Episode 424: Training Recap - Early 2025
This is part one of a series this year where I reflect on my training blocks for 2025. This episode covers the first three weeks after switching from an offseason/strength focus towards running taking the primary position.
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Timestamps:
Episode Transcript:
Alright, everyone, this is going to be another shorter episode solo by myself that I'm going to be doing more of this here. And this one's just going to be a little bit of a training recap or training journal that I'm going to be doing over the course of the year. And the way I'm going to break these down is I'm going to go through what I would consider kind of like a training block, which usually tends to be about three weeks for me. That can adjust a little bit based on how my body responds to the training. And I'm going to do a short episode after each of those and just kind of recap what I've been doing, why I'm doing it, and kind of where I'm at based on my targets. So for this year, I'm planning on heading back to the Pettit Center in June to do 100 miles, 12 hours on the track at the Olympic training facility there, and I'm kind of structuring stuff around that, so I'll do a fair bit of other racing between now and then as well, mostly probably local to Texas, that I'll sprinkle in as I'm looking to kind of just get some long runs and some data points as to where I'm at, kind of more in race day settings and things like that. But this kind of speaking goal will be at the center there in June. So for a little bit of background, I kind of kicked off the year basically coming off of a fairly extended off season for me, where I spent about six weeks to end, the year where I was doing either no running for a little bit of time, I think it was maybe a couple of weeks to just running, but doing it in a much less structured manner where it was kind of a secondary input, with the primary input being just a focus on strength work. So. Kicking off the year. I sort of flipped that around where I started making the running training input, the primary thing. And then I'm still doing strength work. As you'll see when I kind of report on this as a secondary kind of input, the support structure for the build, the running build here. So I'm really interested to kind of get things going on this, this, this training block because or this training cycle, I should say because for one, I think I came into it quite a bit stronger than I have in the past due to that kind of strength work focus for a while there. And I'm also pretty far behind where I would normally be with speed work, and some of that is just from not doing it. And two, I'd had a bit of a hamstring issue that I was dealing with at the end of last year's kind of running race that kind of kept me from doing speed work and really testing some of those paces. Even with the running I was doing. So the strength focus wasn't necessarily going to make me a whole lot faster for short and long intervals directly. But hopefully with that kind of structure in place or that foundation in place, as I kind of expose my body to those stimulus in the coming weeks, I'll see kind of some of the paces of those of speed workouts kind of start to come, come back to where they were in the past and get to myself, get myself in a spot where my my fitness is, where I want it to be for for racing. So just to kind of kick this one off, if you want kind of an overview of just my training philosophy in general, I've done a full series of episodes with kind of the Anchor Point episode being this one called Endurance Training. Simplified. I link to all of the episodes, a page that has all of those episodes on it. So if you want to deep dive into that, that link is in the show notes. Where things maybe will deviate a little bit from just kind of the structure of that will be the fact that I'm working or I'm reporting on myself as an individual here. So the one thing I really like to think about is once you kind of think of things through the lens of what are the important inputs for a well structured endurance training plan, and then what are going to be things that you need to do first, like what's the order of operations? Which for me personally I think are best built off of the race intensity. And then you do things that are going to be maybe weaknesses important, but less specific to race intensity. And then you just get more specific as you get closer to the race. So that race distance and intensity is going to be a really big guide as to kind of how you order those different things inside of it. For me, since I've been through, you know, a couple of decades essentially of training at this point, the way I look at it is get a gauge of where what I'll call like my global fitness is and think of it through, Okay, there are going to be workouts that are less specific and more specific that I want to generally be kind of mindful of, but I also want to make sure that I am really targeting the areas of the biggest weakness or the areas that could stand to develop more, versus just continuing to hammer things that are either already there or close to there, where there's like a smaller margin of improvement. So for me right now, that is speed work. That is definitely speed work. My pace at kind of the lower intensity stuff, what I would consider like the easy category, which could be kind of zone one and zone two type stuff. It's not where I want it to be, ultimately, but it's not far off my pace at things like short intervals and long intervals and my ability to sustain higher volumes of that. That's way further from where I want it to be, relatively speaking. So what that tells me is I want to get to a point where I can really kind of pull that lever consistently so I can see those adaptations take place. Now, with this particular training block, I had the added thing to consider, which is I was coming off of that hamstring issue. So for me to just hop on the track and start ripping it, probably not a good idea in terms of making sure I get that back to 100% or that that's at 100%. It stays there. So I don't have something that's going to just really disrupt consistency and ultimately kind of set, you know, timelines back and things like that. So despite that being kind of my biggest need, I did very little of it in this first three weeks and sort of just tried to renormalize just a fairly consistent amount of volume during those three weeks and use a couple sessions or actually a few sessions and then kind of test that hamstring just enough to know if it was kind of ready, so that with the next training block, I could jump in and just kind of do a little more structured, a little more detailed, a little more high volume versions of that. So I did have a few sessions here, one per week, essentially, where I would test some stuff. I would do some strides at the end of some of the easier runs. And bass, drums and things like that. But generally speaking, those were a very small percentage of my total work volume for these three weeks. So for those curious, my kind of targets are heading inward to try to get around maybe ten hours of running per week, which came out to week one being 83 miles. Week two. Oh, I'm sorry, week one was 80 miles. Week two was 83 miles. And week three was 88 miles. So it was kind of right in that, that distance that would kind of be that time frame. For those curious, it was like nine hours and 56 minutes, ten hours, 51 minutes and 11 hours, to be exact, with that. The way I kind of spread that out was week one. I just did all the solos. So seven runs, no doubles or anything like that. And that, I think, was just something I wanted to kind of do just because, for one, I probably didn't need doubles to get to the volume I was hitting for that week. And also while I was waiting for my body to respond, I did want to give myself that kind of full 24 hours, essentially between training sessions to kind of reset and and also give myself a little bit of space to kind of keep some strength work in there because I don't want to just totally dispatch strength work. I want to make sure that that's still kind of in the program, maybe more so as a maintenance now versus trying to really develop that. But I don't want to just lose it all together. So, you know, that week also included a couple lower body sessions and some upper body core sessions as well. The second week, I actually did try to tease a little more two days just to kind of see how my body was feeling running in the afternoon versus just running purely in the morning, which is when I would normally put some runs in. So I actually did ten runs that week where I did three in the afternoon. They were just really easy, really slow kind of just shakeout runs essentially, and had those in there to just kind of supplement the volume and just kind of get a feel for what I ultimately will want the structure to look like when I kind of get into full steam. Week three I kind of had the idea I had this same general approach going into the week as week two, where I'd have some some doubles, but what ended up happening is I ended up feeling pretty good in the Am runs, so I ended up just stretching a few of those out to the degree where I didn't really need to, or want to add any more additional volume to that week by doing doubles. So I ended up just with one of them. I had eight runs that week with one double in there, and the nice thing was, the double I did on week three was way higher quality in the sense that I was just or was moving faster, felt a little more like natural to kind of move up into maybe a little bit closer to kind of a zone two versus just zone one and kind of spin the legs a little faster than I would normally do on a on a second run. For the speed work sessions that I did in those three weeks, I started off pretty basic. I did a 20 by 30s for the first one where I just did 30s on 30s off. Intensity was kind of moderate. High is where I would put it. It wasn't like pushing to that point where I would feel like, all right, this is definitely a real solid VO2 max. Intensity is sitting just underneath that. Week two I just sort of extended the duration, but kept the same amount of volume at a ten by 60s same sort of target intensity. And then week three, I just replicated that workout with another ten by 60s. And both of those were 60s on 60s off for the sort of structure of that. And I did notice that I was getting faster over those three weeks in terms of how quick I was or how much distance, I guess, or what pace I was hitting during those. still quite a bit off from where I want to be, but I was seeing some improvements there. And, you know, most of that was probably just kind of getting my body used to going through those paces again versus any real adaptations taking place at this point in time. I may see some benefit from those sessions from a, from a speed work standpoint in the future, but there likely weren't something where like, oh, on week two, I ran this pace. Week three I was maybe moving ten 15 seconds per mile faster for those intervals. It's unlikely that I just actually got faster from a real physiological adaptation standpoint, in that time frame, but hopefully that will pay forward or at least serve as a bit of a primer to what I want to do in this next training block from a speed work standpoint. So in terms of what I ended up doing with the strength work, you know, I was pretty focused on the lower body making sure I was doing some kind of pulling exercises off the ground, which I've usually lean on, like the hex bar for. I'd like to do some version of a hamstring curl to kind of supplement that. I'll also do some kind of weighted hip thruster type stuff in the rotation, and then some weighted kickbacks, and then I'll mix in things like some box steps, lunges, Bulgarian split squats and things like that. And then the upper body and core is pretty basic cause a lot of planks are hanging. Leg raises, cable twists, upper bodies. Also pretty basic. I'll do some pulling stuff and then also do some sort of pushing type movement. So I'm looking to do some activities that kind of go in all those directions with that and sprinkling that stuff in a couple times a week has kind of been the framework for these first three weeks. So that's what I got for, this kind of brief little training recap. If you're interested in more details on the day to day, I have been publishing my training journal where I post all my training details and some brief recaps on all of them on my Substack. So if you want to subscribe to that, you'll get an email every Monday morning. Essentially. That kind of highlights that week. What I did, what I thought about it, where I maybe I'm going to make some adjustments and things like that. If you're curious, kind of like get inside my head a little bit in terms of how I'm thinking about these things day to day.