Ashland & Running Ratio

I arrived in Ashland late August and promptly put in a 10 mile running week! Buuut if you count my new elliptical routine and some biking I had logged almost 6 hours of quality cardio work. Having access to a gym has been great. As I've mentioned, I had a bike accident this summer and the danger factor of biking combined with the difficulty of getting in what feels like really good quality workouts is tough. So I was excited to be able to use an elliptical. Hard to believe? Well I'm serious, and its been fun. In the last few weeks I have logged 2-3 hours of great elliptical time per week in addition to running 30-ish miles. My foot hasn't hurt on the elliptical but I finally feel like I can get completely safe and great work in without any issues i.e: Bad weather, impact on foot, potential of crashing a bike, stopping at traffic lights etc. I have been alternating different "workouts" on the elliptical and its been enjoyable and reassuring for my catching up on fitness to get ready to race.

Fairly unrelated but this is a photo Carly took of some rock climb cross training  I got in with Mr. Wet Willy Hoffman at Emigrant Lake in Ashland recently. He taught me how to lead climb, it was great practice and a lot of fun.

I met with my athletic trainer upon getting to Ashland and after talking about my injury issues I got 3 options:

1. Stop running altogether
2. Just start running more on it
3. See a specialist

I wish I had seen a specialist over a month earlier but I think the way I was handling training was probably pretty close to what would have been prescribed to me. Ok lets be honest, I would have been given a much much more conservative approach and could just about guarantee a loss of this season of XC completely. My main worry was if running on it would elongate my recovery time or not. I had no way of knowing this. I was worried it was a stress fracture and I was balancing on a not broken foot / playing with the possibility of breaking it. But enough time had gone by with no or very little running that even if that was the case it could have healed enough to bring running in appropriately anyway. SO with all these thoughts and finally talking with my coach and following his advice, we went with running 5 days in the next week. About 30-40 minutes easy for each run, that was it. This was the decisive change that finally tipped my running ratio in the favor of actual running instead of mostly cross training.

The 5 days went well, still with some irritation but nothing worse or very bad. So the next week was 6 days and a longer run up to 50 minutes. That week went fine too, and I started feeling better about it all and running was feeling good, and fun. It was relieving to be able to really get runs in at all.

That brings us to this week. I'll be running 6 days again and ran a long run on Sunday of 65 minutes. I did one workout which was a sort of 15 minute tempo and I was (barely) approved to run our race today, Friday 9/18/14 in Portland. Obviously I am not going to blow the doors off in the race this evening but I feel good about it considering all things. Its a unique opportunity. There is no pressure other than what I place on myself (which I'm trying to manage as I type this). We still have 2 hours before lunch and we don't race until 5pm. I am wearing some fairly cushy trainers in the race to ensure I don't hurt my foot, and I am unsure about how turning sharply at high speeds will feel but I will figure all that out later today. I'm excited to be racing I just wish I was in better physical condition. But that is what I am working on daily.

I have space to add 1 more, hmmmmm...

A recent addition in my section of Carly and my "Goals" whiteboard is "do something extra everyday". What I mean by this is to do something daily that is beyond the normal stuff to help me reach my running goals. Some examples so far are, adding an ice bath when I normally wouldn't have. Icing my foot while watching a movie, and going through a thorough and long stretch routine. I went on a bike ride and explored parts of Ashland that I wasn't familiar with and I even went on a walk, just to loosen up from a long and tough day of Netflix-ing.

School still hasn't started yet and the job I've secured starts when school starts so I have had a lot of free time. I managed to get a part-time gig a few days a week though...... holding a sign on the corner for a mattress & appliance store. It hasn't been too bad, except the day I was out there 6 hours in the middle of the day. At least I had Carly's ipod, the only issue was it only had 40 minutes of music on it. It mostly consisted of her weird mix of really slow acoustic music and a few top 40 radio type songs. I just stood silently for an hour or more at one point.

See the post set on my foot? Apparently I could get a hefty fine for setting that on the ground, so foot it is!

Coaching in Mammoth Lakes & August Fitness

I haven't written here in about 2 months so heres the skinny:

I spent a mid August week in Mammoth Lakes coaching and hanging out with my old high school and our small but awesome crew of coaches plus some parents that came along. I unfortunately couldn't run too much due to the same foot issues I've had most of the summer but managed to get in some of the teams short double runs and I biked everything else with them. It turned out to be a low volume week of biking too though because I wasn't getting in all the commute biking that I was doing back home, but I didn't mind too much.
I had been wondering how volume increases on a bike may effect me weeks/a month or more later if I did an awful lot (for me). So having this lower week was kind of comforting. By the way, a big week of biking for me was/is 10 hours so take that however you wish but it seemed appropriately high for me given my inexperience with serious cross training for running.

Coach Todo, Clemons and Myself at the bottom of Mammoth Rock trail waiting for any stragglers.

Even though I only ran about 10 miles in the 5 days in ML, I was still very satisfied with the trip. I added up the weeks I've spent training in Mammoth and its now over 4 months, including a summer of 2 months and another of 1 month. Add in various 1 week trips and I have enjoyed and come to love this mountain town quite a bit. During this trip, I had a ton of fun and shared a cabin with Steve (a team parent) and a great group of guys. I tried to impart some wisdom with the little time I had left with these guys, as I knew I'd be heading north for Oregon at the end of the next week.
It's odd coaching only for the summer as I have for the last couple seasons. Its been a blast but I don't get to see all the work unfold through seeing them race and helping them deal with nerves and strategy and all the stuff coaches do. I'm really only there for 6 weeks in summer, whereas the summer training we do will help keep them improving from July all the way to the next June. I do keep up on some results from the season and get updates though. Honestly I am pretty busy training/competing and life-ing on my own anyway so its cool to see how things progress both for them and myself.

Some of the team at Mammoth Creek park. Either pre or post workout and ice bath. Weather was great, it was a beautiful week. Photo by Mama Clemons.

We went bowling! Around my waist is Lucan, a boy presumably raised by squirrels that we found running around the trails and streets of Mammoth(okay he belongs to the Clemons' and we brought him with us).  He beat me in the first game but I pulled through with a PR performance in game 2 for the W. Photo by Mama Clemons

Training and Fitness:
Through late August, I was incredibly unsure what to do in training. To run on the foot a little, not at all, or start to slowly bring running back in completely. I had a x-ray on my foot (and knee just to check from the bicycle incident) and the doc said there was nothing. After talking more, and with more people I realized that I should have continued to a specialist who could have diagnosed me better.... or at all. I was told by the doc that I had metatarsalgia which is just inflammation/irritation in the ball of the foot. So she just said to try and not run for 2 weeks then bring running back in slowly.
I told her I had done that twice already. To clarify... On two separate occasions I didn't run at all for 2 weeks then started bringing in running only to find the same foot irritations. So she just kind of got me out of the room and on my way and I kept biking with minimal running. Due to not running but still hoping to compete in the XC season, from early July onward I kept up with biking pretty seriously. For about 6 weeks I biked as little as 4 and as much as 11 hours per week. This was all what I called "quality" biking. If I biked to work and it took 45 minutes, I'd knock a few minutes off that for my training log if there was considerable coasting time because that isn't really "quality". This was how I was logging it anyway.

It was nearly impossible to prove but I felt fit. Despite not running more than 10 miles a week for about 2 months, I felt like if I HAD to, I could run a decent 5k considering all things. This was encouraging-which was great because if I didn't feel good about that, I wouldn't have much else to be happy about fitness-wise. It was hope. Hope that when the time came, I could begin transitioning my biking fitness into usable running fitness and put a season of XC together.

The coming weeks would entail making the move back to Ashland OR, meeting up with my team and coach and seeing where things went from there. Check back for the next update on being in Ashland and training...

Spoiler alert: I ran 30+ miles the week of 9/7/14!