It’s official: I’m completely effed up

Posted on July 8, 2009 by threlkeld

I dutifully forwarded the last two weeks’ worth of SportTracks logs to Coach Kevin and got a reply shortly thereafter (I’m paraphrashing): “You are really messed up! Stop training right now.”

I’ve known my running was rapidly going from bad to worse, with the abysmal 8 mile race on Sunday being the cardiac Klieg light. But it was helpful to have a third party confirm this, with exclamation points.

It’s probably this iron/vitamin deficiency business, but there’s also a chance of some kind of weird overtraining effect at work. So I was told to run very easy this week, 3-5 mile sessions at most. Since I’m a woman of extremes (which is what got me into this mess in the first place), I’m going to up the ante by not running at all this week.

In the meantime, I’m huffing 27mg of Ferrochel, 1,000 mg of Vitamin C and 4,000 mg of Vitamin D on a daily basis. And rediscovering the pleasures of chicken livers, leafy greens and roasted pumpkin seeds. The cast iron cookware is getting a good workout too.

Now we wait and watch. I’m awaiting whatever modified training plan I’m to start on next week. Then we’ll set up some sort of pace vs. HR workout to do as a baseline for evaluating how I’m doing over the coming weeks.

This is so frustrating. I feel as though now, rather than spending the summer in preparatory mode for marathon training in the fall, I’m instead going to be just trying to get back to where I was in April, before things when all pear-shaped and running a 7:30 mile became a huge challenge.

The fact that something like this has happened probably shouldn’t surprise me so much. When I look back over my training, I realize that I’ve been working very hard and running at high mileage now — at least for a newcomer to competitive running — for two years, pretty much without a break. If I ever wondered what my limits were, at least in training, now I know.

It’s better than being injured, I suppose. But it still sucks.

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Bloody good

Posted on June 29, 2009 by threlkeld

Just got the call from my doc. Good news: Bloodwork came back normal. Bad news: This confirms that the problem was somewhere in my training.

I get the full results by fax tomorrow morning. But, for the curious, the ferritin level was 35. My notes say a female endurance athlete should be, at minimum, somewhere in the 25-50 range. So that’s a good number, although perhaps not great. I’ll see what the other iron-related readings are (he did the whole shebang) and decide if I want to supplement anyway.

Meanwhile, Coach Kevin is putting the frosting and sprinkles on a nine week basebuilding schedule. I don’t know the details, but he’s said it will be different from the previous basebuilding schedule because I’m fitter this time around, plus he’s allowing for the horrible summer heat and humidity.

A nine week schedule sets me up to start training for CIM at the start of September. That yields a 14 week training cycle, including the taper. I think this will work better than Newport’s 22 weeks.

But more on that in a bit…

Filed under: basebuilding, coaching, physiology, training | Tagged: , | 10 Comments »