September 27, 2005 Journal Entry

Posted Tuesday, September 27, 2005

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Well, I'm back and so is www.FasterRunning.com. I've been exceptionally busy, and maintaining this website wasn't at the top of my priority list.

I've been training a lot, but I just wasn't sharing that information. Since I last checked in I race 15:27 for 5K, 32:17 for 10K, and 1:11:46 for half marathon. All that was during a buildup for the Portland Oregon marathon, which is now just 11 days away. I hit my first ever 100 mile weeks, plus a bunch of 90's. In my prime I rarely topped 50 miles, but I'm trying to get to a whole new level, and my goal race distance is much longer.

Unfortunately my training kind of stalled the last couple months. It seemed like I had overtrained, but I didn't actually start to struggle until I had already cut back my training significantly. I just can't identify any specific overtraining, so maybe I got an iron deficiency or something.

I was showing some signs of bouncing back from that when my chronic achilles problem got a lot worse. I think I strained it a bit in a 10K, and then it tightened up when I took time off to try to recover from the overtraining like symptoms. Some extensive driving was probably what really put the achilles over the top, and I now think lots of driving in traffic is what may have started the whole achilles problem 4 years ago. So I took a week very easy which didn't help. Then I took a week off from running and hit the pool. Now I'm mixing light running with pool and starting to come back. But I've got just 11 days to get ready for a marathon.

With that little bit of background, today was a good day. I did 50 minutes of easy running (about 7 miles) followed by a hard 50 minutes of pool running. Dick Brown has given me some pointers on how to use the AquaJogger (he was one of the inventors) and I'm now finding it a lot more effective then when I tried it before.

Tomorrow I have a 12 mile run scheduled to really test where I'm at, although it is more of a test of distance than speed as I'm not planning on pushing the pace. Then Thursday I'm in to see Dr. Stan James to try to get a handle on the achilles and find out if it will handle a marathon or not.

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