A long post this week, training recap for the last two weeks, some thoughts on Melbourne Marathon and the mental side of dealing with injury, and a change of plans with my coach.

Training recap

Week 15 (8 – 14 October)

Monday

On the Monday I completed gym and rehab exercises. With gym I used low weight on lower body exercise which were squats today, to reduce overall training load on the legs. I’m still building back after experiencing some minor achyness through my left thigh where the stress reaction was.

Tuesday

Tuesday’s run was 30 minutes completed at lunch around Carlton Gardens. The run went well averaged 5:32/km and 156bpm which is pretty standard. No soreness.

Wednesday

The usual, gym and rehab exercise day. I began adding the weight back with 30kg for deadlift.

Thursday

Increase to 35 minutes today, same route as Tuesday around Carlton Gardens. Pace similar at 5:28/km however heart rate was a bit higher 163bpm. Aerobic fitness is pretty poor at the moment, but no issues.

Friday

I missed gym weights, I don’t quite remember why now, I think I was just tired and a bit lazy after work. I still got my rehab exercises done which are a series of body weight exercises that take about 20 minutes.

Saturday

Saturday we had beautiful weather. I had a sleep in and decided it would be nice to run in the midday sun. While it initially felt nice it ended up being a really tough run. I under estimated how much harder it would be to run in the heat with my lack of fitness at the moment. I did a big negative split started at 5:25’s, finished up at 5:55-6:00 kms – and averaged 170bpm, which is very high. That’s around threshold effort for an easy pace run! But anyway I completed my 38 minutes without any other issues.

Sunday

With only one weekend run at the moment, Sunday was a day of rest. Instead of running I spent Sunday morning watching running and tracking a number of runners in Melbourne Marathon.

Week 16 (15 – 21 October)

Monday

Gym and rehab exercises. Back to 30kg for squats.

Tuesday

Tuesday my physio had me re-introduce intervals. For picking up the pace my preference at the moment is to head to Princes park (or the Mansion on weekends). I don’t feel ready for the track just yet, I actually feel like there is less injury risk running away from the track on a nice soft gravel surface with less bends.

The session was 3 x 1km with a 10 min warm up and cool down. I felt great for the reps and did them in 4:37, 4:32 and 4:46. The 4:32 was down the gradual hill, while the 4:46 was partly on the Royal Parade side of the park where GPS always seems to have a slow patch!

Wednesday

Gym and rehab exercises. 

Thursday

I worked from home to receive a delivery so I headed out at lunch time to do my run at the Mansion. Today’s session was 8 x 500m with 1 min recovery. Annoyingly from the get go I had some minor achyness through my left thigh. I describe it as achyness as I wouldn’t say it’s painful or sore really, it’s just a mild ache that I can notice. It’s quite frustrating as I feel so close to getting back to running properly but then I get these issues and it’s hard to know how serious it is.

Since it felt very mild I finished my warm up and decided to start the 500s with the plan that I would pull out if it started feeling any worse. It got no worse but also didn’t go away. I ended up finishing the 8 reps averaging around 4:40/km which felt like a ‘comfortably hard’ tempo pace.

Friday

Gym and rehab exercises.

Saturday

No run today, after having the achyness on Thursday I decided to leave a two day break until the next run. I did however do more gardening..

Sunday

The plan for this run was 40 minutes easy run. I thought about heading to the You Yangs but didn’t really feel confident so ran from home instead. I just ran behind the rec centre which is pretty boring but it’s a dirt and gravel road close to home. I felt slow and tired on this run, averaging 5:53/km on flat terrain. The good news though is no achyness at all, and my heart rate was 152bpm so pretty good, a proper easy run. Also my longest run so far on my return.

Melbourne Marathon

One word.. brutal. I was feeling everyone’s pain watching the splits come through in the marathon, but first let’s start with the half marathon.

There were a few people I was interested in tracking, mainly Laura who I have been coaching with the goal to run sub 2 hours. I know she is capable but unfortunately with it being hot and windy it was tough and she found the second half super challenging after going out a bit too fast, as well as dealing with knee soreness from 16km onwards. So not a great day but still a 2:02… definitely sub 2 hours next attempt.

Otherwise in the half marathon Brett Robinson dominated the men’s race. I was also tracking Bradley Croker from Inside Running podcast, who unfortunately had to back off with calf soreness. And Bree from Western Athletics had a good run getting back after injury.

In the marathon we had quite a few Western Athletics runners. Michael, Alex, Cameron, Adrian and Tom, and also Jeff from Wynfit. All but ONE slowed from 25km onwards. That was Michael who ran a very well paced first marathon. To run an evenly paced first marathon in those conditions is very impressive, finishing in a great time of 2:49:23. Alex, Cam, Tom and Jeff all had tough day outs with their split pace dropping off from the 25km mark. It was hard to watch those splits come through and I was very thankful we had good conditions last year. Alex still managed to finish in sub 3 hours, a great effort to hold on. Adrian the melb mara spartan sadly dropped out halfway, I haven’t had a chance to ask what happened.

Outside of Western Aths I was also tracking Tash who keeps getting quicker with every marathon she runs, with an impressive 3:21:46. It’s amazing thinking back that she ran her first marathon just last year in 4:24:02. Since then she’s ran (6?) marathons dropping her time by over an hour.

With the leaders Sinead Diver was incredible, it was great watching the live stream seeing how efficient and comfortable she looked, paced by Jack Rayner from Western Aths. Despite the conditions Sinead broke the course record and ran the 4th fastest Australian female marathon time of all time. In the men’s race Liam Adams put in a very impressive run breaking last year’s winner Dominic Ondoro fairly early on. Not far behind Michael Roeger came through in 6th overall, setting paralympic marathon world record in his debut!

Mentally dealing with injury

I think every runner would agree, it sucks when you’re not able to run. Running becomes such a big part of your life, that when you can’t do it, it can be quite depressing.

For me, while it has been difficult at times, I’ve managed to stay pretty motivated with doing cross training and seeing improvements with the rehab program. As well as staying involved with the club helping out at cross country events, and taking on some extra study with the data science course.

So I’ve gotten through all of the days at the pool, weeks on crutches, and so on, but it’s actually not until now that I’m finding the motivation more of a struggle. Where I feel so close to returning to running properly – I have these runs that feel great, but then I’ll have a run where the same spot where I had my injury feels achy. It’s a really frustrating feeling, up until now the rehab process has been slow but fairly linear with continuous improvement. While now it’s kind of a 2 steps forward, 1 step back balancing act. And I get thoughts of am I just going to run into the same issue again after 7 months of rehab, strength work and careful return to running?

While I’m definitely not going to throw in the towel now, it’s just rather frustrating at the moment, all I want to do is get back to running and not have to worry about my stupid leg lol. And I know I’m not alone here, many people out there have had to deal with injuries and it could always be worse. Anyway that’s all I have to say, I’m hoping the occasional achyness I’m getting is just a normal part of the return, but I don’t really know. Cross your fingers for me.

Change in coaching

I found out this week that my coach Chelsea has decided to take a step back from coaching. I started with Chels back in 2015 when she helped me run my first marathon at Gold Coast in 2015. From around July 2016 she started coaching me properly and since then has gotten me to PB’s across a whole range of distances.. 3km, 5km, 10km, Half marathon and of course the 30 minute PB at Melbourne marathon last year.

So it feels like an end of an era with Chelsea’s Champions going into hiatus. I have a huge appreciation of all the time Chelsea has put in, and can understand the need to make the change. Not that it’s the ‘end’ really, I’m sure soon I’ll be back to chat and jog along on a Sunday long run.

What does this mean for me moving forward? I’m not quite sure yet. For now my physio is setting all my runs, but that should finish up soon. After that I’ll most likely go ahead with what Chelsea had planned for me, which is to build an aerobic base with easy running. Following that with no big goals in mind, I’ll likely just work towards getting back to consistent training with fairly standard sessions.

Summary