Bumping Up the Mileage!

One of the big goals coming back from my recent foot injury was to increase the volume in anticipation of a fast summer and fall season. As runners we have a tendency to always seek more, and sometimes we think more is better without even having a reason to believe so. In my case I've been thinking about the increase in volume for a while and keep coming back to bumping up the mileage as the best strategy for getting faster this season.

Over the past year I've been gradually increasing my mileage from about 35 MPW in 2015 to a 54 MPW average in 2016, while this increase in volume has massively improved my running across all distances it still not any thing like a high volume, and compared with other runners in my pace range it's a pretty small number. That said my training age of 3-4 years is still pretty young and it wouldn't be wise to make any major increases in volume without a long steady build-up, as such I've been putting a lot of thought into how I'll go about increasing the volume and when I choose to back off and say I'm running a high enough volume for now. Given that I increased by weekly volume by 20 MPW or ~160% over the course of one year I would think that an increase of half of that or ~130% would be an appropraite goal for my spring build-up and that stabilizing my weekly mileage around 75 MPW would be a good place to land.

So what do I realistically hope to gain from this increase? Well I'm thinking that in the short term improved body composition (lower body fat) would be the first major improvement I would see, as someone who is already running a fair amount I do not have much fat to lose, but I imagine I could part with another 2-3 pounds which wouldn't hurt performance. A little later on in the year, perhaps by mid summer I imagine that I could expect to see improved cardiovascular performance playing a major role, and by fall I would like to see my XC times dropping substantially. I would love to see something like 20+ seconds come off my 5k this year and a if I could drop to low 26 min for the 8k I would be just about over the moon!

As for injury prevention, I've been giving a lot of thought to the increased risk of injury I'll be facing during the next few weeks, and I am not blind to the danger of ruining my season rather than breaking into a new strata of performance. To mitigate these risks some I've been working hard at taking care of all the little recovery things that it's so easy to ignore, and most importantly I've been focusing a lot on my sleep quality (see the coming article on caffeine reduction). My hope is that all of the things I'm doing to increase my running performance right now will not be in vain!

Ugh... Injured.

The Injury:

So I ran the Amity Island Relay a few weeks ago, and the race even went pretty well, but then I woke up the next morning and tried to stand up... and that's when it all went wrong. I had done something nasty to my left foot and it hurt quite a lot to put any weight on it whatsoever; of course being an idiot and runner I went merrily out the door for an easy 8 miles.

As you may have already guessed going for a run on a sore foot the day after a race was not a great idea, and you'd be right. I got about 5 miles in with only moderate bearable pain when things really started to hurt, and unfortunately I was still three miles from home. The pain at first had been a general soreness, but when it started to hurt it became a sharp cramping pain along the lateral side of my foot. Thankfully after a short break the foot loosened back up a little bit and I was able to amble home at a slow limping jog. Once home I iced the foot and tried to stay off of it but it was clear that the pain I'd felt in the morning was more than just a little niggle.

The Recovery: 

Once it was clear I was actually injured all the usual things set in; the fear that this was the injury that would end my career; followed by the sense to realize it probably wasn't; and finally the motivation to make sure I was better as soon as possible so I could start to train seriously again.

The first step was, well, to not take that many more steps... so I cycled instead. Over the course of the first week I ran a tentative 16.85 miles (in 2-4 mile chunks) and cycled 5 hours on the side. Obviously 5 hours of riding does not equal the 60+ miles of running I normally do during a week but it stopped me from losing my mind so that was a plus.

Week two went a lot better than the first week and I managed to run 53.25 pretty easy miles and cycle 3 hours. While this was close to my normal volume it was far off of my normal intensity, in fact the fastest mile of the week was a 6:20 I ran with the kids I coach (more on coaching in another post). I was missing the hard runs but the fact that I could run at all was a great improvement and really improved my mood throughout the week!

Finally this last week I was able to run a full 61.75 miles! and I even ran a couple of quick-ish miles mixed in throughout the weeks workouts!!! I can not even express how happy I've been to run these sorts of miles again, which brings me to the whole point of this rambling post, which is be happy for your health when you have it and when it goes away from injury or illness fight to get it back!

Moving Forward: 

Over the next few weeks I'll be working to increase my mileage for the upcoming season. I've been doing a lot of reading and discussing of coaching/training techniques and I'm beginning to realize that the volume of work I'm currently doing is very slight compare with the men I'm competing against; and more importantly I'm beginning to find the gaps in my training and the weaknesses in my own running, and the main weakness currently is volume...