The Nature of Fatigue

Today's runs made me think about the fickle nature of fatigue and how the body reacts to stress in the short- and long-term. When I say fatigue, I mean the "breaking down" feeling you get after overloading your body for a few days that can persist for weeks. I guess the more technical term is overtraining. Every runner who has hit mileage or workouts a little too hard knows the feeling. Everything over the course of the day, even simple daily tasks, are harder and take more mental strength to get through. All the runner wants to do is lay around and not have to concentrate or undertake any sort of physical or mental task. Just walking up a flight of stairs or writing a new blog post can be a daunting prospect. I tend to get this more from just running mileage with no workouts. When I run workouts I ideally run my easy days easy enough that I feel pretty good on workout days, so the only time I feel run down is the day after a hard workout. When I started back up in this cycle I wasted no time getting to high mileage, so I felt terrible for about 2 weeks and then all of a sudden I came out of it and started feeling better, mentally and physically. I don't think medical science has yet determined the physiological causes of this kind of long-term fatigue, so it is an interesting thing to ponder.

Also interesting is the way the body handles the exact same stresses at different times. For instance, today I had one of the better training days of my life. I ran 15 miles at a good pace in the morning, then tonight came back and ran 5 more at a pace faster than maybe every other secondary run I've ever done. This capped off a 115 mile week, the highest I've done since at least the summer, and my first week of workouts. Yesterday I ran very easily but accumulated a lot of miles, and today I fully expected to feel at least a little bit fatigued from the last 1-3 weeks of work. But I felt great! It truly is a mystery why I felt so good today, after an accumulation of quite a bit of work for me, and bad some other days with much less crap in my legs. I am sure the easy day yesterday made some difference but I felt so much better today than yesterday that I can't believe it's attributable to only one factor. I can only hope that this kind of feeling continues, but given how little I know about the nature of my body's fatigue I'm sure that I'll wake up one morning, after being in a routine, and feel completely different than I did the day before. I'll probably feel worse, but that's part of what training is for - the mentally callousing aspect of training and being able to get through the bad patches as well as revel in the good patches, like today.

First workout back

After about 2 weeks I'm finally feeling good back at normal mileage. The last 2 weeks have felt like a long time, since I was feeling pretty bad most of those days and was basically waiting to get over it. 2 days ago (Sunday) I ran my first long run in a while and we cut the pace down well over the last few miles. I felt great and even felt good the next day, which was a fairly hilly run. Today I ran my first real workout of the new cycle with my roommate/training partner, Dan Feeney (danfeeney.blogspot.com). We ran a good session of hills at the Newark Reservoir, up a paved 0.35 mile hill. I was a little worried about this because my left plantar fascia has been giving me some trouble, along with my right achilles since I sprained that ankle a few weeks ago. I ended up feeling pretty good and focused on good form, driving off the back foot and not slouching, trying to look more like Chapa instead of Salazar:

I expect to be decently sore tomorrow, since I worked muscles hard that I haven't touched for a while. Since my legs have been feeling good lately I hope to continue this, and maybe do another workout like a long tempo run on Friday. As far as mileage, I'm currently in the low 100s so with quality workouts I think I'll be fine. I don't want to start working out too hard yet; low intensity but high volume. I plan on training for the half marathon for probably the next month. Regarding plans for indoor, if I think I'm in good shape in February then I might attempt a fast 5k but I won't attempt to peak for anything until April. Other than that, low-key races and maybe use a 10-miler in January as a good workout with Feeney.

Back in to hard training

This week was my first week back into serious training. After Rothman, I took about a week off, which was convenient as I got to relax around Thanksgiving and the time off from school. Once I got back to school I jumped in with both feet and started running a lot again. I purposefully didn't slowly ease into running again, because I have never had problems with jumping back in and I would rather get the awful tired feeling of running a lot out of the way sooner rather than later. After about 3 days of consistently bigger miles I was pretty much flat on my back, but today (6 days after I started) I actually felt good on the run. Hopefully I am coming out of the "valley of fatigue" because I want to be able to do well on finals next week!

Once I get acclimated to regular out of season mileage again, hopefully in a week or two, I want to get to doing serious strength work. By that I mean long intervals and tempo runs, similar to what I did this past summer to prepare for Philly RnR Half. Those workouts really made me feel strong and I think they gave me a great foundation on which to do more 5k or 10k specific work later in the winter and spring. In past cycles I have just tried to run a lot of miles, sometimes at the expense of recovery and thus compromising some workouts. This time around I think I'll be able to get fitter by taking my easy days easier, letting me get more out of the hard days. One thing I'll prioritize this year is getting faster; if I want to run 14:10 for 5k I had better be comfortable running 68s for longer repeats. That will probably take a lot of practice to acclimate my body to that.