Sub 1:30 Half Marathon in 2020 (Read 618 times)

Welcome JMac!!  Stick around, you'll get good advice here and plenty of motivation.  We can even help you find a downhill half-marathon to get that time down.

watson - that sucks.  Be cautious, my experience of hamstrings is that they are very niggly and adding another week of rest after you think it's recovered is a good option.  You're right about the 10km, I think that will be my strategy.  The only spanner in the works is it is a small race and last year the winner only did 42 so I might get suckered into racing.  The year before the winner did 33 though so who knows who will show up.

Corey welcome back.  Huge week!

Watson - Sucks about the injury. Is it muscular or tendon related?

Flavio - In your strength work, has it been focused mainly on major muscle groups or how detailed has your assessment and strength training been? Just asking since my shoulder issue I'm dealing with now is targeting very small and specific muscles, but that might be different when we are dealing with running muscles.

Trying a short run this afternoon with easy walking warmup and cooldown. Hope it works out great.

Corey, Marco, JMac - welcome back!!

And a big welcome to all our other new joiners too.

Watson - bummer on the injury.  I hope it won't keep you out for too long.

Steve - I'd say it's a perfect chance for a genuine HMP tempo.  One of my learnings from last year was to keep it focused on the goal races and don't get carried away with the tune-up races.  Like others have said, if you're feeling good with 2-3km to go, maybe try and kick it up a gear.

Brew - sure thing, just make sure you don’t put too many spices in the soup.

Jmac - I was reading jay-em-cee for the other poster so you’re good. I’m so glad you’re back, we have this quota for 3 sandbaggers and Mark and DPS had already returned. We're now good to go!

Marco - hi! You should invent some workouts that can be done in the airplane 

Steve - why don’t you run the race all out?

Corey - welcome back!

I think the hamstring is muscular.  I've never injured my hamstrings so this is new territory. Also trying to figure out what caused it, to prevent it happening again.

The days were:

Sat 0

Sun 13.5km incl. 4km tempo on rolling terrain

Mon 0, travel back from holiday.  Around 7 hours in car.

Tue 10km easy incl. Strides

Wed Intervals and Injury

I'm wondering if Monday's travel might have tightened things and might be part of the trigger?  There was nothing unusual about my intervals, they were being run a little on the slower side.

 

Flavio and zebano - embarrassingly enough, I was on an indoor track, and I did consult my watch.  I knew exactly what I was supposed to do.  To be fair, my first 200m was in 45 seconds (6:00 min/mile pace), so I slowed down a little bit, to 6:30.  Once I get in a rhythm, it's VERY difficult for me to change it.  I was happy to have slowed to 6:30 within the work-out, but still overall annoyed that I messed up the work-out with the long rest.  And to be completely honest, this is a long established problem for me.  To compound the problem, my coach and I are co-dependent.  He wasn't supposed to be at this work-out with me, and I have told him I am doing my own thing for now (following Daniels).  But he was there, and he timed me, and he always comes up with some rationale for why it's okay to go faster.  I try to explain to him what I'm trying to do, but it doesn't matter.  I just can't be with him when I'm trying to do threshold type training.  It doesn't work.  I'm not making excuses - I know I need to do better.  But just trying to explain how this can happen despite the best of intentions.  In the future, I don't plan to do any of these types of work-outs with him around if I can help it.  And again, I know the responsibility ultimately lies with me, but he's a very persuasive guy.  Ask Lauren; she knows.

 

YUP! I'm persuasive right back to him though, so we have a bit of a different coach-athlete relationship, due in part to my injury history and my preferred mileage level (higher than a lot of other club members). I can take advantage of the "you can run faster!" type support when I need it, but he tends to trust me when I say "I don't feel like xyz is a good idea for me today because [whatever reason], so I'm going to do abc instead". Fall marathon training was fun, at times he was just, like, standing back and watching me try all kinds of ridiculous shit, lol, but it worked out well for me!

Thought I was going to have a mental-beatdown battle of a tempo workout today but it went shockingly well! 3 mile warmup, then 2 miles in 6:38, 6:36 without too much fuss. Was expecting to fight my way to a couple of 6:59 miles just to say it was sub-7 and then pout about neglecting tempo work for the rest of the afternoon, so that was a pleasant surprise! Would have continued on just to see if it got harder for a third tempo mile if I weren't nursing the recent hip thing, but no sense in pushing it until I'm sure that I'm 100% again. 3 minute jog to check in with the hip, which was still good, and then 4x 30 sec hard/90 sec jog for a little turnover. Easy cooldown after.

The real test will be if my hip still feels good tomorrow for an easy run. I'll be confident that I've put the issue behind me if that is the case. And I'm feeling real good about that 6:52(ish) pace for 90 min half now!

Zebano - thanks for that Jenkins quote.  I should remind myself of this frequently!