Saturday, January 03, 2015

Achilles Heel

So - after my last post I've carried on with my policy of avoiding the track. The cycle of recovery, track session, achilles / ankle injury, 3 weeks off, slow recovery has been going on too long.

For the last couple of weeks I've had a cold which has transmitted into a bad cough - nothing so bad that I haven't been able to run but until this week I deliberately kept all of the running to easy and steady running with a little bit of tempo occasionally.

This week I've started doing some sessions again (albeit with the cough still) and have been really pleased to put together some quality work for the first time in what feels like years.

  • On Tuesday was a hard set of minute reps on the road off a hard jog recovery
  • Friday was a mini-tempo (24 minutes starting at what for lack of a better term I'll call marathon pace and building to a hard tempo)
  • Saturday was a set of 8 ~900m reps off 90 seconds recovery
The first and third session would without a shadow of a doubt had I done them on the track absolutely inflamed my achilles. The 900m reps are very similar to the mix of 800s / 1200s that took apart my achilles the last two times. 

Having managed to pull together a couple of mini-work-outs without a hugely inflamed achilles (there's still some minor irritation as my foot is clearly not driving correctly which must have been creating the issues going around the bends) I'm very optimistic about the future. 

I'm doing the sorts of sessions I always loved to do for the first time in a very long while. My ability to run at pace has come back over the last month despite not a great deal of training (the full logs will be up soon...).

The pace for my 900m reps (and more importantly the way I felt doing them) has given me a big boost. Okay - it was a pace I once maintained for a half marathon rather than 3 minutes! 

That said - I felt fantastic and the pace felt very manageable. It's only 3 minute reps right now - in a couple of months after I'm down a bit from 12 1/2 stone (which is too heavy at 5'10'' for true distance running unless you're built like Chris Solinsky), not got a bad cough and have a few more months of proper sessions - maybe I'll be able to keep that pace up for a 5k at least! It would be a good start. 

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Bryn Running

Training diary and musings on running in general.