Yes, I am still alive and running. I have been taking it pretty easy for the past few weeks, making sure my knee is right and also getting my motivation back. The fact that I couldn't throw off my knee problem while I could feel my fitness drifting away was very frustrating and a bit demoralising.
I had a few more sessions with the physio and have been working pretty diligently on breaking down the scar tissue and strengthening my hips and glutes.
As an update of my running over the past few weeks since the 6km in my last post, I have run:
30km; 16km; 41km; and 23km so far this week. Planning a 12.8km run tomorrow and 8.4km on Friday to give me approx 44km this week. Slowly building up over the next few weeks.
The 16km week is the aberration there which came about because of a very unfortunate injury to Rox which resulted in me missing a couple of runs. Rox snapped/ruptured her achilles tendon playing netball and had to go in for surgery a couple of weeks ago. Since then she has been in plaster (which comes off tomorrow) and will have to wear one of those big ortho/moon boots for the next 6 weeks or so.
This week's runs consist of 8km WAMC City Beach run on Sunday, approx 9km including 4 x 3min intervals on Tuesday and 8.4km recovery run today.
I'm glad I did the WAMC run on Sunday even though it was hot, a bit windy and a boring course. The reason I'm glad is that I got to catch up with Sugar, Kim, Sas and Epi as well as get a gauge of where my fitness is at. I had decided beforehand that I was only going to do a tempoish effort and didn't even wear my racing flats, just to make sure I wasn't tempted. I tried to run a steady controlled effort and succeeded for the most part, other than the 6th km which was the 2nd km back into the wind for the 2nd time (it was a two lap course). I think I ran 4.37 for this km and got passed by a few other runners.
Finished in 33.46 by my watch which is around 4.12/km. So slower than the pace I was aiming at running the whole Rottnest marathon and slower than I ran for the first 8km of that marathon. It's no wonder really though as I looked back through my running log today and confirmed that I haven't run further than 10.5km (and I have only done 1 x 10km and 1 x 10.5km) since the 2nd of October (other than the Rottnest Marathon).
This knee injury and the impact on my fitness has really thrown my summer training plan out. The plan was to work on my speed over summer on top of the big aerobic base I had. I seem to have lost my base now though so the new plan is to slowly work my mileage back up to around 70-80km a week by the end of January and then try and get some speed back before I get into my marathon specific training for the Gold Coast Marathon in July.
I have been doing a bit of riding as well. Heading out for about 90 mins on Saturday mornings. The first few times I was on my mountain bike which weighs a tonne and has big knobbly tires. But I have gotten sick of being passed by everyone, so took my road bike down to the shop for a service and rode that last Saturday. I covered an extra 10km over the 90 mins and remembered how much I used to enjoy riding that bike. I really want to continue riding a bit each week so will have to find a way of combining it in my schedule.
I'll also try to blog a bit more regularly ...
2 comments:
Great to have you back ; please pass my best wishes on to Rox - sounds like a horrible injury ...
good to hear you are testing out a race again. great blog post title! Sounds like the 90 min rides are keeping things from sliding too much, way to go...Maybe even some duathlon or triathlons? down the track...all the best to Rox with the recovery sounds like a horrific one that one. My mother-in law has those moon boots (surgery to remove bunions) at the moment too...My 2 cents re the change in training landscape; Obviously the base isn't what it was earlier in the year, so marathons would have to be off the agenda for the moment, but see no reason why you can't work your way back into good form in everything else, maybe even dabble with speed in the summer, although obviously with caution...Also if you extend the length of your rides to 2-4 hrs, then your marathon base will be a lot easier to get back...With my chronic knee issues (cant afford the time and money to get the surgery done), I have often alternated long runs with long rides from week to week at times, and it seems to work ok...all the best with getting the knee right, and getting back to your best, if you persist with what you are doing, it will happen sooner rather than later, and the frustration of the last 2 months of 2009 will quickly become a dim memory...sounds like you are ready to start stepping up the mileage/training time now... going well...
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