In case you missed it:
Eugene Half Week 1
Eugene Half Week 2
One of my favorite running podcasts as I've mentioned before is Pro Running News with Dave Lipman and Matt Fox; recently Matt Fox has also started doing his own separate podcast in addition to PRN called Sweat Elite (after his training/coaching company of the same name).
In general Sweat Elite doesn't speak to me in quite the same way as PRN, but every now and then there is an episode or two that piques my interest. Recently Matt has been doing a series called "Training Talk" which is more focused on the nuts and bolts and fiddly details of designing good training and how a well-designed training plan creates the physiological adaptations (ie., "fitness") that make for strong performance. This week I listened to episode six in the series, entitled How Fast Do You Lose Fitness?, in which Matt interviewed Max Frankel, one of the Sweat Elite coaches and in fact the coach who has actually been designing Matt Fox's own marathon training. (Historically, Matt was/is a pretty high level middle distance runner who I believe even ran for some Australian national teams in his younger days.)
Originally the episode was supposed to focus on a different topic but thanks to various Life Things, Matt had recently taken some unplanned days off from training, so instead they pivoted to discussing the role and impact of such unscheduled rest days. Ergo: How Fast Do You Lose Fitness?
I find this topic fascinating. Like many runners, early-on I used to low-key panic about taking an unplanned rest day for any reason. If x run was scheduled on y day, it was for a good reason, right? Ergo doing the run assigned on the day it was assigned is *obviously* the most ideal and optimal thing, ergo not doing x run on y day was *obviously* suboptimal, ergo if there was literally any--ANY--way you could *possibly* get it done, then that was *obviously* the best thing thing to do, no matter what. I remember someone in some online article or blog post joking about the anxiety of unplanned rest days along the lines of, "I can literally feel my mitochondria evaporating."
I'm proud to say that at the ripe old age of 43 and after twenty-some-odd years of distance running, I don't think that way anymore. Of course I do my level best to do the training that I am paying a professional to design for me, but I no longer see a coach as the final, ultimate authority on what "the best" thing to do is on any given day (and I think any coach worth their salt would agree with that). Obviously they do their best for you with the information they have, but at the end of the day, they're not the one living in your body and experiencing your life, which means that you the athlete have a lot of important information that they don't have, and part of developing as an athlete is learning how to understand and interpret and act on that information.
In the episode, Matt explained that he had a series of days where he was traveling, dealing with some urgent business issues that often had him up super late at night, and has also been handling the ongoing stress of wedding planning, and for a few days it just all become too much mentally. So rather than get the work done at any cost and make his life that much overwhelming, he simply didn't run for nearly a week.
And I loved what Max had to say about that:
"I think it's important that people understand that this isn't an entirely negative thing. I think that this six-day period when you didn't run isn't reflective of an athlete who's bitten off more than they can chew but rather I think it's reflective of an athlete who knows what's ultimately best for them in the long run.
"You can give yourself the day in order to save the week. Or you can give yourself the week in order to save the block. And this is an example of that, I think, where, yes, you didn't technically train for six days, but in taking those six days off, you probably preserved a lot of the quality to come later this past week when you returned back to running and in the coming weeks of the block.
"And you could have pushed through...But what are we really gaining from that? And I think that especially when you're under high stress, you're not really going to do yourself any good by trying to push through."
Not that this is 100% a completely new idea to me, but I think there is so much out there urging people to get it done at any cost, and we don't hear enough about how depending on the situation, the cost could be digging yourself into a hole that results in poorer fitness and poorer performance in the long run. (See: Winning the battle and losing the war.)
At the end of 2022 when I had dug myself into a pretty deep hole in this way, I did a lot of reading about physical and mental/emotional strain and stress, and one of the things I learned was that, in some important hormonal ways, the body does not actually distinguish between physical stress (such as a hard workout) and mental/emotional stress (such as not sleeping enough, dealing with stressful work or interpersonal situations, or simply having a lot on your plate). All it knows is that the cortisol and whatever else is piling up, and there comes a point where that is more harmful than adaptive.
So it was kind of validating to hear Max talk about that too:
"I think that our bodies can only take a finite amount of stress, whether it's training stress, cognitive stress, emotional stress, whatever you want to call it. ... Some of the hormones that are released by stress are similar to some of the hormones that are released by training sometimes. And that means we need to pay attention to that cognitive and emotional load.
"And just because we can handle [x training load] in a week where all we're doing is training, life is basically just a training camp ... That doesn't necessarily mean we can also handle [x training load] in a week where we're working 40 hours and we have a couple of flights and average sleep time is five hours instead of seven or eight. Training doesn't happen in a vacuum. And if every human was a robot, sport wouldn't be interesting.
"Being able to manage these more human aspects of going through a training cycle, I think is sometimes the difference between great performance at the end of a block or subpar performance at the end of a block."
Which leads us back to the original question: How quickly do we lose fitness? If I have an incredibly stressful and/or busy few days and skip a few runs because of it, how much should I be worrying about this from a fitness perspective?
Max again:
"It takes two weeks to start losing fitness, and just because you take two weeks off and you go out and do any hard efforts, they are going to feel worse. Your body is not used to the shock of high intensity, high lactate, high heart rate, high ventilatory activity. But you're still going to be able to handle a pretty similar level. It's just going to feel like more of a shock. The curves of freshness, staleness, rest, fatigue, they aren't entirely linear and they go through cycles and waves.
"More than nine times out of ten, rest is only going to benefit you. ... I feel very confident about saying that a week of rest is always going to help you, or is never going to hurt you."
He related rest days (planned and unplanned) to the three constructs of fitness, form, and feel:
- Fitness ➡️ What you're capable of under ideal circumstances. That is, the extent to which you've become physiologically well-adapted to the demands of the event you're training for / running in general (e.g., higher vO2 max, lactate threshold, & running economy) thanks to good training.
- Form ➡️ The extent to which you're able to express your existing fitness in a race situation. (Eg, you can be very fit and then have a stressful day and not enough sleep, resulting in poor form and subpar racing. Think about people who say: "I don't think that race showed what I'm capable of right now.")
- Feel ➡️ What it feels like. I think for a long time I didn't realize that you can be at the same fitness level and depending on the circumstances, running x pace could feel pretty okay or it could feel terrible. But it turns out there are other things that impact your subjective experience of how it feels physically to run a certain pace or workout besides how fit you are.
"Those three things don't move together. Two of them sometimes will get ahead of the curve or lag behind the curve, but these things are always changing. ... Especially as you get close to race day, [a good coach] is trying to optimize fitness, form, and feel.
"Two weeks off, you're not going to lose your fitness. If you were to take two weeks off on the couch, and then you were to try and race--not going to go well. But it's not because you lost any fitness, it's just because your body hasn't moved, so you're not going to have any sort of feel for the effort.
"If you take two weeks off, and then you take say one week to get ready for the event of your choice, so take a couple of easy days, do a specific session, probably targeting race intensity, a little bit above, a little bit below, a few more easy days, a day off, and a good pre-race session to open up the day before, then that's what we're talking about when we say you probably haven't lost any fitness. That is probably still going to result in the same performance, plus or minus a little bit, as if you were to follow that same five to seven day protocol before the two weeks of nothing. So that's the disclaimer."
So, yeah. Take your rest days! And don't freak out if life starts to become Kind Of A Lot and you need to take a few unplanned rest days in order to save your sanity.
~*~*~ 🦆🦆 Eugene Half Marathon Week 3 of 8 🦆🦆 ~*~*~
Grand Total: 41.6 miles
🐌 Easy: 32.24 miles
🏃🏻♀️ Moderate: 7.5 miles
🐎 Fast: 1.86 miles
⚖️ Easy miles vs. fast/moderate miles: 77.5% vs. 22.5%.
Wednesday 3/20: 6 easy. I flew to SoCal for work on Wednesday & scheduling was such that it was close to 9pm before I had time for a run, so onto the treadmill it was. I decided to wear my watch just to get a strain number, but I realized about half a mile in that, lo & behold, somehow it was recording plausibly accurate distance. 🤯 Not totally sure how that works but, hey, I'll take it!
Thursday 3/21: 6 easy 4 easy. After being on my feet all day and then driving for an hour, I had just enough time before my flight home to squeeze in four rather unpleasant miles. My legs felt simultaneously like noodles and also like they were made of lead and I was actually shocked that my first split wasn't 11:00+ minutes. But really the Pacific Electric Trail near the Ontario airport is a gift to my Road Warrior lifestyle, and I was happy to get the blood pumping any way I could.
Friday 3/22: 6 easy. Rain is back, womp womp.
Saturday 3/23: 4 easy Rest. Remember all that stuff up top about unplanned rest days? Well, this wasn't even that. It was an "off or cross train day," but since I'd cut Thursday's run short due to time, I'd been thinking, "Eh, I'll just do another easy four on Saturday, that'll put me at about 45 for the week." But friends, it was a hard week. And I didn't feel very good physically or emotionally. And I had some other stuff I had to do Saturday and knew I would be out late at a show Don's band was playing, with a long run I needed to squeeze in Sunday before some plans with friends. And that podcast episode was in my mind, and I am so glad because it made it so much easier to be like, "You know what? It's actually probably better for my training and being ready for that fast-finish long run if I actually don't shoehorn these piddly little four miles in which honestly aren't really doing that much for me anyway, other than possibly making me just a little more tired for the long run." And it was such a relief to have that rest day.
Sunday 3/24: 10 easy + 5 @ HM effort = 15 total. Even after a rest day, I felt tired starting out (probably due in no small part to being out late the night before) and 5-6 miles in, I honestly I had no idea how I was going to ramp the pace up to HM effort. I kind of thought "Well, give it a shot, and if all you can do is take it down 10-15 seconds or so a mile, then it'll be what it'll be." But I hit 10 miles, took a moment to roll my shoulders out and stretch out my hips with a few deep squats, then got going again at what felt like a good clip but comfortable enough to do for a few miles. I honest had no idea what the pace was and pleasantly surprised to see an 8:05 split. "Okay, okay!" I thought, "That is absolutely more than acceptable!"
I just tried to keep it around the same effort level, pushing but controlled, but I wasn't looking at pace and was even more surprised to see second split of 7:40. Like I really don't think that's half marathon pace right now but it did not feel like I was running too hard. I continued on like that; the third split was still surprisingly fast (7:33) but also I know it was on a slight downhill stretch. The fourth mile (7:41) still felt pretty good, though now I was getting closer to home with stop lights and pedestrians to mess with my momentum. I did my best in the last mile but a) I was starting to get pretty tired, and b) my neighborhood is rife with lights and pedestrians, which is why I usually don't try to run fast around there. Still, very pleased with a final 7:55 mile.
Again I hadn't looked at my recovery score because I knew I was going to do the run no matter what, but the speed of those last miles relative to my effort was even more surprising when I saw I'd dropped further down into the yellow for three days in a row (for which I mostly blame work stress/traveling). So while I don't think it's generally great to feel crappy most of the time while training and definitely not something people should just suck up and live with (except for maybe a couple of peak training weeks towards the end of a cycle), this run was also a good reminder that sometimes you can feel crappy and still run well. So I'm hoping if I can rest up and manage my stress over the next few weeks, I might actually find myself running even a teensy bit better. 🤞
Here, enjoy some pretty sailing pictures:
🎧In my ears this week:🎧
- The Good Lie by A.R. Torre. After six teen boys are brutally tortured, murdered, and mutilated, a seventh victim somehow escapes alive and identifies the killer. While the alleged perpetrator is now behind bars, something about the escaped victim's story feels off to defense attorney (and father of victim number six) Robert Kavin. Soon psychiatrist Gwen Moore–whose specialty is treating the most depraved and violence-prone–finds herself writing up a profile on the Bloody Heart serial killer for Kavin, who has stepped in to represent the accused killer pro bono. But Gwen & Robert’s relationship is complicated, and everyone involved is hiding something.
- This American Life: Heretics. A re-run episode about the Reverend Carlton Pearson, massively successful until he realized he couldn't in good faith believe in the concept of Hell anymore, and what happened to his life and church afterward.
- Sweat Elite Training Talk: How Fast Do You Lose Fitness?
- Greenlight: Trust Me When I Lie (Jack Quick #1) by Benjamin Stevenson. In a small Australian winemaking town, local man Curtis Wade went to jail for a grisly murder. But when documentary film producer Jack Quick finds evidence that suggests perhaps Wade was wrongly convicted and inflects his documentary of the events that way, Wade goes free. Almost immediately, Wade's attorney is found murdered in a similar way. Jack soon finds himself playing amateur detective in order to uncover the truth and soothe his guilty conscience; is Wade being framed for both murders, and if so, why and by who? Or is he indeed guilty of one or both, and if so, where did Jack go wrong in his interpretation of events? The investigation, crimes, and characters dovetail narratively with Jack's own demons and family situation. I really enjoyed this one and immediately sought out the next in the series.
- Either Side of Midnight (Jack Quick #2) by Benjamin Stevenson. When Sam Midford, a popular late night TV host with everything going for him, takes his own life on national TV, his twin Harry is certain Sam was coerced in some way and seeks out Jack, hoping he can replicate his investigative success with the wine country murders two years prior. Jack is not optimistic but needs Harry's money, so accepts the offer. The two follow the twists and turns of Sam's private life and the twins' family history, and soon find they may be in over their heads. Just as satisfying as Book #1! Thus far Stevenson (who also authored the fantastic, hilarious, and moving Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone) can't miss.
- Dayswork by Chris Bachelder & Jennifer Habel. During the endless days of the pandemic, a writer works on a book about Herman Melville while her husband patiently listens to her ramblings. I started listening to this short but much-lauded title during my long run Sunday but it just was not doing it for me at the time and I needed something a little more cheaply entertaining in the moment.
- End of Story by A.J. Finn. Near the end of his life, the famous mystery/thriller writer Sebastien Trap invites fellow writer Nikki Hunter to stay for the last months of his life and write his autobiography. In addition to his much-loved books, Trap is perhaps best known for the fact that his wife and young son appear to have disappeared without a trace on New Year's Eve 1999. Some think Sebastien himself is responsible while others spin all kinds of much wilder conspiracy theories. Nikki soon finds herself enmeshed in the family's drama, and when someone else close to Sebastien suffers a tragic end, the stakes suddenly feel drastically higher. Another winner by A.J. Finn!
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