Lidingöloppet träning

It is now only 6 weeks until Lidingöloppet and harsh reality is sinking in. 6 weeks isn't enough time to make any significant improvement, so I have to take stock of where I am today and figure out how (if) that's going to get me around the 30k course. It is going to be pretty much as it's going to be. The downside however is that 6 weeks is plenty enough time to do some serious injuring. I'm already carrying a leg injury which isn't going away, so I'm trying to be mindful to do as much as I can without overstressing. It would probably take a one month rest period to sort my calf injury out. Obviously that's not practical right now without giving away my start ticket. I don't have that base level conditioning that would allow me to rest up for several weeks without losing much of my fitness. It's going to be a balancing act.

 

The next 3 weeks are the critical weeks. I have been steadily increasing my mileage and severity of terrain as I have been feeling stronger. I've had a few backwards steps along the way with unmanageable injuries, and of course the major head cold I picked up which stuffed me for the best part of 2 weeks. Part of the panic is my own stupid fault really, I should have been in a structured training programme several months prior to when I actually started. That would have given me the luxury of a little reserve. Circumstances didn't help to an extent. Work wasn't particularly healthy for me and my head space wasn't where it should have been. I was also helping someone else out who was training for a shorter distance event, which changed the way I was training during that time. All excuses, mind, I should have simply gotten off my butt earlier.

I'm going to have to stick hard to my schedule now. I'm away in Kiruna for 2 days shortly, then in Stockholm for 3 days. Yesterday I had the horse to look after which took the evening daylight hours. If one more thing pops up then I've lost one week of the six remaining weeks. I may or may not have been training on those days, but I have lost the luxury of one week where I could choose if I would train those days. Now the remaining 6 weeks of training days are compressed into 5 weeks. If I'm a bit tired one day, or the weather turns lousy, then I'm suddenly under stress. I'm the sort of person who likes to be well prepared and to avoid surprises. Being forced into a situation where I am not in control of my destiny is not something I particularly enjoy nor am comfortable with. I don't like leaving things to chance if there is a way of avoiding the risk.

 

All that being said, I'm reasonably happy with the results to date. Considering the effort put in. In order not to overstress my injury, I'm limiting myself to 3 training runs a week. Occassionally 4 runs, depending on the type of workout that week. I could train more, but having those recovery days is crucial to holding my legs together at the moment. Which is why I consider every day to be important to me at the moment. Naturally fewer workouts means a slower improvement, but I can live with that. I'm not concerned about my finish time, only about my ability to finish. Mileage I have been holding at between 40 and 50km per week. I usually try to start the week of with a longer run of between 20 and 25km. Get the worst one out of the way early in case anything should happen later in the week. That gives me 2 or 3 workouts of between 10 and 15km each. That's manageable today. But the next 3 weeks I need to start hitting some bigger targets with longer runs. My weekly target has to go up from the current 4 hours to about 7 hours. Most of my long runs take me just over 2 hours. I need to start throwing in some 3 hour runs to the mix. I've only run for 3 hours once before, and that was on a treadmill. Kind of cheating a little, but I wanted to know if I could physically last the time. Two hours I can handle without too much recovery trouble, but after then it starts to get pretty tough very quickly. I have to break through that psychological barrier some how.

 

Because my body can't quite handle the necessary distances and durations, I'm gambling everything on the quality of my workouts. Mid way through June I switched my training to be almost exclusively trail and hill running. A typical 20k training run has maybe 5 or 6 km of flat running, with as much of that on soft surfaces as possible. Going off road will hopefully lessen the stresses on my body frame, but will build up muscle strength and endurance. That's the plan. I've never run Lidingöloppet before so I have no first hand experience of the course. But I have spoken with a few people and watched some videos. So I know roughly what it's going to be like. I figure that by training consistently on courses which are of the same level of dificulty as the most difficult parts of Lidingöloppet then I might get some relief while on the easier parts of the race course. We'll know in 6 weeks if that's a good strategy or not. Over the last month I've been hitting the local cross country ski trail. This is a 9km forest trail covered in quite deep wood bark. That makes it rather soft underfoot which is good for the skeleton and joints but requires a lot more energy than asphalt running. The ski trail is also good because it's always going up and down, meaning that you have to work all the time. A good tough workout is to run to the start of the trail, do 2 laps of the trail, and then run home again. That works out to be about 22km and takes a lot out of energy from me. That being said, my recovery times are much quicker than the same workout on the open road. It's also more enjoyable being on a twisting forest trail than plodding along a country road. Recently I found that treadmill running was aggrevating my injuries so I've decided to avoid them where possible for now. I thought it would lessen the stresses but seems to be doing the opposite. I think the theory is that the repetitive action of treadmill running will worsen a pre-existing condition whereas open running gives variation of footstrike and so forth. I figure that gravel road and trail running has to offer even more variation under foot. Strong feet means strong legs, so they say.

Assuming that I survive this week, I'll update next week.