Thursday, January 12, 2012

Truffle Shuffle

So, I'm on Week 1-2 of Hal Higdon's Novice II plan. Thanks to my inability to go to bed on time, I had to slightly shuffle my schedule this week so as not to run on 5 hours of sleep.

Tuesday was a 3 miler at lunch. Laboured, kinda shitty. Resolved to attempting to wear orthotics on the next run.

Tonight (Thursday) was another 3 miler (I have one more 3, then 4 on Sat or Sun). It went far better than Tuesday's run. I ran about two thirds of a mile in my orthotics before having to switch to my regular insoles. Some muscles/tendons/whatever were tight in my left ankle, but tight as in "never been used". I'm wondering if it's an issue with the orthotics, or just my feet finally getting the support they need and my stride changing. Either way, I plan to try out the orthotics again, but probably just use them for a warm-up/cool-down session before weights, or at the end of a run. The fatigue in those rarely used muscles nagged me for the rest of the 3 miles. I finished strong though, with my remaining 2.3 miles (after I stopped to switch insoles) clocking in at 20:41.

It looks like I'll be hitting up Staples for some more calendars. I was a bit presumptuous and, in my excitement of registered for the Ottawa HM, wrote out my ENTIRE running plan on a calendar. Little did I know that only a week into training, I wanted to change my program.

Right now, it looks like this:
Sunday: Cross Train
Monday: Rest
Tuesday: 3 miles (all weeks)
Wednesday: 3-5 miles tempo
Thursday: 3-4 miles
Friday: Rest
Saturday: LSR (4-12 miles)

I'm not the biggest fan of running 3 days in a row when I'm only running 4 days a week. I'm injury prone and I think that the 3 days straight, with a tempo run right in the middle, is just asking for fatigue/overtraining. I'm doing a bit of a shuffle, so my weeks will look like this:
Sunday: Rest
Monday: 3 miles
Tuesday: Cross Train
Wednesday: 3-5 miles tempo
Thursday: 3-4 miles
Friday: Rest
Saturday: LSR

Very similar, same mileage, but makes more sense for me. Sundays are generally a hectic travel day for me so they end up being my "rest by default" day. I would like to start doing some swimming for cross-training, but the adult swims I want to go to are on Tuesdays, so it seemed to just match up well. The only thing would be if I was to have to do my LSR on a Sunday, it would screw up the rest of the week, but I think I'd just do a switcheroo, as long as I fit the run in somehow.

Anne

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