October Goals & Objectives
- Race and recover from Uwharrie 100 Miler – CHECK
- Continue weekly hillz/speed workouts outside of week before/after Uwharrie – HALF CHECK
- Increase strength/supplemental training to 500-600 minutes – CHECK
October was another solid month in The Revolution. I feel like I’m really starting to get locked in. I was able to almost double my strength/supplemental training from just over 5 hours to 10 hours in October. This consisted of mobility, stretching, balance, core and a smidgeon of free weights. I’ve been able to do about 30 minutes after I get my daily walk in excluding the week around my race. There was really only one day during the last week where I didn’t want to do the workout. I had finished up my walk, immediately sat down in a chair, and really did not want to get back up. Thankfully, I had the 600 minute monthly goal and I knew if I didn’t do it, I’d have to add the minutes to another day. Bother. So I manned up and got ur dun. It really emphasized to me the importance of having a concrete target. Without having something to strive for it’s very easy let a workout (or four) slide. While missing a single workout will never materially impact a training block, it’s when that single miss leads to another which inevitable leads to a dozen more. Having a hard target limits the single misses and then keeps you from missing multiple workouts.
I can be impatient at times (ask my wife). And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being a little frustrated with my lack of identifiable progress with all the mobility and stretching work that I’ve been putting in. I mean, I just put in 10 hours of work over the last month and I’m still about where I was. I think. I’ve got no way to actually measure this though so maybe I’m progressing and I just don’t realize it? [shrug?] The more adult perspective is that I’ve spent 54 years not doing any strength/flexibility work and the 20 hours I’ve put in over the last 4 months might as well round down to zero. I guess I’ll keep trusting the process.
I skipped a couple hillz workouts during the month so I’m not going to give myself full credit there. The second skip was really a switch to a tempo style workout. The Revolution is not a fully formed set of rules; more guidelines. My “tempo style” workout was to not take any walk breaks during my normal 8 miler. Everything around where I live is rolling hills with about 100 ft elevation gain/loss per mile. Nothing crazy, but I’ve gotten into a habit of walking all the hills. I think I need to get to the point where I’m running 100% of these more frequently. While I could switch to eliminating all my walk breaks, it’s probably not the smartest thing to go completely cold turkey. Especially for my recovery runs. So I’ll start with one per week for November and maybe increase this in December.
The other training adjustment I made during the month was to start wearing a chest strap heart rate monitor. My Garmin Fenix 7 has the wrist based HR sensor, however it’s been jacked up since Christmas so I haven’t been able to rely on it. I haven’t actually trained by HR in forever which is why it’s been NBD. I typically go by perceived effort which is more than fine for me as I have enough experience to have this dialed in pretty good. I know what a hard day feels like and I know an easy day regardless of whatever average HR displays on my watch face (185? LOL). As I ramp up and become more aggressive with my training though, I’ll want to have accurate HR measurements as a check on my effort levels.
I’ve got one final month of racing left. Then the long, slow training build to Vol State begins in December.
November Goals & Objectives
- Race and recover from The Void 160 Miler
- Continue 2x weekly workouts (tempo/speed) outside of week before/after The Void
- Increase strength/supplemental training to 700 minutes