Making adjustments

Yesterday (Wednesday) I was still pretty tired. Not blasted, but enough to make me take a step back, to reevaluate my program and see how to get on track while not being so deeply fatigued.

Rather than do a high intensity workout on Wednesday, I spent the hour talking with Josh to outline my concerns and observations — and to make adjustments to the plan as needed. The notable highlights of that conversation follow.

Nutrition I’ve been pretty diligent about my training regimen, but much less so about nutrition. The number one to do here is to capture everything in a daily journal. I now have a notebook and today is scribbled in full detail. Now to keep it up every day — the idea is that we can then go over this data and make sure I am getting sufficient macronutrients with high quality inputs. I need to pay much more attention to protein intake, which may be one reason I haven’t recovered well and have been fatigued the last few weeks.

Post-workout Recovery I currently have zero post-workout recovery plans on the books. This includes proper cool down and post workout nutrition/hydration. I’m starting to work on how to improve this and put a basic framework in place. For runs where I get back in a car to head home, I need to spend the end of the run jogging then walking it in. For longer efforts, I need to have some post-run nutrition handy (pack a cooler with the proper items).

Proper Workout Intensity I need to make sure I’m keeping my LSD (long, slow, distance) runs at the appropriate pace. Right now I am PRing too many of these runs.

Race Specific Training Right now my long runs have a large amount of vertical, certainly far more that I will see in my race in October. I need to align my training with my target.

Willingness to be Flexible To be time and energy efficient, it isn’t a problem to split daily miles into several runs.

Some of this also requires recognizing that I went from pretty much zero running to a 50k attempt in 12 weeks. That’s a very aggressive schedule and even if I nail everything, I’ll still be tired at times. The good news is that reassessing things at the halfway point (six weeks) allows for adjustments and perfecting more of the pieces to the puzzle.

This evening I went over to GlideTC for the T3 workout. We did a combination of bodyweight exercises and hill repeats — an hour workout in total. A lot of focus on form, which I think has been improving a lot over the past few weeks.

Off to get some good sleep and attack the day tomorrow.