These are some brief notes from my own training logs.
I started this New Jersey Half Marathon Training cycle post a 3 week down time after Valley Half Marathon due to a flare of pelvic floor injury. Then when I started running again, my right foot’s bunion (deformity in big toe joint), henceforth named Granny, blew up and hurt all the damn time requiring another two weeks off. This landed me in December, practically starting over.
It was ok, I am versed in starting over so I go to work doing it. As I preach to the athletes I coach, you trust the process. Fast Erin would be waiting for me down the road. I would get to her with a recipe of patience, perseverance, consistency and hope. Where is Fast Erin waiting? How far away? No one knows. But there’s a definitive moment waiting in which I will know I am there. There will be a perceptible “click” in a workout and I will know: I am back.
I’ve been working monthly with physiotherapist David Kachan on a strength routine to keep me healthy and running. This week, in conversation with him, he asked me how I was feeling in training. I told him: to be honest, I’m just stuck in this adaptation to training period. I’m healthy and I’m so happy about that. I don’t actually feel fit or fast or good in my workouts yet. PEI’s Freeze Your Gizzard was an epic running career moment for me but it was actually too cold (-10 C) to run fast so I didn’t get a good glimpse of where I’m at.
This past Saturday, 681km later, I earned the click.
I recognized it because I know the process.
I started wearing my HOKA One One Clifton 5′s at the beginning of this training cycle. With their meta-rocker midsole technology, they have saved my running life because are so good for my big toe joint. My Strava gear tracker tells me this was 681km ago.
This Saturday’s workout was 23km total with intervals at fartlek (aka 8-10km pace): 6, 5, 5, 4, 4, 3, 2, 1 minutes. Six minutes is a lot of 10km paced minutes.
This was the first workout in this training cycle where I felt strong, powerful and fit: where I felt “right”. Like the effort matched the pace and I knew the pace wasn’t going to bury me. I knew I could hold it.
It was the first workout where I was able to hang with Linda for the whole workout. Ok, she put a surprise 1-2-hammer on me in the last 2 minute interval and I couldn’t respond. But I’m counting it as a workout with Linda. We started at 4:03/km pace and trended down to 3:55/km (3:40/km for the last 1 minuter). That’s pace I am happy with.
There were moments of progress, some milestones, along the way. I recognized those because I know how to look for them. They fed the hope that the click would be earned and would come further down the road.
- Anatomy of a Workout post from January, 2019
- The Fierce Files Volume 4 post from February, 2019, noticing the glimmers of progress
681km is a long time to wait, eh? You have to earn it. Maybe it’s long and short all at once. Now that I am here, I’m smart enough to know that progress isn’t linear: it’s consistency and stress and rest and rolling with the good and the bad.
I was just having a coaching dialogue with a Love Training More athlete about winter training in the context of spring goals. About: “Winter-Shelley” versus “Spring-Shelley.” This is the point in the winter where I start thinking, “If I can do this now, in this freeze, imagine what I can do on a lovely spring race day in shorty shorts and a bra top!” It’s going to be true for Shelley too and everyone else out there training with the Nova Scotia Ice Handicap.
I don’t know what my April 28 New Jersey Half Marathon will bring. It’s not time yet to set a time goal, I have still have 8 weeks of training left. See my post on setting time goals here.
I do know that I now am going to get back to dreaming about the sunny Jersey shore awaiting my running pals and I.
