Go Hard

I've been through a couple of weeks of rebuild. Definitely far from high mileage. A collection of technique work, hill plyometrics and intervals with plenty of recovery, plus a lot of tissue manipulation and stretching. Looks like I've ironed a few problems and built back a bit of structural conditioning and strength. Now it's time to get right back into what I consider proper running. Now it's about getting in lots of kilometres. So the challenge is to build the aerobic engine, increase workload tolerance while still keeping development of speed and strength reasonable. Consistency will be the ticket. So the simple goal is get in as much running as I can that leads to improvement. That doesn't mean the maximum I can fit in. That will be a little less. So I'll take it a few days at a time, pay attention to intensity and recovery. Then see where that takes me.

I've felt pretty damn good for the four weeks since my 100km race. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly my legs came good and how easy it has felt to get back into some running. However, underneath all that there is still some damage and weak points that require addressing. Earlier this week I received a good massage. Separate to the massage work of loosening and lengthening out my connective tissues and muscles, the most important element was the identification of the many areas the are damaged. There are plenty of adhesions that will become problems if not dealt with. One example is an adhesion of decent size on one Achilles' tendon that is limiting movement of the tendon within its sheath. It's not causing pain, but will only be a matter of time before it becomes a noticeable problem. Nothing is a true injury at this stage. Just simply part of the recovery process from the damage training and and running 100km causes. The trick now is to have all that rebuild ba...

It's been a bit of time since my last post. Main reason is I've taken a good mental break from training in the time after the Surfcoast Century. That doesn't mean I haven't been running. Since the race I've taken things quite easy. I took the 8 days completely off running. That time was filled with work in the garden and basically anything unrelated to running. My mind really wanted me to head out a run by day 5, but I made a point not to. Next up I gave myself 10 days to run however I wanted to, with the only caveat of erring on the side of being comfortable. The result was a variety of runs between 40-90 minutes. I didn't worry about pace or times. I just ran. It is good to have that freedom away from a designated training program. Over this time I was pretty happy about how well I recovered from the 100km. Other than a few right spots the only trouble I noticed was both Achilles' tendons seemed to be a bit of weak point. A couple of days off seemed ...