The last few weeks have been a long hard slog. I'm now up to 40km per week with a 20 | 10 | 5 | 5Km split on my runs. Conditions have been largely atrocious on my weekly long trail runs. Cold wet and the kind of mud that sucks your shoes and socks off your feet with each step. Its the grim type of training that forges a kind of stoic resilience I'm going to need to get through what I am going to take on. On a normal day it makes a 20K run feel like a 30k. When you are doing it fasted (i.e. zero calories for the 12 hours before, and the 3.5 hours during), it feels longer.
It's taking a huge amount out of me while I'm only 3 weeks to fat adapting again, and fasted running is certainly helping me get there quicker. I'll be talking about this area specifically during my next post (and adding a video of me talking about my experience so far with it) about why I'm running while fasted. For now though, I'll just crack on with the week's summary...
Training week 10
Good news is that I am bang on schedule at this point. 40km was the plan target. 40km was the outcome.
Don't worry about the 'Keeping fit' title of the image as two days ago that said 'Productive training'. I'm just in recovery phase the last 24 hours since screenshotting this hence the drop in the effort level from the peak.
The red line doesn't lie, and you can see the peak effort is trending higher as is the black line when I'm doing my weekend sessions. That's exactly what I'm looking for.
My training volume is pretty spot on. This doesn't show the rehab work that I'm doing either in order to build strength again in the glutes, and correct the issues in my back. That is also going well.
You can see from the 'Progress' chart that my 'Form' (effort level) is peaking towards the edge of the 'going too hard' zone. That's my weekend activities where I push hardest for longest. After which I ease up on the gas to ensure I recover properly.
My week looked like this:
Sat - 20K
Sun - 10K
Mon - Rehab
Tues - Rest
Wed - 5k
Thu - 5K + Rehab
Fri - Rest
What I'm noticing more is that I am recovering much quicker from the long run than from a few weeks ago. It's easier to go again after doing a very long run the day before. This is EXACTLY what I'm looking to build, along with the distance. Recovery is going to be a very big issue when I go for the 300k. 6 days of having to get up again and again. Right now it feels like I'm breaking through and that my body is starting to shift to becoming better fat adapted in order to help with this.
The weight has also finally started to move again. I mentioned that week that I was getting frustrated at the slow progress, despite all the changes I'd made since the start of the month. It looks like my body has started to respond to those changes.
At the time of writing this, My weight is now 101.1 Kg
Jan 2002 Starting Weight - 105.9kg
Month 1 weight - 101.1kg
Weight dropped - 4.8kg (10.6 Ibs)
Distance to target - 16.1 kg
This is at the same weight i was last March after 3 months of zero carb misery. Once again I am ahead of the curve (for now, at least), and happy that it's moving forward. I am drinking LOTS of water, running fasted, stripped out a lot of carbs, and fasting 24hrs twice a week. All of which I'm starting to get quite used to now. I suspect that it's a month or two yet before I fat adapt properly and the performance while running comes back and i no longer get that truly depleted feeling in my legs. This is very encouraging though.
Let's see how the next few weeks go though...
Thanks for reading...
Comments