Humble Pie…
So far be it from me to admit when I am wrong…
I am hurt. More specifically, I am over training. I spent 10 days a few weeks ago taking a break from running due to having incredibly tight and painful calves. I was really trying to climb back out of my 20-30 mile per week rut that I had gotten myself into post Long Beach (wow, it’s weird to say that considering Long Beach was in October). The rut was self-imposed as I set my sights on improving my short game (sprinting/fast twitch muscle fibers) in the name of starting to do some serious interval workouts. But I was reaching too far and I am now realizing that I am seriously hurting myself. I have been having a couple of months of workouts that were entirely too hard for my body to take and combining them with recovery times that were not nearly adequate enough. And now I am paying the price with probably another week or more of recovery.
I have made the classic mistake of too much of the same thing. I have been out there pushing all my runs to the max in the name of vanity. I just don’t want to see that pace per mile slip down slower. In my harder workout weeks leading up to Long Beach I sort of had a self imposed gauge of effort considering I was coming off of a full day of work and then immediately lacing up to run right after a 2hr train ride from the east side. There was no way I was gonna be able to have max effort on those nights. But with all this time off, I am putting that unused energy into harder and harder training runs, faster and faster paces, and less and less recovery time. It really was/is a recipe for disaster.
The funny thing is that I know racking up mileage, no matter how slow, is what really allowed me to improve over the summer. I don’t know why I decided to mess with that formula. Let that be a lesson to everyone though, if it ain’t broke then don’t try to fix it. I will now will be taking some mandatory time off…perhaps even 2 weeks. I think the time away from running will give me a fresh perspective on things. And hopefully when I return I will be stronger and ideally, smarter.