I write this at the end of a day carefully planned to maximize stair avoidance. Because, you see, my quads are so sore I can hardly walk. I haven’t had DOMS this bad since the days after the Big Sur Marathon. That race took me more than an hour longer to run than the Santa Rosa Marathon last year, yet by comparison, my legs after Santa Rosa were fresh as cucumbers.
The culprit: hills. There’s a reason why hills are called “the runner’s gym.” Most people think it’s running uphill that makes your legs strong. Sure, it does. But it’s running downhill – something that feels low-effort aerobically, thanks to gravity – that’s even harder on your legs. That’s because with each downhill step you take, your quads contract eccentrically — they elongate in order to resist the force of your body weight going down. This creates more micro-tears in muscle fibers than running on a flat surface. Separately, because gravity assists you running downhill, you are able to practice faster leg turnover — and with time, this transfers onto flat roads.
With legs untrained on downhill running, the first few miles of the Boston marathon – including a nearly 100-foot drop in the first half mile alone – can ruin the rest of the race. Sure, Heartbreak Hill – an 88-foot climb over a half mile – is bad, especially since it comes at Mile 20, but it’s the downhills before it that make it especially worse.
So, my coach has been making me run up and down hills. A lot. Save for a short break to let my ankle heal in the past couple of weeks, it’s safe to say that I’ve been doing at least one mid- to long run a week on hilly terrain. This weekend, I did two back to back. It hurt so good. Here’s the rest of my week, with 10 weeks to go until race day:
Monday: Short morning swim (2000 yards). I was relieved to feel perfectly recovered after my impromptu fasted long run the day before. In the afternoon, an easy run: 6 miles at an average 9:14 min/ mile pace.
Tuesday: Trail run, 8.5 hilly miles at my “neighborhood” national park, picked up the pace for the last four. An hour an a half and 1,400 feet of up (and down).
Wednesday: Morning swim (2550 yards); easy afternoon run: 6 miles at an average 9:21 min/ mile pace.
Thursday: Tempo run. This one was interesting. I was supposed to warm up for 15 minutes (10 min easy, 5 min build), stop and do a few strides, and then run a tempo pace for 45 minutes, starting at a steady-to-hard effort (8:20 min/mile) and descend the pace from there. Thinking I’d be running a 5-mile tempo and feeling not quite challenged at an 8:20 pace, I quickly picked it up and ran the first mile in 8:00. The second, in 7:49. And then my brain woke up and realized that – doh! – it’s not five miles that I’m supposed to run, but six. Expletive expletive expletive. Never mind, though, I resigned myself to the idea of starting out just a bit faster than I should have would mean that I’d just have to go (literally!) the extra mile in this workout. Mile three was 7:38, then 7:32, and then – because I am that good at pacing my running, 7:31. Coach said to descend each mile, he didn’t say whether descending by one second was good enough or not?
For the last tempo mile, I ran 7:22 and it felt harder than any mile I’ve run in training. I’m convinced this was because I’d conditioned my brain to expect a five-mile effort and then telling it, mid-workout, that no dear, we’re actually going to do six today. Next time, I’m calculating my mileage carefully before I head out! A total of 8.3 miles for this run. Phew!
Friday: Short easy run, 4 miles at a 9:20 average pace.
Saturday: Trail run with my tri buddies, except this time I ran the majority of my miles by myself. It was a foggy morning in the Bay Area, but with all the climbing – up, up and up for five miles – I got myself above the fog and into the sun. It was bliss!
On the way down, I kept a steady pace, 8 min/ mile down to 7:39: not too fast, given the incline – a loss of 1200 ft over five miles – but I could feel my quads tearing up and working hard, anyway!
Sunday: My legs were tight from the day before, but off on another hilly run I went: 12.3 miles of trails and 2,400 feet of climbing in a little over 2 hours. (I can’t even begin to describe the amounts of food I inhaled after that…)
And this was a wrap to my training week, rich in trails and hills, hills, hills.
Total mileage: 57
Phase: Volume
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