The Pain, the Pain!

Week 2: 10/19/09 - 10/25/09 (16 weeks remain)
Monday: Off day. Went down to the department and learned me some smooth tensor fields of type (r,s) on differentiable manifolds; you know, the usual day at the office.

Tuesday: 8 miles, general aerobic. Some generic junk mileage. Nothing interesting to report.

Wednesday: 10 miles, medium-long. So today was supposed to be a 12 mile day, but about 4 miles in, my left knee really started hurting in a way that was unfamiliar to me, just above the kneecap. I suspect this was due to the fact that I haven't really been taking very good care of myself over the past few weeks (months) in terms of getting an appropriate amount of sleep. On the plus side, though, the pain felt like it was more of a sharp muscular pain than joint pain, which makes me optimistic that if I'm smart about this over the next couple of days, I might be able to knock this thing down before it starts to become a serious problem. One of the things that's really screwed me up in the past is that I often don't use an appropriate amount of forethought in my approach to training. I've actually seen this trait in several of the other runners that I've run with in the past, especially in high school; you get a group of naturally competitive people together, who are highly motivated, who want to train hard to do well, and they get so caught up in going out and running hard in practice every day that they lose sight of the fact that having a training week consisting of six back-to-back hard workouts may not actually be the optimal training schedule. A couple of guys on my old high-school team took themselves out of action unnecessarily doing stuff like this, including me. When I got hurt a couple of years ago, I definitely prolonged my recovery time by getting overeager and trying to come back to running again before I was physically ready, which only resulted in me reinjuring myself and having to take more time off. So one of the things that I've been really cognizant of since having decided to go through with this training plan is the fact that I am somewhat injury prone, and this is more intense training than I've done in a while (certainly in several years), so I need to be smart about sticking to what the training schedule actually calls for (e.g., actually going easy on the easy days so that I can go hard on the hard days), and handling the nagging pains/problems that inevitably come up when training for longer distances in a way that will enable me to continue to get the most out of my training. So today, I cut my run a couple of miles short because the pain in my knee was actually starting to interfere with my running gait; as much as it pisses me off that I'm cutting a workout in the second week of training, I think that a dispassionate analysis indicates that whatever marginal benefit I might gain from running two additional miles on a moderate intensity day is more than offset by the expected setback of continuing to run in the presence of a potential injury, and possibly screwing up the next several weeks of training. As of right now, the most important workouts in this phase of my training are the lactate threshold workouts and the long runs on Sundays, so the goal is to get my knee back into shape for a good workout this weekend. So this is my attempt at trying to train smarter; we'll see how this works out for me.

Thursday: 4 miles, recovery. Still some lingering pain in the knee; hoping that a good night's sleep tonight will knock this thing down.

Friday: 8 miles, general aerobic. I did not want to run today - not at all. I've been busting ass on this geometry and physics course I'm taking in the math department, and I didn't get back home from the office until around 11:00, after having gotten a fairly paltry amount of sleep the previous day (like 5 hours). But I figured that this is likely what it's going to feel like during the later stages of the actual race (i.e., I'm ass tired and the last thing I want to do is run another 8 miles), so that in some perverse, masochistic sense, this is actually more of a reason to get out the door - it'll toughen me up mentally. So I put on the shoes and went out anyway. As it turns out, that was definitely the right decision. The fact that I was tired to begin with meant that I was relaxed when I started the run, so that I actually was able to lock in pretty comfortably at a consistent moderate pace (as the workout actually called for). As an added benefit, running for 8 miles at a consistent, moderate pace warmed up and stretched out my left quad in a way that the recovery run yesterday didn't (because of my schedule, I'm doing most of my runs in the early to late evenings, and it's been getting kinda cold here lately), so the pain in my left knee seems to be subsiding somewhat. Since it's Friday and I don't really have to get up early tomorrow, I'm hoping that getting a lot of sleep tonight will mean that my knee feels even better.

Saturday: 4 miles, recovery. Knee actually feels pretty good today. I think taking it a little easier earlier in the week has paid off. We'll see tomorrow.

Sunday: 15.5 miles with 9 miles at or above goal marathon pace. So today was meant to be the hard workout of the week. The plan called for a two-mile warmup from my apartment down to the eastern end of Town Lake, followed by an 8 mile section at or above marathon pace along Lakeshore and Riverside to the Congress Street bridge, up Congress to the Capitol, east along 12th to Red River, up Red River to Dean Keeton and west to Guadalupe to loop around the outer edge of campus, and then back through the Capitol grounds and down Congress to the river. I was actually quite pleased at how the marathon pace section went - I kept up a consist, quick pace throughout, and even tacked on an extra mile at this pace when going from the Congress Street bridge back to the I-35 bridge. Unfortunately, I was working pretty hard, and in particular sweating quite a bit through that first 10 or 11 mile section, and although I stopped to get some water at a park at the end of the hard section, I hadn't been hydrating during the hard section itself. This created a situation where I had 1) already sweated quite a bit, 2) was mildly dehydrated, and 3) was trying to get sufficient water at one go to somewhat rehydrate myself. Having thought about what happened after having gotten back from the workout, I'm pretty sure that the combination loss of sweat (and salts) + rapid influx of water (diluting whatever salts were left over) meant that my electrolyte levels ended up being lower than they should have been, because I very shortly thereafter started feeling like death and cramping up everywhere. Something similar happened to me during the last marathon I ran, which did turn out to be due to low levels of sodium (a mild case of hyponatremia caused by excessive consumption of water without electrolyte replenishment). So although the hard section of the workout went well, the last two or three miles were kind of a disaster, and I was kind of a wreck by the time I made it back to my place. On the other hand, I think this is what is now referred to as a "teachable moment": I gotta get a bottle of Gatorade or something for next week's long run...

Total weekly mileage: 49.5 <--wrong direction :-/

So my training this week suffered somewhat due to my cutting some of the workouts down earlier in the week in response to my knee. On the other hand, this did have the desired effect of enabling my knee to bounce back to the point where I could run a strong hard workout at the end of the week, and avoid a long-term injury that could screw up subsequent training weeks. I guess that counts as a win :-/. We'll see how next week goes.