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Connective Tissue

"Connective tissue is what gets all runners in the end."

Bruce Denton, Once a Runner


 It may not be the end, but connective tissue is what has laid me up for the past month. After the disaster of the LA Trials, I just wanted to race again. I did; four races in five weeks: two 5ks, one 10k, and then a 10 miler. All of it was leading up the Flying Pig Marathon, redemption day.

That all unraveled at the end of March with a tight Achilles that just got worse the more I ran on it. For most of April, I was down from running 95 miles a week to running just three days per week: one normal run, one workout, and one long run. I was trying to do just enough to get to marathon day okay.

But if there's one thing I learned for good (which I knew already, but chose to ignore), it's that you can't fake a marathon.

You're not just racing against yourself and your competitors; you're also racing against the distance. On that day, the marathon won.

Flying Pig: 2
Tommy: 0

After that, I took a month completely off from running. Mostly to get healthy, but also to rest my damaged psyche.

Achilles tendonosis is a nasty little injury. It's not so bad that it's fully debilitating, but it's just enough to be nagging. And the crazy thing is, to treat it you actually have to make it worse before you can make it better. Treatments like Graston technique, foam rolling, and eccentric heel drops are all aimed at aggravating the injury site so that it does get inflamed.

When it comes to injury healing, inflammation is a good thing. It gets a bad rap and icing/ice baths are common recovery tools to reduce inflammation, but I think that's misguided. It's your body's way of bringing fresh blood flow to a damaged area -- that's the healing process. But because the Achilles already receives so little blood flow, I basically have to induce inflammation. Fun stuff.

If nothing else, I've learned about my body and how I react to training stimuli. This is the third time I've had a bout of Achilles tendonosis (of varying levels of severity), and every time has come under the same circumstances: train to peak for a goal race, it doesn't go as planned, try to extend fitness to another race just little bit beyond, BOOM - injured. It's a classic overuse thing.

Chasing the Trials the past few years has led me away from traditional six-month periodization. Instead, I had always been trying to be six weeks from PR shape. Race a half marathon...didn't get the standard? There's another one coming up, go for it there. Didn't get the standard? There's another one coming up, go for it there. And so on.

 Now I know -- for sure, without a doubt -- what my body responds to; or, rather, what it doesn't respond to. I'm excited to get back to the fundamentals: training in about six-month cycles to a twice-yearly goal race peak -- what nearly every successful coach since Lydiard has proposed.
___________________________________________________________________________

May 23 - 29

Monday - Friday: No run
Saturday: Run! 4 miles in 30 minutes
Sunday: 5 miles in 40 minutes
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