Fraser Darcy

Not a good headline to start with but don’t worry, I’m not actually in the trenches in a war. It just feels a bit like the marathon training equivalent of that. Coming off a 218km week where I had hamstring tightness every day it’s probably to be expected. I took a bit longer to get moving on Monday morning to start this week off as a result. Limbering out to my car at 8:30am I then realised I had to fill it up with diesel too on my way to Belair. Nah, screw that, I’ll just run from home to Belair instead, save some time that I’ve already wasted. It turned out to be a good idea. I managed 16km’s relatively well, did all my other normal Monday jobs including some light gym and then went for an easy 8km in the afternoon. Having neglected strides the last couple of weeks I felt both motivated and strong enough in my hamstring to give them a go this week. The first four were good. The fifth one wasn’t. Oooohh no, that’s a bit tight. Yep, I tweaked my hamstring a little like some B grade footballer who hasn’t warmed up properly.

It didn’t feel too bad at night, nor in the following morning at the RAO session. The session this week was 8*1k which we usually do off a 4.5min cycle meaning I get almost 100 seconds of recovery. A good session if I’m focused on 5k-half marathon for me but with a marathon coming up and having banked plenty of speed work lately I felt I needed to change the session slightly to make the ‘recovery’ more of a harder jog. The plan was to still do 8 reps then, but run the reps closer to 3:00/km pace and the jogs around 3:50-4:00/km pace so I might average out my ‘k splits’ at 3:15-3:20/km. Which is kind of what happened. The bad thing was though I felt my hamstring straight away on the first rep and it got tighter and tighter as the session went on. I tried shortening my stride and turning my legs over faster to get going a bit quicker but it wasn’t working. This wasn’t very good at all. One, because it hurt, and two, would this mean I need to take time off?

I finished off the session and the warm down feeling a tiny bit better but was still a bit down about my leg. I did some work at The RunHouse, went home, did some more work, had lunch and then had the brainwave that instead of doing nothing about my hamstring I may as well put some ice on it and see how it responds to that. Turns out RICE is actually pretty good as a recovery tool. I spent the afternoon prioritising rest, ice, compression and elevation and felt confident enough to give the hamstring another go in my arvo run. 10km’s later and it was still sore, but I could run.

I was a bit down about how sore it was though. Sometimes all I want to do in training/running is just fang it and run fast and with a sore hamstring holding me back it’s like I’m in running prison. I applied some more ice at night, gave it some rest and hoped things would be better on Wednesday.

They were a little bit. I was able to offload my concern about my hamstring a bit to my Wednesday morning running partners Jess and Jacob who positively informed me that because the hamstring is such a big muscle group you can sort of get away with a little strain/tweak/niggle in there to some extent as long as you don’t do any intensity. I took that information like gold. I’ll be fine as long as I don’t do anything stupid (which isn’t a sure thing I guess, I’ve done many stupid things). I did some gym later that morning, trying to focus on keeping everything else activated and then was happy enough to get an afternoon jog in again. So far I hadn’t missed any km’s in training, just maybe a second or two in the pace of my 1k reps on Tuesday.

The theme of slow improvement continued into Thursday as I put together two more easy runs. One in the morning along the Sturt River, towards Bowker, around Bowker and back. And one in the afternoon back in Belair, mimicking my Tuesday arvo run. The difference in this Thursday arvo run to Tuesday morning’s run was a good measure. The hamstring was improving. What else was improving was the Bombers won their first match of the season too on Thursday night. A painful watch it was still nice to get a win and not lose all hope in them not making finals.

Moving onto Friday and the biggest most specific session of my marathon build to date, I was on edge a bit. I had to collect the first aid kit and signs from The RunHouse to put out for the group so meant I had to start my warm up from a different spot. I was also being given the opportunity to wear some free shoes and kit from Saucony via RunDNA. All I had to do was wear the stuff and be ok with having my picture taken. Easy enough but with only one day of warning I was a bit on edge about it. What if the gear was no good? Would I be letting them down by having to say no? Would new stuff be compromising or improving my training? Further adding to my ‘on edge’-ness I had to take a No.2 in the parklands which at 6:15am is not an easy thing to do.

But, despite all these minor inconveniences I still made it to the start line of the session ready to go and confident. All I had to do once the session started was do what I’m good at and run. The group was doing a normal tempo run and I hoped to run 10km’s with them, have a little break, take a gel and some fluid on board, do another 7km’s at tempo/marathon pace, another break, another block of work and then possibly one more block of work depending on how the morning was going. All I wanted to be by the end was cooked and do at least 20km’s at marathon pace. If I started to slow down beyond 3:20/km then I was going to jog and try again. My training on this Friday was all about specific marathon pace so it was important that I didn’t train at 3:25/km in this session.

Anyway, off we went, me and a few others running at 3:20/km or just quicker for the first couple of km’s. It was a big turnout from the group, including a special guest appearance from friend of the blog James ‘Galloping’ Galpin (my nickname for him, not his, I think), but the front end of the group was a bit thinner than normal. Not to worry, I was able to do most of the session with Fin and then we caught up to Will by the end of it. They both dropped off around 8km’s in and I continued on for one more lap to run just under 10km’s. I felt good at this point, took on a gel, some drink, put some music on and kept going.

The second block felt good as well for the first couple of laps. It definitely felt harder on the last lap and I was grateful for the rest though after 7km’s. Again, I took another gel, had some fluid and then got back out there. This time, I was unsure if I was going to do 3km’s, 4km’s or 5km’s. Turned out 4km’s was all I could manage. The last lap of this third block felt pretty hard and I was having to work to keep on pace. This is the point in training that I really enjoy though because when you’re working hard, you’re putting your body through a lot of stress that hopefully it will adapt to after the session has finished. That stress was weighing on my stomach and by the end of the 4km block I felt it was pretty cooked. That was 21km’s of work at marathon pace too. I ummed and ahhed about adding on one more 3km effort but could just feel that I was too cooked. Sometimes training is all ‘I’ll do 60 minutes and just stop there because that’s what I saw on a training program’. Other times it’s ‘I’ll do as much as I can manage today before I’m cooked…oh, that turned out to be 60 minutes, cool’. There’s a difference in the two and I think that is what gets lost in looking at old training logs from other runners. Maybe they only did 2hrs on that long run because they were really tired? Maybe that wanted to do more and just couldn’t?

I didn’t want to do any more on this Friday session though. Even the warm down was a struggle with my stomach and energy levels. It was also a cumulative factor of the other inconveniences weighing on me too I think. I was relieved to finish and stretch at my car (I know I was really cooked after this run when I almost cramped during my stretching routine) and started to upload my run data to my phone when the last inconvenience of my morning hit me. The little f****** wouldn’t upload. F*** technology. Why won’t you just work! Upload! Connect bluetooth!! I turned you off/on again, work goddamit!!!

50 minutes and multiple resets later and it finally did work. All my stress was gone. Ahhh the serenity. I wrote some programs and did some other RAO work to celebrate. Later in the afternoon I had to work pretty hard to motivate myself into doing an arvo run. My ankle had felt a bit sorer in the morning than normal but I assumed it’d be alright, I mean I managed to not miss a run because of my hamstring, surely a sore ankle won’t stop me?

Well, actually it did. That and the combination of being tired and knowing an arvo off would be a good thing for my hamstring and that doing a slow thirty minute jog wasn’t probably going to help my fitness at all as opposed to letting my body recover from what was a hard morning run. So I took the afternoon off and my world didn’t cave in. I did a little gym session instead and worked on making sure everything else was working properly and it was just my left hamstring and left ankle to be concerned about. The ankle has probably copped it from me changing my gait to accomodate a sore hamstring. A sceptic would say the new shoes were probably a factor too and that the sharp left hand turn and other two left hand turns on the tempo run loop we were using on Friday were also factors. I think they were factors yes, but truthfully, my ankle was sore on Sunday and on Wednesday. Both of those runs were long and this Friday run was long too. So I think it’s mostly the hamstring/ankle/gait issue I have to sort out.

Which, after more RICE’ing on Friday night, I was relieved to feel that I was sorting out my issues a bit more on Saturday morning’s RAO trail session. It was nice to be out with the group in Cleland again, revisiting the area after my successful race there two weekends ago. I could feel some discomfort in my ankle, hardly any in my hamstring, but not enough to stop me from running the easy 12km’s I had planned.

Following Saturday’s morning run I did some other stuff, relaxed and then went out for a longer arvo jog. These longer arvo jogs are important in my mind for marathon training because it trains me to use fat as fuel more so than carbohydrates given I’m a bit more depleted in the afternoon than I am first thing in the morning. I was happy to run 12km’s on this arvo run and felt really good actually. Yeah the ankle was sore, but generally body and energy wise, I felt great!

I carried that momentum into Sunday’s long run and was relaxed through the first thirty minutes knowing I was in good form. I didn’t really have a plan for the run besides wanting to tick off 2.5hrs at a good pace. I could feel my ankle on paths where the camber was rolling from left to right but not from right to left. That tells me it’s just a tendon issue in my ankle and I need to give it some rest or better support at some stage to shake it off. But, being out there in the moment on Sunday morning I was soaking up the run. I had gone off the front of the group with Mark for the second week in a row and we were having a great chat. We slowly wound up the pace until Mark disappeared off home around the 21km mark. I made it back to The RunHouse, grabbed my bottle and another gel (third for the morning) and then went over to a group running on the same loop we had used on Friday morning.

Instead of aggravating my ankle further by running in the same direction around the loop I did on Friday I used all of my brain cells to make the smart decision and run in the REVERSE WAY so that my right ankle was the ‘inside’ ankle on each turn. That meant I couldn’t feel my ankle too much and was able to focus on the effort. Which, without necessarily pushing it, was increasing. I was pleased with that and capitalised on it to run a solid section from 26-37km’s including 5km’s at marathon pace or faster. I probably could’ve kept going with this little pick up but was happy to grab my bottle, call it there at 2hrs 20min and jog back to The RunHouse.

On my jog back I knew I was within touching distance of ticking off a marathon in this run which is something I had hoped to do in this block but again, wasn’t going to push it. If it happened, it happened. And today, it was happening. I was ‘jogging’ at 3:40/km pace as I ticked off kilometre 38, 39 and 40 and felt good. Even by the time I went past 42.2km, a marathon, woohoo, I was still feeling good and almost got greedy wanting to do more. But, I made what I think is another smart decision and called it there at 2hrs 40 minutes for the long run. An extension of 20 minutes from last week and a good way to end a 212km week.

That’s now two 210+ plus kilometre weeks in a row. Yes, the body was a bit sorer this week but other than that, my fitness has been great as shown by my ability to run at marathon pace at the end of a long run. The next week that I have ‘planned’ focuses on hopefully racing the Clare Half Marathon on Sunday, some faster work on Tuesday and a shorter mid week long run on Wednesday. Look forward to sharing with you what actually happens next week. Thanks for reading!