Fraser Darcy

New theory off the bat to kick-start regular programming. It’s somewhat of an extension of the Central Governor theory by Tim Noakes which proposes that your brain has a little person inside pulling the strings on what your heart and muscles can output given what the little person knows about how far you’ve been running and how far you’ve got to do. In practice, it means your brain is calculating to basically get itself to the finish line and then collapse. You can’t override the Central Governor but you can teach it to let you race harder through training.

My take on this theory is that it not only applies to micro-events like a running race but also in macro-events like the day-to-day, week-to-week activities of life. Two weeks ago I was finishing off my Austria trip and my body was pretty cooked. One week ago I was feeling better, and started to get some better rest. In the present moment I’m feeling a lot fresher and well-rested which is obvious given I’ve had two weeks of somewhat ‘rest’. However, my brain has also had two weeks of somewhat normal programming and inside could (this is just a theory after all) be thinking ‘OK Fraser, seems like you’re not doing any big 4-5 hour mountain runs anymore and you don’t have anything big in the horizon so we’ll stop holding you back in training and let you have some speed back‘. See, while I’ve been feeling fit the last two weeks my body has been feeling relatively clunky and slow compared to before the World Champs. My understanding of speed in running is that it’s more neuromuscular than cardiovascular (except once you get past 200m). I built up my speed before the World Champs and then, according to my theory, the Central Governor turned that speed part of my brain off for a bit to save myself in the Alps and it’s taken two weeks or so of reminding it that it’s OK to run fast again. I can’t have lost the ability to run 3:00/km from just a couple of weeks off. The alternative theory is that my fast-twitch fibres transitioned to slow-twitch fibres over the last month and I’ve just got to give them time to transition back a bit. In combining the two theories, one (my extension to the Central Governor) is all about the message going to the muscles and the other, more scientific theory, is all about what’s gone on at the muscular level. Together they go hand in hand and I should be getting back to Fast Fraser as opposed to Mountain Fraser sometime soon.

With that prefacing my training so far it’s time to provide an update on the last couple of weeks. An easy way to think about it is Austria was like Christmas from a food perspective. I got stuck in, filled my plate and had a good time eating lots of food. Some days have passed, I’ve digested my food/trip and now it’s time to get back in the kitchen and get back to good staple training and eating.

Off the Plane: Back in Australia my legs were feeling the strongest they ever had from all the pounding they took going up and down the Alps. I was tired but my legs and heart felt good. I put them to work on a lap around Belair while I tended to some important Adelaide stuff and then got back to Quorn later in the week. Again, I put them to work after my first day back at work as a teacher and had plenty of steam to run off on my usual Thursday Dutchman loop.

Which turned out pretty well. My time up the Dutchman was just off my Personal Best while my downhill times were PR’s given I put a bit more emphasis on trying to run the downhills fast (one of my major learnings from Austria). Seems I haven’t lost any fitness from the taper-race-recovery period.

And then that’s when the fatigue kind of hit me. I didn’t make it home from school on Friday without stopping for a twenty minute nap in my car. Cue some big sleeps on the weekend and I made some progress in recovering in amidst checking out some new running options. One of the things I felt I fell into with my training in the build up to Austria was that I was too scared to change my running routine in case a new option was poorer than the system I was currently working with. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it rationale.

First change to the system was a session on Saturday morning I’m calling Steep Browns. The idea was that I wanted a hill that was steeper than the one I use at Warren Gorge for hill reps (which is about 5%). Over at Mt.Brown, a location I use for a consistent thirty minute uphill effort there is a perfect hill for just what I had in mind (most of it is around 15%). I was a bit tired for this run, coming off a 10 hr sleep, but it felt good to push up the steepness. This new route was therefore a success and one I look forward to implementing more (the subsequent week of weather negated access to this trail so I haven’t been back since).

New route number two of the weekend was a run up to Tanderra Saddle at Wilpena Pound. It had been on my radar for a while as a possible alternative to Dutchman or Mt.Brown loops due to it’s similar prolonged uphill nature but because it’s over an hour away it always got shunted to the can’t be bothered basket. The past Sunday I could be bothered and was eager to re-visit the Pound after not being there for just over two months.

This was not a success (hence I’m glad I didn’t venture out this way in the pre-World Champs period). Rain the night before made the long flat fire track leading to the base of the climb quite slippery. No relaxing was possible lest I wanted to fall over. The long single track up to the saddle was a bit more technical than I remember (I’ve been up there at least five times but still forget about how hard it is to run in some stages) and meant it wasn’t as runnable as heading up Dutchman’s or Mt.Brown. Still, it was fun to run around here again, got lost in my headphones for a bit and was a good reminder of why I chose to live in the Flinders, so I can have access to cool views as like the ones I was rewarded with on this effort. Despite these nice feelings, as a training run, it was not very good and was a bit longer than I anticipated. I probably didn’t need the almost 2.5 hrs on my legs but it is what it is.

Monday Morning: With a full week for my central governor to realise things were OK my body started to feel better but was still requiring a fair bit of sleep. The above sleep stats show how high my sleep heart rate was for my first week back in Australia despite averaging almost 9 hours of sleep each night. It took until Monday the 19th to get a heart rate reading that was more similar to that of May. And with that trend in the right direction I thought my legs would be returning to me. Wrong I was it seems.

The above stats are from an attempt of mine to run 3:10/km for 1km repeats. Instead the best I could get was around 3:22-3:25/km and I felt like I was working bloody hard just to get that. Demoralising. The caveats to this are that I spent 3 hours walking up Dutchman’s with students from school during the day so my legs were feeling heavy from that and my big weekend of running. This was, besides some strides I did on Monday that may have given me some false hope, also the first prolonged effort I’d made in almost a month at running faster than 3:20/km. But, even though it was demoralising to not achieve the pace I wanted, it’s still better than nothing and still ‘training’ if I’m putting in the right effort and not getting injured.

Coming into Wednesday though, with the body still fatigued and the pace of Tuesday’s effort a bit down I thought fuck, is it really the right thing to crank out a mid week long run up Mt.Brown in the rain and wind? Maybe an arvo off wouldn’t hurt. Freshen up type thing. Take the easy option out for once.

That’s the way the arvo was trending until I got chatting to my French Airbnb guest for a good hour. After a tough few days of running and school (where I have felt a bit like pushing shit uphill towards the end of the term given the effect my disappearance had on the student’s ability to output work) the hour chit chat about European life got my psyched again. ORRRR was this just the Central Governor re-adjusting itself? See, when I get home from work I don’t have much time to myself if I’m to get my run in before it gets dark. But, in rushing my schedule like this, my brain goes from conserving energy in the at times stressful school environment to conserving energy in a stressful run (runs are not ‘stressful’ per se but do stress the body) and only gets to relax after 6:30pm. However, chatting with Herve (French mate) gave my brain an hour to relax, re-calculate it’s energy stocks and go ‘actually Fraser, you are pretty fresh to go for a run, I say go for it!‘. Go for it I did. In my nice fancy rain jacket I bought for Austria, in the rain, in the cold and in my element somewhat. At the end of the easy 60 minutes I was very glad of my commitment and felt a lot better about my running.

Lucky I had that motivation because Thursday arvo’s run was just as demoralising as Tuesday’s run. Again, it was meant to be a faster session but the wind in the Flinders was pretty much gale force. I put the effort in, got the work done, a bit slower than I liked, but it was another opportunity for some of my slow-twitch fibres to transition back towards fast-twitch fibres.

And now we’re up to speed with where the training’s been at. I feel as if I’ve held on to my aerobic fitness from all my training this year so far but getting the speed back into the legs has been taking a bit longer than I would’ve liked and that’s just the way it is. All I can do is give it some more time, pray it’s not a sign of overtraining and I’m actually digging myself a hole, and race off where I’m at now with my fitness and speed, not where I want to be.

Which segue’s nicely into where I hope to take the running for the next few months. Why all the concern about speed? What about the elevation? Before the World Champs it was clear I was aiming for the World Champs so I didn’t have to spell it out what my plans were. Now though, the horizon is a little more open which is great and there’s some variety coming up with the races I’m aiming for in order to give myself the best opportunity at becoming a well-rounded athlete in the image that I hope for. The races are a mixture of road, cross-country and trail events over the next two months which at most, have an elevation gain of 1000m. Less than one third of what I did in Austria. And that’s only one race out of the six I’ve got my eye on for the next two months, with the other five races having much less elevation gain (that’s running in Australia compared to Austria for you!). Hence, with a flatter elevation profile, these races will require fast leg speed so my speed is more of a priority in my training and I’ll be doing a few more specific sessions as such to sharpen up my legs whilst also keeping my hill climbing ability in check with more efforts at Steep Browns.

Overall, I am excited to getting back to racing and competing in the spirit of early 2022 Fraser where it was more, just enter, race hard, maybe put some music on, and see where the chips lie, no expectations etc. without the weight of the World Champs hanging over me. At the end of this period I should hopefully come out the other side a better, faster, stronger runner which if you put that in a little marketing package, with a bow on it, sounds pretty fucking nice. That’s the dream and how I’m directing my mind at least. Thanks for reading!