Competitive Jerks Racing and Training - 2023 (Read 575 times)

 RP - how did it go??

TL;DR....

It went great until it didn't. We missed a BQ as well as a PR, grabbed a backpack and a jacket (higher quality than the one you received) and went home.

What do you have to lose in relation to your foot? How about all the speed you have had for years. Go run, see what happens and risk being one of those guys which struggles to break 3:15 in the marathon. The mental depression of accepting you'll never achieve the things you took for granted and possible walking with a limp/cane because it was more important to go run than wait until things didn't hurt. I mean, you area kind of a spreadsheet reviewer guy who solves his Qwordle daily so I'm totally going to understand you've in-depth knowledge of Anatomy and Physiology based on something you read on the internet from your less than imaginary friends. :SmilingFlipoffEmoji:

EDIT:

I believe our silent friend dpschumacher scored himself a sub-2:42. He was on that Moose Mug train.

TDP on race day was in the 138 scores. This is actually typical for CIM.

In 2019 when I broke 3 it was 147. LMFAO!!!!

https://findmymarathon.com/weather-detail.php?zname=California%20International%20Marathon&year=

I don't plan to post much in this thread, but I have to ask you JMac what exactly is hurting in your foot/heel area? Then I'll give you my (un)educated opinion based on my experiences.

Keen is he really doping or is his increase in performance just too amazing to be believable? I think even John Cena has been accused of using steroids to enhance his performance.

Jmac - Apologies for asking the dumb questions, but:
a) Have you tried working with a different PT yet ? Maybe try 3 or 4 specialists and try to compile their theories into one central root cause analysis ? I have done that before and it helped.
My stupid theory is that you have an underlying cause that triggers this issue. It could be nerve damage. The issue might even be on your spine, there's a lot of road in between your brain and the foot fascia nerves.
b) Have you tried running with different shoes ?

Cal - Amazing performance once again! All that hard work you put in over the years is still there paying dividends.
The reason I was slowing down was because the pace was too hard for me, and even as I was slowing down it kept becoming hard again.
I was definitely not 100%, I'll list some signs below of that.

Mental strength can be a limiter in that it can lead you to have a poorer performance than you could have done otherwise.

It can't make you heal from sickness or run faster than you trained though.

DW - No, it didn't have any extra impact on me at least. I've trained almost exclusively on warmer weather.
Sorry to hear the new meds didn't work after all.

WCRunner - Ugh, sorry to hear about that, here's my wishes your body fights it well.

Mark - Thanks for the race report, looking from afar, it seems you had a period of less than ideal fitness for maybe a couple of years but now seem to be trending faster and faster of late ?

JBlack - Welcome aboard! I hope you stick around and we all get to know you better.

Dave - You are absolutely right. Marathons are extremely hard. It's easy to get distracted and see other people have an apparently easier time and then think my way should be that easy as well.
As with everything in life, nothing is granted, and everything takes 10_000 times more effort than you expect.

Me -

I do not think I was 100% for this race. I'm not sure exactly what it is that I have.

I know that I have full blown cold symptoms including sore throat, cough, phlegm, tiredness, headaches, etc.

I remember when I was close to KM 34 when I was approaching an aid station and I was breathing super hard, think end of a 5K breathing hard, and I started to feel some light dizziness.
So I decided to walk through the aid station.
Then I grabbed a bottle of water and took a sip. Then I had a bout of cough for about 20 seconds, at the end of that one of my coughs launched a big ball of phlegm into my right hand.
I then had to wash my hand as the phlegm was not washing out easily.

I also know that in the days leading to the race I had unusual muscle soreness and chest tightness.

I think my training block was going okay-ish until that week where I hit the 76 miles.

A lot went downhill after that.

I got a lot of weird muscle soreness the week after, then had a weird left pectoralis minor injury on the week after that.

My performance on the workouts suddenly got considerably worse.

I remember I went to my cousin's birthday party around November 24th and I had to speak only a bare minimum because I had a very sore throat. I still had a store throat through Tuesday on race week.

I also read about exercise induced bronchoconstriction on Let's run, though I don't have the worst symptoms like wheezing or a hard time breathing, I do have some. It's probably not that, but it's something that takes longer than a cold to heal and causes chest tightness, cough and general cold symptoms, which is what I have ever since that fateful 76 mile week.

I had chest tightness from KM 5 in the race as well.

Most of these symptoms I had ignored cause I could carry on with my life and attributed them to taper madness.

For the record, it could all also be performance-related anxiety. But I think that's a lower probability because:

a) I don't know of anxiety causing cold symptoms

b) I was doing fine with all my workouts until that big week, and then suddenly started struggling with all my workouts from then on.

So yeah, I have something which I don't know what it is, it's impacting my running, and I don't have the slightest clue what caused it.

It's likely a combination of things.

Please notice this as well: When I talk about MP it's not the same MP you guys are talking about.

My MP is 6:50 per mile/4:14 per km, my HMP from my last HM race was 6:13 per mile/3:45 per KM.

My MP is slower, if I were in 1h22 fitness I should most certainly not struggle to run 2x 6miles at MySlowerMP.

I hope to collect more data over the next weeks so I can try to figure this out. I'm not even sure which doctor I could go to for this.

A regular pneumo will hear my breathing and tell me my lungs are fine, just go home.

One last thing, I think I did a lot of things right in this training period. I'm happy about that. I think I have accumulated some excellent levels of fitness, which I should be able to use at some point in the near future.

For now, the priority is getting healthy again.

Ok, I'll continue my monologue:

One possible simple answer is allergies + gastric reflux combination.

Reflux causes near constant damage to the throat which combined with the usual allergic reactions (think rhinitis) it can lead to most of the symptoms.

Something else then would account for the unusual muscle soreness I have sometimes.

I guess I need to visit an allergist. I did do a battery of (very expensive) blood exams on common allergy markers but it came back negative for all.

That could explain it, but have you retested for COVID or RSV or even the flu.

 

That could explain it, but have you retested for COVID or RSV or even the flu.

I haven't, but I don't think it would change much in terms of troubleshooting this.

It seems to me that the combination of reflux + allergies + especially this time of the year, the cold and humid weather here in Porto, just guarantees that I'll be at least half sick for most of the time from mid November until early January.

JBlack - One step at a time. We're all turtles if compared to the elites, or even the faster people in this thread.

When Marky Mark is late for the bus and runs to the bus stop he's running faster than our mile pace 😁

I wanted to comment on your long term objectives. It's cool to have something long term to aim for, but I'd recommend you have intermediate SMART goals.

If you recently ran a 5K in 29 minutes and change, maybe target a sub 28 next ? That way you can track your progress along the way.

Trying for something too far out of your reach can be very frustrating and it might derail your consistency.

Also, there's absolutely no way of knowing how fast you're gonna reach these long term objectives. Maybe you have outstanding genes and you're gonna reach them in 3 months, maybe you're never gonna reach them.

 

If you recently ran a 5K in 29 minutes and change, maybe target a sub 28 next ? That way you can track your progress along the way.

 

Yea, I'm just basing my next 5k time off of the running app that I am currently using. Not sure if you have ever used Runna or not but it gives you an estimated 5k time based off your current 5k time and the running plan that it creates for you. Maybe I will hit that goal in 8 weeks when I do a 5k time trial, maybe I won't. I'll be ok either way because I know that it will certainly be faster than where I am at today.