s, which is faster than my 5k PR pace (5:47) and much faster than I've run a 5k for years. Most weeks I also do a 3 mile, 4 mile, or 2 x 2 mile tempo run, which lately have gotten down below 6:10 average pace. In addition to those two types of workouts, which I usually do on Tuesdays (tempos) and Thursdays (intervals), on weekends I not only have been doing a lot of marathon pace work during long runs, but I've also squeezed down my marathon pace in training to the low 6:40s or high 6:30s. I've done a 10 mile tempo, a 12 mile tempo, 2 x 4 miles, and several long runs with sections of push miles in that pace range over the last couple of months. Any one of these variables - more frequent workouts in general, more intervals in particular, faster intervals, faster short tempos, more marathon pace running, a faster marathon pace - would mark a significant change for the better in my training. But all of them are happening at the same time. Once again I very much doubt that any of this, let alone all of it, would be possible if I weren't eating fish again.
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| Intervals are improving my hip extension |
Since Buffalo I've run several summer club races, which were fun but hot and slow, and two 10 mile races. Near the end of August I ran the Annapolis Ten Miler in 1:06:35. It was my first time running that race and apparently the weather (in late August!) was better than anyone can remember. But all the hills were still there, and it's not a fast course. I ran well, though, and was pleased with how strong I felt on the hills after a shorter than usual stint of training in hilly Greece this summer. But the improvements in my training that I mentioned above really got going after the A10. My first opportunity to put them to use in a race was at the Army Ten Miler last weekend (on October 13). Again we had great weather, and the ATM course is fast. In 2013 I ran 1:02:49 (6:17 pace) at the ATM, which was my 10 mile PR until last weekend. Because my weekly short tempo runs have gotten down to 1:01 flat 10 mile pace (6:06) lately, I knew I was in PR shape. But I haven't been doing longer lactate threshold workouts, because my current schedule gives me only one recovery day between tempo and interval workouts, and I don't want to get too worn out on tempo day. Not really knowing what sort of pace I'd be able to handle in the latter part of a 10 mile race, I decided to aim for sub-1:02 (sub-6:12 pace). According to my Garmin, I ran the first 5 miles of the race in 6:04, 6:07, 6:05, 5:59, and 6:08. But, as often happens, my Garmin was measuring the course long, and I crossed the halfway point in exactly 31 minutes. I slowed down a bit from there, especially in miles 8-10, and finished in 1:02:43 (6:16 average). So I averaged 6:12 pace in the first half and 6:20 in the second. It's not the time I set out to run and think I can run with more LT-focused training, but it was still a PR - 6 seconds faster than I've ever run 10 miles, 19 seconds faster than I ran the same race in similar weather six weeks before setting my current marathon PR in 2015, and almost 2 minutes faster than I've covered that distance since then.
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| Adidas Adios, then air, then the ground |
By the way, I ran the ATM in Adidas Adios, the same shoes I wear for short workouts, and the same shoes (but a later version of them) that I wore at the ATM in 2013 and 2015. I mention this because everybody is talking these days about the supposed performance advantage of the Nike Vaporfly 4% (and now the Next %). I wore Vaporflys when I ran my 1:23:45 half-marathon PR in March. According to McMillan, my new 10 mile PR converts to a 1:23:39 half marathon. So either the shoes don't make me faster (at least at those distances) or I'm in better shape now than I was in March. I think it's probably a little of both. I'm certainly in better shape now than I was in March, but I felt like I didn't run as well at the ATM as I did at the B&A half in March relative to my fitness at those times. But the shoes might help a little bit too. As I've written here before, I think the Vaporflys are best suited to the marathon, not to shorter distances. It probably depends on your running style, but I don't think they make me faster at all - in fact, I find trying to run fast in them more difficult than in proper racing flats like Adios (which are on the heavy side for racing flats). But over long distances the lightness and squish of the Zoom X foam in Vaporflys reduces fatigue and helps me avoid slowing down, as well as aiding recovery. It's possible that I could have run a little bit faster in them even over 10 miles than in Adios, but if so I don't think the difference would be very big at all. They're really just shoes, not magic, whatever the Nike marketing division would have you believe.
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| Some of the DC Road Runners after the Army Ten Miler |
My next races will be the Veterans' Day 10k on November 10 and the Philadelphia Marathon two weeks later on November 24. I've run Philly twice before and PR'd both times, including my current PR of 2:58:56. Maybe the third time will be even more charming.
