Fraser Darcy

Last week could be characterised by the highlight of my birthday. This week could be characterised by grinding along in training. Week 4 out of an 8-week build. Usually I’d be racing this weekend and enjoying a mini-taper into it and recovery out of it. Instead, head down, bum up.

As a result this week felt like a grind at times but was probably one of the more important ones. If I had let myself have a rest and dislodge the consistency I had built over the first three weeks my very delicate increases in training volume and intensity would go out the window. Instead, head down, bum up, more training it was.

Monday was an easy but busy day. Morning run, school, staff meeting, grocery shopping, evening run, strides, strength, dinner, blog prep while watching Indiana Jones (birthday present), bed. The two runs on this day are always a grind coming off Sunday’s long run so it was no surprise that the week started in grind mode.

Tuesday is also a busy day but not easy. Early morning run, school (including two doubles of teaching maths which can leave me feeling like I’d rather be trapped in a bear cage with a class full of bears and teach them maths), arvo run with intensity (steep Mt.Brown hill reps as usual), dinner, running newsletter work. Two days of some good head down, bum up work.

After school on this Tuesday in particular my head was really down. For a good hour in a decent nap. I often struggle to drive home from school without feeling sleepy and sometimes have a quick 10-15 minute lie down but this Tuesday was a full blown hour on the couch. I had my doubts about getting up for some intense running to finish the daylight hours but once I tick off the getting in the car process, the getting out of the car, the warm-up and then the first rep, the second rep, the third rep, then the fourth rep, I’ve done it so there’s no more doubts. I finished off my steep hill reps with a 2km tempo effort and once I had freed myself of my doubts that I could actually run fast, this last 2km is the some of the best running I do all week.

Wednesday. Easy morning run. Hearing test for lifeguard job. School (mostly just preparation for The Blue Line). Another nap. Mid week long run. Usually both of the runs on a Wednesday are quite enjoyable but this Wednesday the grind of the week really kicked up. On my Tuesday run I lengthened the time between reps from 60 seconds to 90 seconds. That meant I could run faster in the rep which was great. That then led to me pulling up sore in one of my hamstrings and ipso facto, my gait was restricted from Wednesday onwards. Training is training though and I wasn’t going to do any damage with this run so I followed my schedule, put my head down and bum up and ticked it off.

Thursday. Easy run, light strength (no deep squats or lunges to protect sore hamstring). School. Interview Ryan Gregson for The Blue Line. Contemplate no run. Do it anyway and have a great 60 minutes in very still conditions (unusual for a Quorn arvo). Hamstring is still sore but feels a little better. Dinner. Watch an hour of Star Wars Episode IV (birthday present). Awesome. Bed.

Friday. Last week I took this day’s early morning run off and slept in. I probably could’ve gone running this time but the habit from last week got to me and I slept in longer. I had a sore hamstring anyway, maybe a morning off would be good for it. Attended school, completed a fair bit of life admin, came home, relaxed, went for what is usually one of the best runs of the week. School week’s done by now and I have a whole weekend in front of me so the world is my oyster. Trotting out the door I felt pretty clunky (as a result of no Thursday strides maybe? (Tried to protect my hamstrings)) but got rolling with the ambition of doing a similar 21km run like the week prior. A kilometre or two in I realised the wind was cooked and life would be difficult. Ah well, more training I guess. Warmed up for 7km then hit lap and started what is usually a 30 minute tempo effort over undulating hills. Usually I precede this with some strides to get the body into fourth gear. I didn’t this time though and the combination of headwind, no sharpness (this is Week 4 of training too) and low energy (sleeping hasn’t been as great as it was in late September) meant I was running around 4:00/km instead of 3:30/km.

I could’ve stopped and just gone back to an easy pace but that always leaves more doubt in my head. I put all timing and pace expectations away and just ran to feel. I’m training for a trail 50km so it makes sense that I should probably focus on trail 50km speed and become economical at that effort. Which is kind of like the pace I was holding. A blessing in disguise then? After 16/17 minutes I turned around and got the tailwind. The pace quickened up but I kept it pretty solid still instead of going hard. I now wanted to run through a further 2km’s after the usual 9km distance I aim for and lengthen out my intensity to around 40 minutes of solid 50km effort running.

Settling in at the 25 minute mark I also realised this is the type of good hard enjoyable long running I used to repeatedly do around Belair or Shepherds Hill if I was going for a PB on my little loops. I’m talking about efforts like this back in the mid 2010’s. Back when running was mostly just for fun and sometimes for racing. Getting back into this groove was very pleasing and makes me want to adopt it a bit more on these Friday night sessions. I could go for the structured 4*3km, or 3*10 minute approach like other sub-elite runners but there’s something that’s a lot nicer to just run to feel, tap into some nostalgic memories and relive them with the same music playing through my ears. Running like this is also very similar to the efforts I put in at 25-35km TRSA races. Which, if I was following a normal schedule of mine, would coincide with this weekend so it’s like I’m getting the best of both worlds, training and some race pace enjoyment!

At the completion of my one ‘interval’ (a convenient cross roads which usually marks the 2km spot on my morning loop) I was pretty happy and started to be pretty cooked. A 20 minute cool down followed, put the washing on, did some watering, had a pizza and three beers (birthday present) and watched Harry Potter on free-to-air TV. Another Monday-Friday grind complete.

Saturday. Sleep in. Listened to ABC gardening while watering the garden. Easy run around the roads at home then some very light strength exercises. Body moving around like it hasn’t dropped into a rest-and-digest phase in a while so instead of trying to give myself the usual Saturday treatment of some bike riding, maybe a walk up Devils etc, I consign myself to the couch for most of the afternoon and get a head start on this here blog. While it goes slightly against the more training philosophy I think I’ve got the experience to know when it’s more productive training or more harmful training. There’s a difference and it’s often too late when you find it out.

As a result of having the afternoon ‘off’ I felt a lot more refreshed ready for my easy arvo run. It was blowing pretty hard around Quorn so I jumped in the car and escaped to Warren Gorge. No wind at all, nice dappled sunlight through the trees. Excellent. Started out at a really relaxed pace and stayed that way. Didn’t really feel my hamstring so maybe I’ve passed the hump of it? Either way, this run was very good. Was it because I had no expectations of it and was just absorbed in my headphones, or that during the afternoon of resting I had caught up with a lot of tasks that needed doing and was now ahead in life? Either way, this run was very good and that’s all that matters. I finished off the day with some more watering, some pasta and finished Star Wars from earlier in the week.

Sunday long run day. A day that sometimes I’m up and about for and others I’m a bit like ‘ehhhh, I wish I could just run 1 hr and relax more’. Today was the latter feeling. Made worse by the fact that I had to be at work at the Quorn Pool by 10am (yep, it’s pool season). Up at 5:20am, for the 5th of 7 days this week, coffee, toast, scroll the internet and then out the door by 6:30am. These long runs are meant to go for at least 2hrs but 2.5hrs is the gold standard. With some elevation. And some fast stuff at the end. And I should practice taking on gels, using my vest and drinking electrolytes. So much ‘stuff’ to tick off you can see why an easy 60 minute run in the afternoon is a bit more ‘free’ and enjoyable.

But training is training so I put my head down, and my bum up and got on with it. That’s the great thing about living in Quorn. Yeah sure I could sleep in but really what else am I going to do but run and give credence to the fact that I moved here to become better at running so I bloody well do that. On top of this the fact that I have to learn to mentally drag myself into runs when I am not motivated is great brain training. An advantage I wouldn’t be gaining if I relied on group runs in Adelaide.

Fifty minutes into my long run I decided not to follow the same route I’d done the last three weeks into Dutchman’s Stern and just followed the main road instead. I was avoiding the elevation (again to protect the hamstring) and the cattle grids (annoying to stop and walk over) but I was also enjoying Arden Vale Rd and as I was already ‘stressing’ my body by pushing myself out the door I thought ‘hey, why don’t you take it easy on yourself and just stick on the road for a bit’. So I did. The universe agreed with this theory too because Dutchman’s was closed anyway for feral pest control! So my decision was going to be made for me anyway! Having consciously made it though felt better than having it made for me. This gave me some positive momentum, which rolled into trying a new gel for the first time, which worked, which kept the momentum rolling further. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, just sunshine, but I was now confident I could make it near 2.5hrs.

During the 1-2hr mark I’m always doing sums of how long I have to go time-wise, distance-wise and actually what that means (if I run to that road then turn left I have that loop left). Breaking past 2hrs all those timing calcs go out the window. I’m past 2hrs and I’m not at home so whatever happens I’ll be near 2.5 hrs! I did feel guilty for not including lots of elevation on my run so I pushed for twenty minutes past the 2hr mark instead and actually really enjoyed it. It was like the first 2hrs was just a long warm-up for the last twenty minutes of fun running. Ten minutes of cooling down and then bam, 2.5hrs, 34km’s was done and all my anxiety about getting it done before 10am and getting the right training benefit out of it was gone. That’s the thing with these long runs, these are meant to be the most important runs of the week because they are the most similar to my events (marathons and trail races) so I stress out about making sure they go right. A better strategy in future would be to free myself of expectation (like Friday night’s run) and just enjoy them a bit more but I haven’t cracked the code on Sunday’s yet. It would help if I travelled to do new routes but then I risk selecting a route where I run too slow or it’s too technical to be of any real worth to marathon training. Anywho the long run is done for another week and this one was probably actually the best. Fastest av. pace, longest time running, longest distance, nice little pick-up and walking around at the pool afterwards I didn’t feel cooked either showing that my body is adapting once again to regular long runs.

It’s about time it started adapting because that’s 5 solid Sunday long runs in a row (when you include the TRSA race before Week 1 of this block). I’m now heading into Week 5 of the block and have about 3 more serious weeks before a two week taper starts. So I’m past the halfway mark of hard long runs to do. The focus this week won’t be changing that much. If I can, I might lengthen my mid-week recovery runs a bit more or tack on some more time to my Wednesday mid-week run. Really though, if I repeated what I did this week I’ll be happy. If I had to race in a week or so I’d be pretty confident of going well but if I could just get a few more 1.5-2.5hr runs under my belt I’ll be even more prepared.

Touching back on how this week felt like a grind at stages and how my long run feels like a grind for the first 2hrs there seems to be a symmetry in that when you take another step back and look at the 8-week block into 1-day of racing. The 8 weeks feels like it’s going by semi-slowly and then bam race day will be here and I’ll be cruising with a smile hopefully like I was in the last half an hour of my long run. It’s that sense of having the work behind me allowing me to relax into the final moment. Writing that though, then pausing on it, it would be better to always be relaxed from the start obviously. Hopefully one day I remember all the bits of advice I write in this blog for myself and won’t have to have the same cathartic learning experiences over and over.

That probably wraps things up there. Wasn’t sure how long this was going to go at the start but it went on a while in the end. At first I was like, ‘is a day to day breakdown really that interesting…ah screw it, thats whats coming out of the fingertips just let it roll’. But then, having flicked through past blogs I now realised that in a few years time when I’m re-reading this I’ll be like ‘wow, that’s what I use to train like when I taught at PASS for a year…‘. And now I’ll be re-reading this statement about re-reading this in the future so I am somewhat talking to my future self (hello Fraser) and possibly your future selves (hello and thanks for reading current you and future you).