Sunday, November 23, 2014

Deepwater Point 7.5k race

As usual in recent times, I've neglected the blog. Who still blogs anyway? 2005 called and asked for it's blog back.

I recently went back and read some posts from the past, whilst I was struggling with injury, and realised it's nice to be able to look back and relive my running, beyond just a result time or an entry on Strava.

So after the Marathon I had some downtime, went on a holiday (yet another cruise on the med) and returned retaining pretty good form. Eyeing off the Bold Park XCountry race I started running some hilly loops in Bold Park. Clearly I did too much too soon and on 13th Sept, running the third 10 miler in 3 days, developed sudden right knee pain, which I couldn't run through.

My knee swelled in the next few hours and it seemed pretty clear I'd injured my cartilage again, in very similar circumstances to the injury to the left knee in 2010, which required surgery. After a week off, I tried running on and off over the next month, each time flaring things up a bit. In the end I realised I had to take some time off entirely, which luckily coincided first with a Broome trip, then with a 2 week viral infection and finally with moving house (again), all of which distracted me from my natural desire to run no matter what.

Three full weeks off, and now I've been running again for a fortnight. I've done about 80km each week - pretty much all flat. I've tried hard to up my cadence and land under my centre of gravity, to reduce the load on the patellofemoral joint. I've also been working hard on my weak glutes and crossover gait. I've also been struggling with some left sided achilles tendonitis but this seems manageable with some eccentric exercises

It was really too early to return to a race today, but I still have a small chance of winning the 40-45yo age group for WAMC this year, but have only done 5 races, needing a minimum of eight. Today I needed to run the 15k to count as a championship race.

Pretty early on I knew I didn't have the legs or fitness to race 15k. not surprising given my training runs back have all been about 10k. In fact, at the pace i was running I didn't have the legs/fitness to run 7.5k. I made it to 5k in 18:53 and was knackered. I walked for 30sec then ran the rest closer to 4min/k, finishing with 28:34 running time and 29:08 race time.

I'm about 15-20sec/km off my peak pace at the moment. interestingly though my training paces are much closer to normal, there's just much less between easy pace and race pace at the moment. The prospect of winning the age group seems less and less likely, especially seeing Evan Kolbe (my rival for this) finish a long way ahead of me today. I need to run each of the three remaining races this year to qualify - 10k, 16k and 8k on the next 3 Sundays, and would probably need to beat Evan if he runs them also. I might go into the specifics of the competition next time.

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