Recovery
After finishing my
first ever marathon, I took 2,5 weeks completely off from running. I
was the local Donald Duck for couple of days. I walked funny. My thighs in particular were weak and
hurt the first few days after the race. Walking down stairs
was difficult, I had to climb down back first. My girlfriend goes to
dance in a local dance hall. They also do massage. The third day
after the race I went there to get a massage. This time the massage
was better than I had come across so far. One week
after the race I had recovered sufficient that I could go out to do
some inline skating. I had basically complete rest for one week.
Strength Training
On 15th of
Octobre I enrolled to a local gym, Mr. Mundo, just two blocks away
from home. The gym is a bit robust, but not a junk yard at all, still my kind of place. The type of gym where you won't run out of
weights. Not one of those expensive fitness clubs where you spend
more time ”admiring” yourself in the mirrors than you do lifting
weights. The weightlifting bars need to be bent from previous heavy
use because the Rocky feeling is essential part of the strength
training for me. I don't mind if there's water dropping from the
ceiling. Even better.
I had to go through
medical exam before I could start training in the gym. The part I
really thought was great was when the director of the gym, Hernan
Brisco, invited me to his office to talk about my goals in practice.
I explained him that I had six months ago begun running again and that I
was aiming to be sub-3 hour marathon runner in a year or two. So he
made me a strength training plan accordingly and suitable for a long
distance runner. I started going to the gym 4 times a week. I was
running just one time per week. I went to the gym five weeks, a total
of 20 times.
Enjoying The Fitness
10th of
November we participated in Nextel Runroller Buenos Aires. A relay
competition where we had our 3 person mixed
colombian-argentinean-finnish team: my girlfriend Sandra, her
collegue Evelyn, and me. The first two legs of the relay were 5K
running and then the third leg 11K inline skating. The girls took
care of the running and I did the skating. Sandra started out first
and managed to run very well (with zero running training), 33:35.
Evelyn run the second leg, a solid 28:04. I skated the 11K in 30:43.
Our team did well and we were in the overall results at position 279
out of 484 teams that finished the race. It was a very nice and well
organized event. And we had fun. Who knows, maybe we do it again next
year.
 |
| Figure 1: Asics Kayano 18, black/yellow |
At week 47: 19th
of November I started to run again, six times a week. I also bought
new shoes, Asics Kayano 18. I had studied the programs from the
Finnish Marathon Runners and decided to give it a try. I picked their
3:30 aiming marathon program. Their programs include all the
essential pieces of marathon training: Recovery Runs, Easy Runs, Long
Runs, Marathon Pace Runs, Tempo Runs, Hills, and Intervals.
The temperatures in
Buenos Aires in November and December start to be around 30 C. That
is the maximum in Finnish summer. I am not that used to running in
heat, yet. The things that I noticed when the temperatures started to
go near 30 C is that I need to drink a lot more water and my heart
rate is higher. Obvious reactions in the body, but I had never before
been able to study this because in Finland this is uncommonly hot.
Maybe one or two days the whole year. In Buenos Aires it is still
considered spring.
 |
| Figure 2: Long Run in Las Cañas, Uruguay |
So I stopped going to
the gym and started following the 3:30 marathon program. I could keep
up 4 weeks and then I was out of juice. My tank was already empty. I
felt it inside me that I am doing too much with too high intensity. I
don't have enough time to recover. I needed to slow down and build a
good base before I could add the intensity. At that moment I hadn't
decided where and when I would run my next marathon. I knew I
wouldn't be ready in half year to run a marathon like I would like
to. I needed more time. So I decided I will run the 2013 Buenos Aires
City Marathon again in next Octobre. I had 10 months to go.
I had already run with
a fairly intense level of training a new weekly record on week two of
the training program, 56.8 km. I decided to cut down drastically my
kilometers and start building the base slow. The days were starting
to get really hot for me, so I had to wake up early and tried to run
in the morning at 7 or 8 o'clock. Since 17th of December I
run only 3 times per week, keeping the intensity low, mainly Recovery
Runs 6 to 9 km. We headed out for the Christmas to Cordoba,
Argentina. There I experienced the hottest day so far in my life, 42
C, on the Christmas Day. I couldn't do anything else but just sit in
front of a fan.
We flew to Bogota,
Colombia for the New Year to visit the family of Sandra. A change of
climate from hot moisture summer of Buenos Aires to high
altitude (2700 m) dry cool air of Bogota. The weather is pretty
much the same all year round in Bogota: daily maximum 22 C and minimum 6 C in the night. When the sun goes down, the temperature drops very
rapidly. I went out for a run twice in a nearby park to experiment
and feel how it was to run at altitude. The heart rate was sky
rocketing when I run there. The running feels a bit like if you would be running in a
hangover. One day we climbed up to Cerro Monserrate, a hill (or
mountain) close to the center of the city. The next time I will run up there, mark my words!
 |
| Figure 3: Climbing the stairs to Cerro Monserrate. |
 |
| Figure 4: Hills training. Cerro Monserrate in the back. |
Base Training
Week 3 in January 2013
I started to build my Base. The idea was to keep intensity of running
low, and start building the weekly kilometers. There is a rule of thumb that
you should not increase your weekly running distance more than 10%
per week. By the way, that is a lot. In my experience about 5% is sufficient for me. Anything more will just result in injury or exhaustion. I wanted to experiment this theory, trying to run without
injury increasing the distance about 3 km each week. I started off by
running five times a week: the first week I run 37.0 km. The next
week 40.0 km. Just Recovery Runs and Easy Runs, nothing more intense. On
the third week of training I added sixth running practice to the week
and run 43.2 km. In 11 weeks I had built up my weekly kilometers to
71.9 km. I felt I was all the time kind of close to my limit, not
pushing it, but close to it. I needed a lot of sleep to recover from the running I was doing. My week 13 training looked like this:
Week 13: Total of 375 minutes and 71.9 kilometers of running.
25.3. Monday: Easy
Run/Fartlek 50 min 6.0/4.5 km
26.3. Tuesday: Easy Run
61 min 12.1 km
27.3. Wednesday:
Fartlek 29 min 6.5 km, Warm up/Cooldown 24min 4.2 km
28.3. Thursday: Easy
Run 63 min 12.2 km
29.3. Friday: Recovery
Run 33 min 6.2 km
30.3. Saturday: Long
Run 115 min 20.2 km
31.3. Sunday: REST
I had been running
without injury or even nuisances, but the next week my right Achilles Tendon got sore. I had to stop running. And I started to do eccentric
strength training for the Achilles Tendons and a workout program I
had come across on Runner's World called Iron Strength. I was two
weeks out of running. I could feel the right Achilles Tendon when
running, sometimes it hurt more, but I could finish the practices.
I had run almost 800 km
with my current pair of shoes so I figured out that it was time to
buy new ones. The running shoes usually last from 600 up to 1000 km before
they wear out and start causing injury. 28th of April I
bought a new pair of running shoes, Asics Kayano 19. The next week I would start to follow the marathon training program aiming for 3-hour finish and I needed a
good pair of shoes from the beginning.
 |
| Figure 5: Asics Kayano 19, grey/blue |
The base training
monthly running time and kilometers:
January: 644 min, 119.3
km
February: 1070 min,
201.9 km
March: 1404 min, 269.8
km
April: 845 min, 160.9
km
 |
| Figure 6: Weekly Base Training time spent at intensity (Red line=Avg HR) |
P.S. We got married in February 2013. So from now on I will refer to Sandra with the acronym "my W.I.F.E."
No comments:
Post a Comment