Training Plan

 It's actually been about three years since I wrote a training plan for myself (besides a plan I didn't end up doing due to injury). In that time, I've written quite a few plans for other people, but I have just stuck to flying by the seat of my pants with my own training. Part of that came from when I read the book "Run: The Mind Body Method of Running by Feel" by Matt Fitzgerald. "Run" devotes an entire chapter to "winging it." This does not mean no structure at all. In fact, in that chapter Fitzgerald writes, "Training without a plan... is not exactly training without planning."

However, I do not use plans from books or websites. I would recommend that if you're newer to running, you use a pre-written training plan and eventually get an idea of what workouts are like and what workouts work best for you.

What I've noticed is that my best race performances have come when I have had a written training plan. I've done training plans from several different books along with one website, and I feel like I have a good idea of how to structure my training. But, instead of completely flying by the seat of my pants, writing a training plan based on what has worked for me in the past along with improving my weaknesses should give me a better chance at success.

The training plan I've written is a little wonky. I really want to get as close as possible to meeting my goal of breaking 18 minutes in the 5K, so I have a lot of 5K-focused workouts. I also want to finish a marathon as well as I can, so I've got a good amount of marathon-focused workouts as well.

I'm hoping my training plan leads to some success. The past few weeks of running has been going really well, so I'm hoping that momentum carries into completing my training plan leads to some big gains in my performances.

Home Update

Since Laura went back to work after maternity leave, I’ve been home with the kidddos for six months now. Though it can be challenging sometimes, for the most part the kids are pretty easy. The four-year-old is good at listening and sometimes keeps his sister entertained while I take care of something. He has a very cute song that he wrote himself that he likes to sing to her.

It feels good that I’ve been home with the kids this long. Four years ago, when our first one was five months old, I was going to stay home with him for the summer. Unfortunately, shortly after starting the summer with him, I started to have some moderate bipolar symptoms that kept me from being able to take care of him, so we had to send him to daycare.

On this go ‘round, I was more than a little nervous about taking care of two. If one was difficult, two was going to be even harder. I worried that my bipolar symptoms were going to crop up, and I didn’t know what we were going to do if I was unable to care for them.

Fortunately, for the last six months my bipolar symptoms have been in check, and I’ve only had a few rounds of depression and hypomania, both of which were mild enough that I was still able to care for the kids.

We’ve stayed busy while at home, and every day goes by quickly. I made the older one a couple pictorial schedules, so every day he knows what we’re up to. He really enjoys the schedule, so when I thought that after doing the schedules for a while he might want to just do our own thing, he said he wants to keep the schedule. Here are some fun things we’ve been up to:

The littlest one still enjoys crawling under things. She’s was doing mostly army crawling, but it the last few days she's been regular crawling.

We’ve started solid food. She does a nice job of trying every food, but she hasn’t been eating a whole lot:

A big game changer for me has been getting them both in the double jogging stroller. It's not actually that bad to push around, and it's a nice way to get us all out of the house as well as getting to parks that are a little out of walking distance.

Besides the jogging stroller, the older one can ride his bike for a while while the little one rides in the stroller. It's not the fastest way to run, but it's fun. Laura even finds time to run with them as well. 

That should do it for my home update. Stay safe out there!

Running Injury Prevention: Slowing Down

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Earlier I wrote about things I've been doing to reduce my risk of running injury, but I wanted to spend a little more time on running easy. Since restarting my running life in 2009 and reading many books and articles on training, I've known that easy runs are supposed to be just that — easy. I hadn't, however, realized how easy. 

I was listening to a podcast that said you should be doing your easy runs 90 - 120 seconds slower than your marathon pace. I don't think I've ever done my easy runs that slowly. I tried running that pace for a while, but it felt really slow. There are other formulas for easy runs, so I checked out McMillan's running calculator and Jack Daniels' running calculator, both of which I've used in the past, to get get a range of paces for easy runs. McMillan's fast end was a little fast, so I decided to go with the Jack Daniels' range of paces when 90 seconds slower than my marathon pace is feeling a little too slow.

Besides using pace, I also use a method I read about in Matt Fitzgerald's book, 80/20: Run Faster and Race Stronger by Training Slower. He writes about running easier than the ventilatory threshold — the pace at which your breathing becomes labored. He suggests that 80% of training should be done easier than ventilatory threshold, and he gives some advice on determining and staying within one's ventilatory threshold. The method I use is to say the Pledge of Allegiance. If it's not too hard to say, then I'm running easy enough.

The only negative to running so much slower is that I'm able to run fewer miles with the time I have. I used to knock out eight miles in about an hour and now it can take me as long as an hour and twelve minutes. Really though, it's not that much of a negative because decreasing mileage reduces my injury risk too.

After all the research I've done on running easy, I'd recommend it to anyone — not just to prevent injury but also to get faster.

Stay healthy.

Running Injury Prevention

In a previous post, I wrote about my training errors that have led to running injuries. In this post, I'll outline how I plan to reduce my running injuries.

Looking at the list injuries I've had could make me depressed and think there's no hope for running injury-free. I've joked before that running is something I do between injuries. I've been to physical therapy quite a few times, and each time the PT recommends at least one exercise, and it's usually two and as many as four. If I did every PT exercise I've been prescribed for injury prevention, I would have daily sessions that last between forty-five and ninety minutes.

As I've mentioned previously, I've started a program called Foundation Training. The premise of the program is to improve functionality of the posterior chain to reduce or eliminate back pain (something I also deal with) and to improve daily activities and athletics. The FT Streaming service has exercises specific to running, and they seem to help. The amount of time spent on these exercises can be as short as eight minutes, so since I've started this program in March, I only missed a few days of doing a Foundation Training routine.

Along with Foundation Training, I've also been running significantly slower on my easy runs than I ever have. I'll explore that in more depth in a future post.

In addition to Foundation Training and running slower, I'm using three other injury prevention tools. First, I increased my weekly mileage at a painfully slow pace. Second, I started my running after a long break in March by running five minutes and walking five minutes. I slowly worked my way up and landed on taking one minute walk breaks every 15 minutes. I've now switched to walk breaks only on my longer runs. Honestly, I don't know if that's frequent enough to make a difference, but it doesn't seem to be hurting.Third, I've increased my running cadence.

I've been running injury-free since I started up my running again in April. Whether that's because of using run/walk, increasing my mileage slowly, slowing my easy runs, increasing my cadence, doing Foundation Training, or all of the above isn't clear.

Here's hoping I can continue injury-free running.

Hypomania and Productivity

 A week ago or so, I was feeling a little hypomanic. Hypomania, according to an Ask the Doctor article on Havard Health, is: "at least three of the following symptoms for at least four days: inflated self-esteem or grandiosity; decreased need for sleep; increased talkativeness; racing thoughts or ideas; marked distractibility; agitation or increased activity; excessive participation in activities that are pleasurable but invite personal or fiscal harm."

While hypomania can be bothersome and often harmful, when managed properly it can be used to one's advantage. In the article, "March Madness: 7 Signs of Hypomania," by Helen Farrell, she writes, "When the symptoms... coalesce to produce an extremely goal-oriented and focused individual, hypomania can be a good thing. The key is that functional people in a hypomanic state are able to keep their goals rational and concise, and they can plan around them accordingly."

In that past several years, I've continued to work on managing my symptoms in order to keep them from interfering with my life and to harness the energy that comes from hypomania to be productive.

It's interesting how the swings of bipolar can change my outlook and functioning in a short amount of time. Before the hypomanic episode, I was feeling pretty down and ready to abandon some goals. My wife did a nice job of reminding me that my running goals help improve my exercise and that exercise in turn helps my functioning in general.

Then, a couple days later the hypomania hit. Racing thoughts and ideas, increased activity, increased talkativeness and distractibility are challenges to manage, but I feel like I continue to manage hypomanic episodes much better than I have in the past. As a result, the episodes don't last as long and can actually be productive.

In my most recent hypomanic episode, I've cleaned more thoroughly, reined in my talkativeness, written several blog posts, and thought of more ideas for a couple of books I've been working on.

Previously, I've often jumped from one thing to another, leaving things half-cleaned or half-written. I've also tended to set out to accomplish more things than I have time for along with mismanaging my priorities.

Now, I still struggle with some of those things, and I know I'll never be perfect with or without hypomania, but I'm grateful that my management of hypomania has improved.

Be well.

Why So Many Injuries?

 In my last post I wrote about all the running injuries I've dealt with. While I believe some blame lies on genetics, most of the blame is likely from training error.

 The primary training error I've made is running too fast on my easy days. Often, way too fast. In and after college I blamed my coach for my running injuries. It may have been partially his fault — we didn't do much in the way of injury prevention exercises, but other things like static stretching before workouts were not well known to be harmful to performance. 

But, another thing that contributed to my college injuries was doing my easy runs too hard. In fact, I did my "easy" runs with athletes far faster than I and would sometimes get dropped on a longer easy run, and my coach had nothing to do with that. In fact, I'm pretty sure he told us to run at a conversational pace, and I definitely wasn't conversing while trying to keep up with faster athletes.

My eyes opened to my overly-speedy training runs this year when I read the book "80/20: Run Faster and Race Stronger by Training Slower." The thesis of this book is that approximately 80% of training should be done at an easy pace. In a future post I'll explore how to determine that easy pace.

Another training error I've made is not doing enough core and strength exercises. I stayed pretty injury-free in high school, and I think part of that was because I weight lifted several times a week. I like to run, so when I've had time to work out in the past, I usually spent that entire time running rather than working on strength exercises.

Finally, I've increased my mileage too much in the past. That error is an older one as I'm much more conservative with my mileage increases now, but it's definitely contributed to past injuries.

In a future post I'll write about what I'm doing to prevent running injuries.

Stay healthy.

Running Injury Blues

If you follow this blog, you're probably aware that I deal with lots of running injuries. Just because I have, however, doesn't mean you have to. I'm naturally injury prone, and I've made a lot of training errors that have led me down the injury path. In the next few posts you can read about the mistakes I've made, and I hope you can have far fewer injuries than me.

Here are some running injuries I've had since running my first marathon in 2009:

• Patella tendinitis
• IT band syndrome
• Posterior tibial tendinitis
• Calf strain
• Broken leg at knee (from basketball)
• Runner's knee
• Peroneal teninitis (left)
• Metatarsalgia
• Peroneal tendinitis (right)

There's one pro that comes out of that list: I average fewer than one injury per year, so when I sat down and listed these, it was fewer injuries than I thought. Part of this was that I enjoyed injury-free stretches from the fall of 2011 to the fall of 2012 and again from 2016 - 2017.

Unfortunately,  some of my racing seasons were disrupted or curtailed, and one, the spring of 2018, I would have abandoned altogether if I hadn't already been signed up for a marathon. This spring I wouldn't have raced due to my peroneal tendinitis, but races being canceled due to COVID-19 meant my missing the season due to injury didn't matter anyway.

Some of these injuries cleared up on their own and others required some physical therapy.

In my next post, I'll be writing about how my training errors have contributed to my running injuries.

Stay healthy.