50 mile training….3/4 of the way through update!

I last shared a training updates almost three months ago. In that time, I had just starting working with a coach and really started to ramp up my mileage. I was probably somewhere in the mid teens in terms of my long run and doing peloton treadmill workouts for speed. I was feeling strong and ambitious.

And I’m happy to say, all of these weeks later, I’m still feeling strong and ambitious. I began working with Coach Colleen around the end of March and quickly noticed how much more targeted of an approach I’d be taking once under her guidance. In prior attempts at doing speedwork, I would guess the paces based on feel and go from there. I think that often led to not working as hard as I could be and in essence, not getting the most benefit out of the workout. With Colleens guidance, we worked to actually establish paces using a lactate threshold test. Once I’d taken the test and she reviewed the outcome, she began to design workouts with very specific paces in mind. Speedwork was much more frequent than it had ever been too-often two workouts during the week during the speed phase of training and at times it was added into my long run as well.

Along those same lines, my training became much more periodized; we started doing blocks of training, first centered around speed and leg turnover and then transitioning to gaining endurance. Both are necessary skills to successfully run any distance but over the years, I really neglected the speed part of training in favor of running a lot of slow miles. Slow miles are great but it’s also beneficial to become more efficient while running and thus I’m now a firm believer in adding in speed for long distance events.

One of the areas that I really vowed to do differently during this training cycle was to be more consistent. In the past, I had struggled to maintain high mileage from week to week. As a self coached athlete, I think I just was giving myself way too much leeway to sort of wing it as I went along. At this point, I’m most definitely not winging it, I am not skipping workouts. I’ve had some good (to me) reasons to do so like for example, I started seeing clients at 6am for counseling appointments which means that I have to start my run at 4am to fit it in, get home and dressed before I see my client. I don’t have the option of doing a workout after work or in the evening (or the desire to be totally honest) and I really didn’t want to switch days around to accommodate my work so I set my alarm for 3:30am and just went with it. Waking up that early is not eat easy. ever. But it was necessary and it allowed me to build mileage week over week and maintain that mileage. While I have felt tired, I have never felt burnt out. I have had appropriately timed cut back weeks and have adhered to the training plan written for me with very little alteration.

An area I wish I had done better with was strength training. I run 5 days a week which leaves a small amount of wiggle room for strength. And I was doing really well with that until about one month or so ago when the fatigue just really caught up with me and I started sleeping in on those days reserved for strength or cross. I started slacking on my core and mobility work and while it’s marginally better these last two weeks, it’s still not where I would like. I have made it to Epiq X fitness (my old gym!) twice in the last two weeks so it’s not like I’ve completely given up, but I wish I had made it more of a priority throughout. I keep reminding myself that I have five weeks in which to continue to get better.

And what’s up next? Well, I have my longest training run of the cycle coming up on Saturday. I’m running the ghost town trail challenge which is a 32 mile race. I’ll end here and share the race in my next post!