Fraser Darcy

Another week and another set of 200km’s. The high mileage, Lydiard inspired training program continues without any hitches. It beggars belief that this time a little over a month ago I was barely running every day a week in the lead up to the Melbourne 10km. Here I am running twice a day, pain free and feeling strong! Skeptics among the readership of fraserdarcy.com might argue, ‘ah yes, well, you can say you’re running well and we can see you’re actually running these kilometres but what about that whole labral tear, intralabral cyst, lack of strength in your leg situation hmmmm, what about all that?!’

Well, what I say to that is read ’em and weep. *Shows the results below*.

Yes on Monday, after my normal 10 miles at Belair (counting in miles means I have to count less for the week and also keeps it fresh) that felt alright I visited Emma, the queen of all physio’s in the Darcy family. We did the usual chit chat and then got on to the tests that we had done several weeks before.

The results show I went from having a 20-30% strength difference between my legs to having less than 2% across most tests! And I’ve improved my strength marginally in all areas as well. So stick that up your science theories of having to run 100km’s a week whilst managing an injury.

Ok, so I have a strong leg now, what did I use it for this week? Well, another gym session on Monday after my strength testing plus another easy 5 miles at night and some strides and fancy drills. I’ve decided that I haven’t been prioritising strides and plyometric drills anywhere near enough in my running and once I do, I will become better. This is a very classic Fraser strategy. Reads something on internet once, is excited about it, does it once, reads about it again, looks back over training history and realises he hasn’t been doing it all that right, does it more and more and becomes better. I will cut myself some slack though and lean on that old proverb about ‘a teacher will appear when one is in need of one’, meaning, when I am ready for the next information about becoming a better runner, I will not skim read over it and instead will absorb the advice and implement it. You can’t implement everything at once but hopefully by the end of my running career I will have had the opportunity to try every trick in the book to be better.

These strides and drills must already be working because on Tuesday morning I went out with the 6:30am crew for a session of 6 minute tempo, 2 minute rest, 10*300 (with 100 jog) and another 6 minute tempo. The tempo felt fine with the group, that was easy. The 300’s though were something new to me having never run them on the track before. All I hoped to be able to do was average around 52 sec per effort which is on track for 14:35 pace in a 5km. On the first rep I followed Jacob around for 47s, 5 sec quicker than what I wanted. Oh boy. Into the jog recovery part I thought we were going to go real slow, or perhaps my subconscious had tricked my conscious into coming to that scenario so I was then shocked when Jacob and the others kept moving pretty quickly. Ah boy, I’ve cooked this a bit here. I reset on the next rep and hit 48sec again, feeling pretty good. My game plan was then to keep my own rhythm going, jog real slow, getting passed by other runners I would beat by several minutes in a 5k time trial, and then chase them all down in some very fast 300’s. Speed has never been my forte, running sub 3:00/km used to be very difficult and something I commented on frequently in the early days of fraserdarcy.com. But here I was, averaging 2:30-2:45/km across all 10 reps. The tricky thing was, having nothing to compare it to I wasn’t sure if this meant I had the shape to be able to run a fast 5km or not. I would find out later in the week…

For now, though, on Tuesday, I had a bike ride to do with Izzi and another easy afternoon run which I bumped out to just over 6 miles.

Following Tuesday’s fast session I pulled up a bit cooked on Wednesday. This is the risk you play when running fast and not following a true aerobic base building program. I got into a run with Jacob again and after I dropped him off at his house 1hr 10min in my stomach went to crap. This happens to me from time to time and today was one of those times. I still gave a bit of a progression run a go but there were multiple pit stops I had to make in the bushes to try and relive the bloating pressure in my stomach. Oh well, at least I still made 15 miles of running… I followed the day off with some gym work and another afternoon run where my stomach was a bit better but still not amazing.

On Thursday I had a bit of a dilemma of what to do. I still felt a bit cooked and iffy with my stomach but kind of wanted to do a mini session before Saturday. Wait, what’s on Saturday? A 5km race! What?! A 5km race! Yeah I can read you bloody idiot. Oh right, well there was this 5km race on Saturday night and I thought ‘if I can get an indicator of where I’m at over 5k, I’ll be able to judge what I should aim for in the Victor 10k a bit better. Plus, it’s fun to race especially when there was a good field of fellas lining up‘. So, given I did a session on Tuesday and an aborted progression run on Wednesday it was a 50/50 call on whether I do a light session on Thursday or just try and recover a bit. I looked towards the heavens for some inspiration from the lord. The heavens being instagram and the lord being a fast marathon runner who set their own 5k PB last week after a week of 130 miles. This runner in particular did an easy run on Thursday and Friday before their race on Saturday so of course that’s what I planned to do! Remember, read something on the internet etc.

My Thursday run was with Connor, another training partner who hasn’t got a mention in a while, and Georgia even joined in for a bit for her first run with me in a few months. The afternoon run was another good 6 miles and I was tracking along nicely.

On Friday, the day that had been involving my second session of the week in between two bike rides was a bit different for once. I still did my first bike ride and then went for a run but this time kept it easy. I also didn’t have a second bike ride to do either so was able to rest a lot for the rest of Friday. Most people would’ve rested again on Friday afternoon but I still got out and enjoyed another good afternoon run, feeling strong and light on my feet without having a second session for the week. I put in fifteen minutes worth of work on some drills and strides and felt pretty fast again.

Saturday rolled around because that’s the day after Friday in the week and on Saturdays I go running in Belair with some mates to help keep me from running too fast. We ran my usual pre-race shakeout loop that I’ve done before a couple of marathons/big road races and I felt good. By ‘feeling good’, which is a very lazy description I mean feeling; light on my feet, excited to race, confident I have the will to exhaust myself and without any preconceived ideas of what my performance will mean. That’s feeling good. Feeling bad is the opposite and can be characterised as; heavy legged, unsure of what my aims are, lacking confidence, risk of further injury, hoping to run a certain time to validate my ego/self-worth. It is still possible to run well when feeling bad but it is rare. Hence, feeling good is better than feeling bad but it itself is also not a sure fire predictor of having a good race.

Warming up at the track later that day I still felt mentally good but physically I felt a bit average in my stomach and legs. Oh well, I was here now and I trusted my body would get going a bit once the warm up was done. I was right and by the end of my warm-up strides I was relaxed and ready to go. Last time I raced 5km on the track I had a perfectly paced race from the gun to set a new 5k PB of 14:29. This race I was just happy to run with the pack and see what happened. Everyone else was kind of in the same boat of not knowing where they were over the distance.

We started out a very nice pace for me, sitting on 14:50-14:55 pace for the first kilometre. I was still relaxed and sitting in a pack of about 10 runners at this stage with only two runners in front of us, Jacob and another guy. We kept going for a few more laps at this somewhat leisurely pace and I started to feel even better and more confident. I’m five/six deep here and feeling good but let’s just get to 3k and see what happens.

Somewhere around the 3km mark the pack started to seperate and I timed my voyage to the front three perfectly, being on the right side of the split. After a lap like that the group did rejoin but it wasn’t as big as before. The race was really heating up now the adrenaline was building. We had started to drop some 69/70 second laps putting us back on track for 14:40 something. I was still feeling good.

With 1 mile to go, or 4 laps, I thought I should turn the screws a bit here and jumped on the front. I pushed the pace a little bit and had hoped to stay there for maybe two or three laps but another training partner Will got in front of me and picked it up again with 1200m/3 laps to go. He’s in a similar boat to me with building back into fitness but has a higher ceiling so I was more than happy to sit on him for the last 3 laps and hold on. We also had for company two other younger guys from two different squads making the final kilometre an interesting race. PLUS, the guy who had challenged Jacob up ahead in the race was slowing down and coming back to our little group. There was also of course several other runners only 5 seconds or so back. A lot was going on and it was bloody exciting and fun to be in the middle of it.

With 600m to go Will and one of the other guys started going for it and I was hanging on the back keeping an eye out for the other guy in our pack. With 400m to go I started going for it and got a little gap which I managed to hold. I couldn’t make any distance on Will in front of me but I did catch the other runner who had gone with Jacob and eventually finished 4th in 14:36. Within a few moments of finishing I had recovered a lot already, giving me confidence that maybe I’ve just run the easiest hard 5km of my life and possibly had more in the tank had the pace been faster earlier. The race wasn’t quite set up for something like that so to finish 3rd amongst my pack was pretty good. It also means the purpose of doing this race to see where I’m at in preparation to Victor went well too. I can possibly aim for a 10km PB if the conditions are right and I’m once again feeling good. There’s a lot that can go wrong though within seven days!

It was a great race in the end from a lot of my mates too so the cool down jog was pretty fun. So if you haven’t got the picture, I’m glad I did this 5km race because I thoroughly enjoyed it!

I carried that enjoyment over to the Sunday long run the next day and we had a very large group of runners joining in with us this morning in support of someone within the group passing away during the week. Some of these people had raced the night before, some were just other ‘elite’ runners. All it meant was the usual group of 5-10 guys rolling 4:10/km on the long run was about 20-25 people deep. Very fun.

It also meant we were able to get the pace of the long run rolling again and by the 20km mark we were hitting a nice steady pace of 3:40/km pace. I continued on for another forty minutes after most people stopped and continued progressing the pace to hit some high 3:20/km’s which was fun again (geez I’ve had a lot of fun this week). I ended up with 32km’s in 2hrs 7minutes. A great long run.

Following this great long run I’ll get out for an afternoon run to tip over 200km’s for the week and also because I just feel fresh and can handle it. Next week will be relatively similar to the past three weeks to start with until I taper off a bit in the second half to be ready for Victor 10k. It will also give me a good opportunity to have a mini reset within this block of aiming for 200k’s a week. It won’t be much of a reset though really, instead of running 2hrs + for a long run on Sunday I’ll just be trying to run 10km’s flat out. So it may be just as intense, but not as voluminous. Apart from that, there’s not much going on (which is probably the reason I’ve been managing 200km’s well). I’ll write some programs this week, I’ll do some relaxing and I’ll just try to keep having fun and enjoying my training. Thanks for reading.