The other week I wrote some on returning to form following an injury setback. I’m about half way back in terms of volume, maybe 90% if you go by fitness (which I’ll term ability to cover a given distance from say 5 minutes to an hour at an appropriate race or workout pace). Getting there but not yet back.
Today I’ll just mull over some more numbers, thoughts, and approaches to this build-up. First though, I’m pain free, and not even any residual stiffness after a run or next day. I’ll attribute that big step to physical therapy (PT) and time. I’m spending about an hour a week at core and glute-strengthening PT and it is really working.
On Time Over Distance
We runners get so caught up in tallying numbers, in particular miles per day or week. That can be good or bad, or just insidious. When I’m at lower volume, and building-up, I prefer to go by time. I tried my build-up in December, and was thinking ahead to miles per week for January, even entertaining some racing in the middle or late part of that month. However, I probably jumped up too quickly, and that resulted in a setback in which I had to take another week off completely and start over again. And start PT. So I lost about a month in the short term, long term hope to be better off.
Going back to the first of the year here is a summary of my running build-up. In minutes:
13
1:04
1:51
2:12
2:35
2:49
3:16
3:52
4:10
It doesn’t look as cool as miles, but by increasing my volume by about 5 minutes per day of running each week I’ve managed to temper my build-up and give some time for my body to re-adapt to the training. I feel good and will continue this for a couple more weeks, and then I’ll get back to counting miles and minutes.
My Current Approach
I started out at running three days a week, and transitioned to five days by mid-January. This week is my first step back to six days. Before the injury I had been doing just one day off every two or sometimes three weeks. We’ll see where I go from here, but I’m thinking by summer I’ll be back to 10 days on one day off, with a three week microcycle. But that’s getting ahead.
For the first seven weeks I just ran easy and fairly short (20-40 minutes). Once I got over that, I have added a little bit at tempo effort. Two weeks back I did 15 minutes at what felt like threshold, and last week I did 18 minutes, with these workouts with the 5K test effort on my birthday. And last week I introduced a very short hill session of 5X 30 sec on a 7% grade. This week it was 5X 45 seconds on the same hill. I’ll do a fartlek on the weekend and another hill session on next week. By then I’ll be at about 5 hours of running and ready to think some about miles, and adding more miles.
Next Month and Beyond
I have a big (championship) 10K at the end of April. I don’t have great hopes of cruising through that easily but definitely want to represent and mostly help our team out. Coronavirus and any travel restrictions aside.
By then I hope to be at 7-8 hours a week (50s/week) with two workouts and a longer run (1:30 to 1:50) every week, and I’ll keep it at 6 days a week until summer.
Leading into summer I have Bolder Boulder, and that’s always a big target for anyone here. And I have some good stuff in store for summer, like World Masters in Toronto, but haven’t committed to anything yet. If all goes well, should be rolling pretty well by then.
rrunnin234 