Feelin' alright

It finally feels like my body has caught up to the new workload. All leg and health issues are in good shape apart from the left Achilles, which continues to yip away. I now see the great benefit of slowing down a little and evening out to some extent the daily load. I ran 14 km this morning at an average pace of 4:41/km and it was just a steady rolling pace, well within myself. The milder 26 degree temperature helped.

Now, to deal with a couple of things raised in comments to my last post.

To Ewen: Yes, my lower aerobic runs tend to be relatively easy judging by heart rate, though not necessarily by how my legs feel. Though that is now finally turning around, as per the above note. Thanks for the prod, I added the link to my on-line log over on the right there. That takes you to the summary page and then you can click on Calendar or Workout views to see links to individual runs.

Clairie: "Do you throw in a 'drop down' week after several high mileage weeks?"

My reply: I probably should but haven't specifically programmed it in. I think I will do that if I feel myself starting to get worn down. But the specific strategy behind my current program is to run at distance/pace combinations that stress the system only slightly and from which I can recover from and adapt to and start to feel strong, as is happening right now. So with three 90-100 km weeks behind me, and this will be a fourth, I will try to ratchet up by 10-15 km adapt to that, then when it becomes comfortable, ratchet up again. I will also need to start introducing some hills and small amounts of speed work, moreso after the next four-week block of steady distance.

Clairie again: "I'm curious to hear what an 'easy' pace is for you as most of your runs seem to be tempo or decent pace for someone doing that much mileage."

My reply: I am using two kinds of reference systems for pace. One is the Lydiard "steady state" pace (the fastest pace you can run 10 km every day and recover from for the next day). I judge that to be about 4:30/km for me at the moment. Training paces are based on percentages of that. The fastest training pace is that pace and the slowest is supposed to be about that pace plus 10% (about 5:00/km). The other system is Hadd percent of maximum heart rate zones, which roughly line up with the Lydiard pace guidelines. I wouldn't say that any of my runs (except a 5k time trial two weeks ago) have been tempo pace (defining tempo as lactate threshold). So I guess the bottom line is that anything slower than about 4:55/km falls into "easy" (depending on the overall distance), and that is what I will use for warm-up, recovery and long runs. Just about all other training paces at the moment will be between 4:50/km and 4:20/km and if you did a frequency histogram of recent runs, the distribution would be skewed towards the slower end of that range. (But this will change as time progresses.) Because of the current heat, I am also not at all concerned about going slower than steady state + 10% if heart rate or common sense dictate.

milesandmiles: “Always amusing for us training in Singapore to hear people complaining about a 29 degree day :)”

My reply: yes, yes, I know Arnaud, you Singaporeans have the worst of everything. Almost as bad as Texans, you are :-). At least you have the whole year to get used to those temperatures. We have to go from 4 degrees in winter to perfect conditions in autumn and spring, to boiler house conditions for 6 weeks in summer. And yes, I agree that cross training is helpful. I did use it to some extent during the early part of this build-up.