I’ve kept up on my running, but my posting has fallen behind due to work. It’s hard to maintain a 40 - 50 mile per week training schedule while working, parenting, and just doing life. Training is time consuming! I see people on Strava running 80 miles per week and I think - those people must either be single, married with no kids, and/or unemployed! Or insanely efficient with their time. I can’t figure it out. This week I did 50 miles, and barely held the rest of my life together. Or at least I think I did.
Anyway, after last month’s post, I was admittedly feeling a bit frustrated with my running plan. After making so many huge gains in Month One, Month Two came and went with virtually no gains at all. I was on a hard plateau - and a month is a long time to be stuck in the same place, when you’re running tons of hours a week and your Garmin continually throws you shade by saying that your runs are “unproductive” (WTF?). I don’t need to see big gains, but it’s motivating to see something in the data that says you’re doing something right. Not in Month Two.
Injury Time!
Month Three started off similarly. The first week (week 9) started with no gains at all, a clear continuation of the plateau I was on from Month Two. And then - suddenly, an injury popped up out of nowhere. My left foot suddenly developed an issue that was located (or centered) in the top part of the foot, close to the ankle. It felt like a tendon was pulled or sprained, and the issue ran all the way down to my toes, and halfway up my shin. It was pretty painful, and my lower ankle swelled up pretty badly. It was hard to sleep, or to straighten out my foot. I was getting worried that it was serious.
I took a few days off, and then in Week 10, I decided to give a run a shot, and it wasn’t awful, but not great. My ankle area had swelling that just wasn’t going down. So, I decided to cut my threshold and tempo runs and go full out Maffletone Method - all Z2 runs. I had no choice really - if I even attempted a tempo or threshold run, it was clear I’d end up with a serious injury. That meant going to five Z2 10k runs a week plus a weekend long run. I did four 10k’s in Week 10 as a way to ease back up. By the time I got to Week 11, I was doing five 10k’s in Z2. The swelling was on the way down, and I decided to just stay with Maffletone Method to play it safe.
The Data - Just the Facts, Ma’am
Here’s the data (below). Note that I changed the columns in Week 9 to better mirror the new method - no tempo or threshold runs (which I was making good progress on, as you can see!), and instead everything in Z2 - 10k’s and a long run. Although Week 11 was all over the place in terms of times - mostly due to the injury to my foot and me not trying to push it - by Week 12, I started to see a sudden and unexpected shift to the positive in terms of pacing times in Z2.
In fact, if you look at the row of data for Week 12, you’ll see that the 10k paces started to drop to almost 10 minutes even. At no time before was I anywhere near that pace in Zone 2. And in addition, I was starting to rack up some (mid to high) 9 minute paces in the internal split data. This was very encouraging - since I had zero 9 minute mile splits in Zone 2 before. By the third 10k that week, half of my split miles were in the mid to high 9s. My long runs were the same - my last long run, though on average not much better than the weeks before, had 5 split miles in the 9s. This is serious progress. this tells me it’s just a matter of time before those averages drop fast.
Here’s a visualization of the Z2 runs below. The visualization doesn’t reflect well the progress at the end, but it’s definitely there.
And here’s the long run visualization, which also doesn't reflect my progress well at this point. I ran a great 10:07 in Week 11, and then my Week 12 long run I ran out of gas - I had run 50 miles in Week 12, and my legs were tired. But I had 5/13 of those miles in the 9s. I haven’t done that before. I lost so much average pace in the final three miles. So at this point, progress is really in the splits data, and less obvious in the charts. I can tell that I’m turning a corner here, and will soon see better times.
Interpretation and Looking Forward
So what accounts for the progress I’m seeing? I’m not sure, really. It could be that the method (80/20 and MAF) plateaus now and again, and you just have to be patient and work through it. Or, it could be that when I dropped the Z3 and Z4 runs and went full on Maffletone, that this made a difference. When you are an experiment of 1, it’s hard to know what causes what, and what’s just a correlation. That can definitely be frustrating, but there’s not much you can do about it.
At this point my foot is fine. My plan, however, is to stick with full Maffletone for the next three months and see what happens. Remember, my goal is a 1:35 half marathon in November, to qualify for the NY Marathon in 2022. So that’s 7 months away. Since that finish time requires a 7:20 pace, I know that I can’t even think about hitting that target if I can’t bring my Z2 runs down to 8:45. I figure (and maybe I’m wrong) that in race conditions I can probably shift between tempo and threshold running and achieve an average pace 1:30 faster than my Z2 time. So that’s 8:45.
At the same time, I need to run tempo and threshold runs to get comfortable with faster running. I figure that if I have a minimum of 4 months of 80/20 running prior to the race, adding back in the tempo-threshold runs, that gives me 3 more months in full on MAF mode to get this aerobic base to where it needs to be. If my Z2 times in three months are only 9:30 or so, I have no chance to hit that time in the half in November. So, it’s now or never - hence the shift to full on MAF. We’ll see how it goes in Month Four. Fingers crossed.
Hope your running is going well, if anyone has any questions (and I know that MAF and 80/20 plans raise mountains of questions), leave them in the comments section and I’ll be happy to reply!
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