When Life Gets in the Way: Sick, Sleepless & Behind on Training

I ran a half marathon this spring in 2 hours and 21 minutes, so I knew I had a lot of work to do to accomplish my goal.

After that half marathon, I started a base building phase because I realized that I never really built an aerobic base.

This was that nine weeks of mostly zone two training that I talked about in my last episode, where I was doing one long run a week, one fast run per week, and then every other day I was running easy zone two miles for basically as much time as I could fit into my schedule.

By sticking to that template and running seven days almost every week, for instance, I ran like 29 out of 30 days, And I got up to 30 miles per week.

But then I started noticing some knee pain.

It felt like the miles were piling up and my body just didn't have the foundation to handle all of them.

I could feel my old knee injury getting louder and louder.

And I also started to feel like I was developing some Achilles tendon issues.

So I decided to stop that training block and shift gears.

I think that the underlying issue was that my muscular and tendon foundation just wasn't strong enough to handle all the load that I was putting on it.

So I made a five-week strength-focused training block to address both of those issues and also to give my body some time to recover while still being productive.

I decided to take some of my very limited training time to do this because I felt like I really needed that foundation to hold up to all of the stuff that I was going to throw at it during marathon training.