The foundation is built, and learning how to say no

This is week five. I gave myself nine weeks to make serious running gains. Three weeks of base, three weeks of solid work, three weeks of sharpening. Though it is only Friday of week five, week five is done. I'm sick.

Base training was a little scary but I managed it well. The first week I simply upped my run frequency and took on only as much as my body felt comfortable with. That's a lie. By the end of the week I saw that nice round 70km mark and went for it. I felt it at the beginning of week two, my legs weren't quite ready for that, so I started a little easier, but by the end of the week that 70 was coming up again. However, this time I didn't feel quite so beat up. The third week was easy. 70 again. As you may or may not know, for most of my running life I've muddled around the 30km mark. Seeing that number more than double was such a cool feeling.

Weeks four-six are the hardest. I'm supposed to hold that volume and introduce hard workouts. Due to my time constraints I omitted the slowly-building-intensity phase and jumped right into serious work. This was somewhat daunting, but hey, I only have to do it for three weeks right? And heck, I'm a 70km/week runner now! Week four had some solid running at 3:15/km pace, some tempo intervals at 3:34/km pace and a 5km race. Week five had the same 3:15/km intervals, a 30-40 minute tempo run somewhere around 3:40/km and a bunch of fast 400s. 

An important concept in training is to introduce new stresses slowly so as not to shock the system. Of course there are always exceptions but a standard, conservative training plan won't have you crank up intensity and total volume. Last week I bumped up to 75km. Sure, what's an extra 5km right? I also started going to UWO Tri Club practices. I also started going out more. And of course school is starting to pick up. This week I don't think I've been home for dinner more than twice. I'm getting good at finding free food on campus. I'm also getting good at falling asleep in weird places. And making beds out of things. Sunday night I was out until 2:30 yet up by 5:30. I got more sleep during the day and went to bed early so I wasn't totally wrecked for Tuesday. I got home at midnight on Wednesday and was still up Thursday morning at 6am for my tempo run. By the end of it I could feel a tickle in my chest. The rest of the day I was seriously sleepy so had another early night. This morning I got up fairly quickly but had that thick throat feeling and didn't feel all that rested... but not sleepy. So I made my way to the track, hammered 400m intervals in the dark and cooled down on the spin bikes with Tri Club. The rest of the day was garbage.

There are all sorts of stresses. Some of it will push your body to adapt and become faster or stronger, but most of it won't. At the end of the day all of these types of stress are poured into the same vessel. When you're pushing your limits in training, that cup is always nearly full. You pile school on there and you get a nice display of surface tension. Add an extravagant social life and after a little while you might find yourself on the couch the Friday night of homecoming weekend editing a blog that no one reads.

Don't worry, me, you'll figure it out.

Adam "Lesson learned" Fortais

Building up, slow and stead

After succumbing to foot aches almost all of last week, I've slowly but steadily been able to start running. Each day I've been going out with no distance, time or (by definition,) speed goals. I would run short loops until I felt my foot begin to respond negatively. Then I would shuffle home immediately and ice it. Each day the general discomfort would be less and show up later in the run. I am now only having a bit of warm up aches which disappear by about 2k and I am able to hit 10k easily without any foot pain. I am still icing it and being very careful not to become stranded far from home with an aching foot, but I think it's more or less fixed.

Interesting thing I've noticed since coming back from no running - my endurance pace is sort of locked into my muscle memory, but the combination of slightly de-training and allowing my body to recover has my heart rate higher than I'm used to, by somewhere between 10-20 bpm. With that in mind I've slowed my pace a bit, but it's very hard to keep my heart rate under that 170 mark (I suspect this is the transition from predominantly burning fat to burning carbs). I guess I just have to be patient and let my body get used to training again.

Soup, this officially marks my first week of base training for my run block. The main goal is to push up the volume of running from what I'm used to (30-40km/week) to something closer to what good runners do (a lot more). Week one is all easy running, as much as I want but not trying to push the volume too high. However, if I feel comfortable going high, I'll keep going. So far I'm at 40km and am plenty comfy. If I don't feel like I'm getting any negative, over-doing-it bodily feedback, I will allow myself to go as high as 70k. Since missing my first week I may take a quality week out of the plan to ensure I get those 3 solid base training weeks, or I might just take out a base week... But either way I still have a couple weeks of increasing volume to go. I don't want to max out in the first week.

As a final note, I may slot in a trail race in the fall so I have been taking advantage of the awesome trails around Sault Ste Marie. Hiawatha park is where all my high school XC races were and has some of the most intense, hilly, sandy and generally best trails I've been on. Amazing mountain biking and xc skiing as well, though I've never really done either of those. For instance, Within 1800m you get the opportunity to meet the Sand Hill and Cement Hill. Sand Hill is about 300m of sand, averaging a 13% grade, and the Cement Hill puts the nail in the coffin with 1k averaging 6%. In about 1 hour of running you'll get maybe 10-15 minutes of flat. You're typically on a gradient of +- 2%. Good luck keeping a low heart rate.

Adam "Sand Hill" Fortais

Base 2 review

This is some serious back-tracking but I thought I may as well document it. Base 2 was from March 4 - March 31 and consisted of mainly long, low intensity work, strength and force-training and the introduction of some longer, higher-effort intervals.

Run weeks focused on very short, hard, steep hill intervals to build up some run-specific leg muscle. The other main focus was to begin increasing the duration of my weekly long-run. This went from 50min to 60min to 75min. The Splash and Dash 1km swim - 10km run race fell on the first week... which wasn't ideal timing wise, but I made sure I didn't over do it. Week two I kept it easy with a 30 minute fartlek run, and I threw in a basic, easy 6km tempo run at 3:50/km in week three.

Bike weeks focused on bike-specific strength training in the form of big gear steady intervals. The weather was still less than great so everything was done on the trainer. A typical workout may include up to 10 minutes of gear-grinding with less than half the interval time recovering, or, getting off the bike to wall sit or squat for a minute or two. Second focus was similar to that of the run weeks, slowly introduce longer, higher effort intervals. Week one was 30 minutes at my "sweet-spot" (80-93% ftp ~ 240W). Week two was 60minute tempo interval (220W) and week three was 3x15minutes (10min tempo (220W), 5 min SS+ (260W))

Swimming was swimming. Just following the UWO tri club's workouts. Hitting about 10km/week in the form of Tues-Thurs morning, 45 minute workouts, and a 2 hour workout on Saturday.

End of month testing went well for cycling, but not so much for swimming. I chalked the poor swim test up to not fully recovering since I hit a new record during the Splash and Dash. The swim test protocol I had been using during base session was 50m invervals on 45seconds to exhaustion, holding whatever pace I want. I picked this since it doesn't take a lot of time, has some amount of specificity, but also focuses on top-end speed which is what I've been trying to increase outside of the competitive season. Last test I managed 10x50m before calling it quits. This month my 10th interval missed the pace time... but again, just like my last post about my most current running test, I did this on a Tuesday after a full training block. From now on, no testing until at least Wednesday.

As I mentioned above, cycling went well. I upgraded my all-time best power over 5 and 20 minutes WHILE ON THE TRAINER... I don't know if anyone else notices this, but hitting your watts on the trainer feels a lot harder than on the road. Physically I don't know how this could be, but it seems to be a real phenomenon. However, I still managed to up to 20 minute critical power to 294W, and my 5 minute critical power to 342W. CP5 was done on a Wednesday, and CP20 was on a Friday. It seems like Wednesday is all right for testing. With this new CP20 value, my estimated FTP (functional threshold power, or, power I can expect to hold for 1 hour) is about 280W. Not bad, not bad.

I decided not to test my running, as the results from Splash and Dash as well as my increasing long runs provided enough feedback to tell me I'm heading in the right direction.

Adam "Catching up on old news" Fortais

Base 3: (Mid-Week, Big-Week)

I'm just about finished the biggest training week of my life and thought I would quickly update with regards to that.

Base 3 was re-designed (or rather shifted) by essentially 2 weeks as per the last post. When you're sick, you gotta do what you gotta do. The hour structure was maintained at 10-12-14-Restandtest, but the focus shifted a little bit. I caught myself doing more very focused race-pace stuff, ie medium-length intervals very near my predicted racing wattage and speed, so I decided to change it up a bit for this last "training to train" period. I moved more above race pace intervals and below race pace intervals into the schedule and plan on training very specifically in the coming build blocks.

More specifically, my quality workouts looked like this (excluding swims, because I don't really know what I'm doing in the pool)

Week 1:

Bike
3x10min at ftp (1 hour TT pace, 280W) w/ 5 min rest
-To get used to intervals in that range again, not too stressfull

3x(5min top-gear low cadence, stand at 2 and 4min, 2 min rest, 2min standing, 1min rest), 2:30 high cadence -Functional strength training, a perceived limiter for my tiny runners legs


30min tempo (210-250W), 10min w/ single legging, 25min tempo+5min Sub-threshold (210-250, ~270W) -I have to be ready to ride hard for ~ 1 hour, rather than 30 minutes this year

Run
6x 200m hill repeats, 1:40 rest
-Gotta be strong

30 min tempo @ 3:40/km
-Right about threshold

Long run

Week 2:

Bike (first week outside)

2x10min ftp (5min rest), 20min ftp, 2x1min HARD efforts
-Building on last week

6x ~1min hills, about 400W
-Pumpin'!

Run
5x(2min I - 1min E - 1min I - 30sec E - 30sec I - 30sec E), I = <3:20 km="" p="">-Worth noting, I did this workout faster and with more reps than I did about 1 month out of my 10k PB last season. Training the high end speed.

Long run
-20km

CN Tower race
-Race report to come. 144 flights of stairs, ~1750 stairs. You can imagine what system I was training here.

Week 3:
Bike

20min @ 280W (100% ftp) - 10min rest, 15min @ 285W (102% ftp) - 7min rest, 10min @ 290W (105% ftp) - 5 min rest
-Keep on building. The goal is to build my tolerance to the longer intervals. I'm used to 10 minute sufferfests, but I need to make 20 minute efforts my bread and butter.

90 minutes of searching and destroying various hills around London. 6 big efforts from 1:30-4:00 climbing.
-Lots of recovery means high watts!


Run
5x400m including 200m of hill, 78 seconds w/ 400m jog recovery
-Speed and strength


4x200m w/ 200m recovery (32sec), 3x1km, 2min rest (3:14), 2x400m w/ 400m recovery (68sec)
-More VO2Max training with some very fast running for economy. Again, running better than last year

Long run
-Nearly 20km


Week 1 and 2 had the workouts spaced to get good solid quality out of every interval session. Things went very well and I was feeling a bit of fatigue creeping up near the end of week 2. The CN tower race demanded that I front-load week 2, and the race itself hurt quite a lot, so some easy sessions followed.

Week 3 has been amazing - I've been quite tired through most of the sessions, but I've still been hitting all my numbers, or exceeding them. The beginning of the week saw well-spaced quality sessions, but I've been exceeding the speeds I was expecting at this point of the season, so I've been doubling up some workouts in the latter half of the week to try and get a bigger endurance stimulus out of the training. What I mean is I'm sacrificing some potentially raw speed and freshness - "workout PBs" for a bigger endurance load. Specifically, I doubled up running and bike quality sessions on Thursday (VO2Max running work in the morning, hill work on the bike in the evening). This was followed today by 90 minutes in the pool doing some above race pace work, and some technique and strength work... into my long run... leaving me "trashed".

Here is the reason I'm doing this. I believe my Base 3 period is meant to be more about training your body to be able to take on the race-specific, high intensity loads you will be giving it during the Build periods to come. Also, you want to be maxing out your pure endurance at this point, so you can put nearly all your effort into race specific work. With that in mind, I noticed I've been hitting my swim, bike and run workouts faster than I ever have, even with all this fatigue building up. However, I am also moving up in race distance this year which plays a huge role in my training plan. Therefore the decision process was that

1) "The hey is in the barn" as far as short speed work is concerned since I've already seemed to have exceeded my speed from last year in every sport
2) I have 2 entire blocks to come that will be concerned with raising my race specific speed even more
3) My biggest limiter is volume and endurance based - I've never raced longer than 1 hour and I believe I have more to gain at this point by addressing these issues.

I don't even see this as a gamble - I hit the times and watts I was hoping to ahead of schedule, so I re-arranged the work I was going to do anyway in such a way to tax my recovery and endurance systems more. That being said... I can't wait for this recovery week! Only 2 more workouts to go... A short swim involving 25m all-out sprints and pushups (a workout that I will drop upon reaching the build phases), and a long slow endurance bike ride. No problem!

In the near future, be prepared for a much shorter review of Base 2 training (a lot less interesting), another race recap, and my thoughts on my swim season.

Adam "lol, the hey is in the barn" Fortais