Work is paying off

Unfortunately I greatly messed up a race yesterday. Lost path at around 2-3km already. I was up in front of the race around 4 to 5th position. Feeling like a king. Cardio low, legs fresh, roaming like a champion. Easy flying. Not even felt like challenged. In control, as I even could have gone faster, but said to myself, wait it out, just enjoy while it last. Anyways, 1 hour into the race, it will be hard as ! Then 3km into the race, I already had 5 and needed like 5minutes still to catch up the last participant. I started jogging it in, caught up with a friend and ran home together. 17km jog.

But I already had some signs at the beginning of this week. I went to do a repeat workout on a hard segment. 8minutes of hard climbing. The segment is around 610m long and climbs 165m. Runnable for 1min then steepens up as ! It is held by an old local champion who used to train there. My friend told me to forget it as he is fit as. However you know, in case of segments, I am quiet confident. Just like in races, in segments, course knowledge worth 30% effort. So the time is 8:23. My strava did not pick the segments correctly, probably cause I did not find the end properly. But ! I ran 8:25 on the first repeat and 8:15 on the second .What is very very promising. 

Then for the rest of the week I took it very very easy. I jogged every day and did very very slow hiking with friends. Friday off. I woke up with no alarm every single day. I stopped strength training 2 weeks ago. I stopped post workout protein and creatine 3 weeks ago. It has been 4 weeks I am eating pure. I always eat great, but not that pure. You know, I might have time to time a glass of ice cream, some biscuits and chocolate. I might have jar of peanut butter or almond butter, chips and pizza. Not anymore. I just abuse the steamer. Morning porridge with poppy and sugar. Midi, potatoes with other steamed veggies and raw veggies. Evening steamed rice with other steamed veggies and salad. Fish 3 times a week and meat once a week. No dessert. Eat till full from the main meal. I liberally re-serve from the rice and celery sticks, even three times. No issues here. I might use some olives, sun dried tomatoes, or if not, little olive oil and salted tomatoes. But I make my rice better and better, after 25years of rice cooking, it is getting really dialled in. 

Training 

The training cycle is important. Cycling training. Recycling training. Getting into phases. Periodization ! Having staples is like grasping on to a winning bid on the bourse, that is turning into a loosing option. 

Periodization is complicated as science, but if you don't want to get flooded with too many options, it can be simple. The only thing you need is nutrition and intensity control. 

1. You need to understand race dynamics, race speed, elevation type, terrain, terrain and elevation variation. 

2. In my case, that was 15km race with D+1000 on quite technical 10km terrain after 5km running start. 

3. I needed fitness of running fast. So did like a month of VO2max style interval training. Starting with 2 weeks on non technical terrain and going way faster than race speed. 1 tempo run ad libidum with friends, already running a couple of big runs like 3 x 300m of elevation gain @ 20min*3 or 15 + 8min climb. Then started on more technical up and down 1 to 4min Vo2max circuits for the second two weeks. Then turned these workouts into volume based routines. 6 x 4min +  min down, 30 x 1min , some uphill walking and steep uphill hiking workouts for 2 weeks, and two weeks of mixed training with recoveries. Just let it flow for the final two weeks and adjust to niggles and fatigue. 

What most people don't get is that, once you step over race speed, you train yourself to run faster than race speed. So if you check the first strava segment of runnable section of 5km of my race, you can see that people on the front run it at 4:45/km pace with a couple of peak sections of 3:45 to 3:30km & 160m of elevation gain for this 5km. 

No need to do constant 4:20/km tempo runs and 3:10/Km speed sessions. You just risque fatigue and injury. You can just chose a similar sort of terrain and test yourself first, then adjust speed on ups and downs. See what is holding you down.

Cannot hold that 5min  to 5:30 pace on the ups, but can run  3:10 on the downs ? Forcefully, of course it is possible, but when doing that to achieve your goal, is your heart rate recovering ? I mean on the downs it should. Mostly however, when this situations happen, people are not fit enough to push their heart rate up high on the climbs, then descend it down on the descent. Instead, they have a quiet high heart rate on the up, and the same on the descent. 
What you need is some race specific uphill training, then once every second week one quality control style, up and down rolling. 

Just to repeat myself, the moment you are running faster than your race pace, you are training ! That is the most important part of training to understand. The more volume you can do at these faster paces, well, the more you can improve. If you can really dial in these efforts and outwork your competition or in some cases greatly outwork, that is when improvements come. 

The how of this will be discussed in the next article. Quality control !