Let the second guessing commence
4.5 days until the start of the Never Summer 100k and I’ve felt really off for about the last week. All of the classic symptoms of over-training. I had that great skyline traverse run a week ago last Saturday and felt super confident going into my taper week. But I think I pushed a little too hard. I took 1 day to rest after the skyline (22 miles, 6200 feet of climb) then did a tough strength workout Monday, Green Mountain (10 miles, 2800 feet) Tuesday, and a basketball/strength work double on Wednesday. The Green Mountain run wasn’t good. For reference, on a good day that loop takes me less than 2:10 with my best time being 2:07. This one took me 2:20. So while not a complete catastrophe, I was definitely not fully recovered from the weekend. And I was sore in my knees, heels, and ankles.
The obvious moment came after basketball, though. On a normal day, i can go forever. But I was hunched over looking like I just summitted Everest after an hour of playing. Then I did strength work after. Thursday was just a bad easy run. Only 8 miles - and I did it, but it was a struggle. I try to follow the rule that 3 bad workouts in a row means I need some extra recovery time. That was number 3. I took Friday off (went rock climbing, but whatever) and then tried to get in 18 easy, flat miles on Saturday. I ended up quitting at 8 miles and walking home. I just felt terrible. Everything was sore. All of my standard injuries that had been feeling better were much worse than normal. Then I took Sunday off.
Over-training is a hormone issue. Cortisol is a stress hormone and your body doesn’t care what the source of stress is. It can be exercise related, stress from work, lack of sleep, bad eating, whatever. I’ve had it a few times, and the usual symptoms are general exhaustion, bad mood, over-eating, and slow recovery from workouts. In my worst case of it, I wasn’t recovering at all from standard exercise-related muscle damage. I did a set of push-ups and my arms were sore for a week. Luckily this isn’t that bad and I seem to have been recovering reasonably well. But all the other symptoms have been there.
The fix seems to be to give your body/mind a break. And as hippie as this sounds, a positive attitude really helps. So I pulled out the full bag of tricks this morning for my traditional race week tempo run. I tried really hard to amp myself up about it. I jacked myself up on caffeine. I listened to really high tempo music. Everything i could think of to motivate myself for the run. I also got lucky with a reasonably cool morning. And it seems to have gone okay.
The middle 3 miles were in the upper 6:00′s, which is a speed I’m not used to at all after doing very little other than mountain running for the last month. I had this dream of gliding effortlessly through this run. But then I guess it wouldn’t have been a tempo run. But the important thing is that the easy parts felt easy and I didn’t have more soreness than normal in my knees or heels. My muscles are a bit sore after, but that’s fine. It’ll give my body something to do while I sail into the race on Saturday.
I’m just doing a bit of climbing tomorrow and then doing an easy 4-5 on Wednesday. The hope is that i feel better by Wednesday, but if not, I still have 2 more days after that. I’m confident that I could finish the race feeling like I did today. But I have some high hopes of actually pushing hard after a strong training block. Hopefully I didn’t screw it up in the taper week.
