2015 Training Week 17 (28/09/2015 to 04/10/2015)

October 4, 2015

Summary of this week’s activities

First, let’s review my activities during this week. I had 4 run activities in this week. On Monday (28/09) I had a 10K easy run with the following averages: (10.08 K , 5:24 min/km, 155 bpm, 68m elevation gain). On Thursday (01/10) I had a 15K run (tempo 13.5K) with the following averages: (15.62 K, 4:57 min/km, 170 bpm, 41m elevation gain). On Saturday (03/10) I had a 35K long run with the following averages: (35.00 K , 4:59 min/km, N/A bpm, N/A elevation gain). On Sunday (04/10) I had a 2K easy run with the following averages: (1.8 K , 6:00 min/km, 122 bpm, 17m elevation gain).

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday	Total
10k easy run	29	30	Tempo 13.5K	2	Long 35K	Easy run	62.5 km Run

VO2Max and weekly mileage

My VO2Max this week in my (Monday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday) activities were (51, 53, N/A, 52) ml/kg/min respectively. Also my weekly mileage this week was 62.5 km run.

About individual runs

On Thursday (01/10): After the run, my heart was a little bit hurting maybe because of irregular training past couple of days. Don’t change your rhythmic suddenly as in the 5th kelometer, I suddenyl decided to increase my cadence from 172 to 180 and 182. It was succesful but for just one kilometer and then it again dropped down to 174 for 500m , I was again trying to increase it and now it was 178 for less than 1km where it finally droped down to 174 for 2.5 km and even below that afterwards. These sudden changes takes a lot of power and would totally disturb your run, so as you know, in future don’t decide to change important factors suddenly.

On Saturday (03/10): It was basically a confident run, the only 32+km long run that I wanted to have before the race and my plan was to run it fast to make myself more confident about my marathon goal. I successfully made it with the average pace 4:59 min/km and average HR 173 bpm which is pretty good. After 28km it was more mental rather than physical and after 31km it was really killing me. I lost my water bottle the night before so I didn’t have a good bottle for drinking during the race. Inappropriate drinking cause some temporary stomach pain during the race for me (similar to ones that I had summer 2014) There were tons of other excuses that I had during the race to stop running fast, but I ignored all of them and was able to successfully complete the run. Again after the race like last Saturday I got depression and it last for more than one complete day in a way that the day after this run I couldn’t mentally cope with a run over 2km. This is again an obvious symptom of overtraining because I was trying to get too much from my body in an unreasonable way. The key point here is to train in a regular bases but unfortunately sickness and small injuries disturb the weekly plan and I try to complete it in the remaining days of the week which makes the situation worse. The other point is I have to get a good idea of my marathon pace by the long tempo runs not with the speed or long runs or even race predictors. As a result I decided to set my marathon goal back to 3:20 which is consistence with my half marathon record and I’ll train for my tempo runs with the average pace 4:44 min/km not 4:41min/km. During the race up to 24 km, I completed 1L of powerade drink and had another half liter water up to the end of the race. I also had NB in this long hot run today.

On Sunday (04/10): After a very heavy workout yesterday, I just wanted to get out and have a very easy relaxed short run. The heavy 35km long run of yesterday with the average pace 4:59 had such a huge mental impact on my mind that I really couldn’t continue to run more than 2km today. The reason is because in the past 3 days I had two very heavy workouts, one long tempo and a fast long run. That’s overtraining and depression and insomnia were the two obvious symptoms of that for me yesterday.I had the exact same feeling last Saturday were I was pushing myself too much after getting back to run from my cold by running 47km in three days included a heavy long tempo run. These are all because of irregular training and the main cause of that was my cold that I had a few days rest for it and after that I emphasized to continue my regular training without being fully recovered from my cold, usually you shouldn’t immediately get back to your regular training after a cold and there is a transient time for that.