Full-on training and season opener

My injuries are healed. It's time to get back to full-on training.

January was a tentative month. I slowly increased my speed volume and tested out my body in a couple tempo sessions and one easy special endurance workout. My start is better than it's ever been and my acceleration pattern is good. I need to work on top-end speed now. I had a great last 2 weeks of workouts, slowly extending my speed reps into the 50m-70m range. In February my focus is on getting my top speed to where it should be (2.80-2.85 for 30m with a full approach) and then extending my speed endurance to a little over 100m. My 30m out of blocks is ok for me (3.85 electronic timed, not counting reaction time). I will also be working on special endurance and some general conditioning. 

After so much time being injured I'm happy to say that I'm in decent shape. I can complete 10x30m sprints with 1 minute rest all within 0.02 seconds of one another (electronic timed, too!), and I can sustain my heart rate in the 170-180 range for 20 minutes very comfortably in my tempo sessions. My strength is good, but the focus this year is not on absolute strength as in years past. Rather, I am focusing on the quality of movement and the proper activation of my muscles.

I'm now spending a considerable amount of time on movement training. I'm working hard to increase my mobility and stability in complex multi-joint movements. It's amazing how much better I feel after doing exercises to "wake up" certain muscle groups that have been chronically tight for so long that they were losing their ability to generate force. The main focus for me right now is my chronically tight shoulders. Once they're doing better I'll put more emphasis on my hips. I'm always working on flexibility and facial release so that I can recover faster by getting more oxygen and nutrients throughout my body. Big clumps of tight muscle constantly filled with leftover lactic acid don't make for fresh legs. I still have a long way to go to get rid of all the grossness in my body (especially my lateral quad on my right leg which used to get "pins and needles" throughout the day from being too tight) but I'm well on my way.

The best part of being healthy is that I can have a proper training plan now! Since I no longer have to wonder what I'll feel like each day I'm no longer training in week-to-week or day-to-day sessions. I'm finishing up my February training plan and will post the entire thing soon.

Season Opener

I had my first race of the season this past Saturday. I ran a 60m here in Vancouver. My result was 7.09 in the heats and 7.07 in the finals. I didn't feel or look great but they weren't bad runs by any means. I had trouble accelerating through my transition phase from 25-40m and couldn't get into a good top speed rhythm like I was doing the week before. I was also a little off balance with a tight left hip. I'm a bit disappointed since my practice times indicate I'm capable of 6.90-6.95 right now. I'm going to race again in a month am confident I'll get into that time range then.

Now my focus is on having the best February of training I can possible have. I'm very excited for my next race and to start putting in more consistent work on the track. I'm actually starting to look forward to my first 400m of 2012!

Almost back in a normal training routine

The hardest thing about training with a baby is trying to recover between sessions. No matter how good I am about my diet, stretching, or active recovery (i.e. light activity, mobility, getting on a foam roller, yoga) the lack of sleep makes me feel a bit old! Soreness doesn't go away as fast and it's harder for me to handle long medium-intensity sessions where I have to just keep grinding away. I've been staying away from caffeine (I've never been a coffee drinker) and I'm reluctant to start but that may change! At least for the next couple months... Lucas is now going to sleep around midnight or 1am and is lasting 3-4 hours between most nighttime feeds but he still makes noises I can only describe as "tropical bird squawking" for a few hours beginning anywhere from 6 to 8am.  

Since my last post I've done several short speed workouts, lots of mobility, weights, and proprioceptive work (balancing on balance boards, drills with resistance tubing etc.). I'm working hard to get everything firing the way it should be and it seems to be paying off. My starts are as good as they've ever been. I'm beginning to work on the transition and top-speed phases and should be ready to run a good 60m soon. Only 340m to go! ;) 

Once my ankle sprain healed I developed a tight Achilles on the same leg that forced me to keep my volume low and skip some running sessions after getting physio to loosen it up. This has prevented me from doing any tempo or speed endurance sessions for 6 weeks as I've been saving my Achilles for speed work. It's at a point now where I can do speed on a fly in spikes and 150s and 200s in flats at 24 second 200m pace with no problem. I'm going to try getting into spikes for the longer reps next week. I'll start with 6x150 with 3 min. rest in 17 seconds on Tuesday. If my Achilles is still happy the next day I'll feel comfortable writing out some definitive workouts and will finally get to take myself off "day-to-day" status. I might even have some good training sessions to post about!

Getting motivated again

It was a tough November but I'll be all the better for it come summer. There have been some serious setbacks over my career that put my recent injury troubles (see Strange Injuries) into perspective. I was starting to feel really down about not having done a proper track session for 4 weeks until, during a conversation with a friend about my newly born son (see photo here: The very unusual athlete), I was confronted with the question: "I wonder how long it will take him to beat your pb in the 400m!?" So it's a matter of time, eh?! That's fine. If he does pursue athletics I hope he smashes my best time, but that comment reminded me of how deeply unsatisfied I am with my current PB and how much work I have ahead of me if I'm going to fix that problem.

I ran my personal best 400m in 2005, winning the Canadian National Championships on my home track in very windy conditions with 46.12 seconds (I also ran 21.02 in the 200m earlier that year). I was pleased to have broken my previous PB of 46.35 but felt that I had underperformed. No worries, I thought, I'll run what I'm capable of in August at the World University Games.

I made a horrible tactical mistake at the Games and was eliminated in the 400m semi-finals finishing tenth overall in an event I felt I could win (it was won in 45.95 with no wind). After lackluster performances in the 200m and 4x100m relay my teammates and I never even got out of the blocks in the 4x400m relay final. The microphone in the starting blocks malfunctioned so I couldn't hear the "set" command and even though it was illegal to start the race since I still had one knee on the ground it started anyway. Although we protested we weren't allowed to run against time and thus ended a physically and emotionally draining 2 weeks.

Fueled by the disappointment (anger?) of the summer I had the best fall training of my life. I ran a 500m in 60.1 in October then in November I did workouts like 5x250m with 90 seconds rest in 30.2 (average). By December I could run (hand-timed) 38.8 in the 350m and ran a session of 3x300m in 35 with 5 minutes rest. I was itching to run a 400m because I knew that 46.12 was going down. With this attitude I went to les Jeux de la Francophonie in Niamey, Niger. What happened there will be the focus of one of my next posts but, long story short, the day before my race I got terribly sick. I lost 10kg (22lbs) in 3 days. I suffered some symptoms for the next 3 months, either couldn't train or trained poorly during that time, and managed only 46.40 as a seasons best that May.

Since then I've come close to my PB, managing to run both 46.21 and 46.23. I've also made a lot of "life" decisions that I knew full-well weren't the best for my career (moving to a cold-weather place with no training partners and no coach while doing graduate school being the most relevant!). I fully accept that my decisions that are to blame for not breaking that 46.12 and I took them with a "rest of my life" perspective. I feel that in many ways I've made the right choice but now, at 27, I'm having some athletic mortality angst and don't want to retire before I've done what I fully expected to do in 2005.

The fitness level I have now makes the kinds of workouts I just mentioned seem surreal but I know that I've done them before and can do them again. When my son asks what my best 400m time is I don't want to say "46." This will be the 8th year of that "46" and I'm sick of it. The past month has made me focus on all the little things that I find easy to neglect when I'm worn out from intense track sessions. All the tedious stabilizer work, the self-treatment, stretching, and mobility drills will be compulsory for me this year. If I end my career with a 46.12 best, fine. But I'll have had years to better that mark and I won't accept any regrets or excuses if I fail. Today I test my ankle on the track. Whether it's another week of everything-but-running or not, I'm ready.

The very unusual athlete?

In my experience having a child slows one's perception of time. My son, Lucas André Vadeboncoeur sent my wife into labour at 4am on his due date (Nov 15) and was born at home at 9:29 that night. From early that morning my notion of time became the space between contractions. In my wife's case these were 4 minutes apart almost from the beginning. Now time is divided into the space between feeds, about 1-2 hours (I have a very hungry kid, he's gained half a kilo in a week, or 16% of his total body mass!). He's two weeks old but it seems like we've had him forever. It's been an amazing fortnight and I look forward to every day I get to spend with him as he makes his way (slowly!) toward the social world. Big thanks to the midwifes for their wonderful (and continuing) support through his development from bean-sized foetus to infant. Here he is at 5 days old, looking considerably less squished than when he came out...

If you've read my first post (it's here) you'll know that Lucas is a beautiful addition to my already full plate. I feel like spending all day at home with him and his mum, but I also want to complete my PhD and have a great athletics season. Those contrasting thoughts are a constant reminder that desire without action is a daydream. I need to spend time working hard and spend time at home. I can see now more than ever why that's called having a "balanced" life, one could easily find themselves falling off either side. Very luckily my wife has 52 weeks paid maternity/parental leave at 55% salary up to $468/week (thanks Govt. of Canada!). We also get around $3,000 per year in child benefits until age 6, then about $1,200 per year after that. This is a blessing and will help with this "balance" but it's still nothing like what they provide people in Scandinavian countries, Bulgaria, or Slovenia (see a summary on Wikipedia here). Having supported my wife through the process of pregnancy, labour and now child care, while learning about maternity benefits, is highlighting women's rights as a social issue. Since this is a sports blog, I'll be brief:

In Canada a women is guaranteed the position she held when she took leave, or if that is not available, a position of equal rank at the same salary. Now, what about during her time away? Fifty-five percent of salary up to $468 per week is great for women who have a good salary, live in a part of the country with a low cost of living and/or are married to or in a relationship with someone who has a good salary. In the case of my family, the support we receive from the government is great but in the case of single mothers with average-to-low salaries it's a different story.

There is no defined cut-off in Canada for a poverty line. Rather, there are Low Income Cut Offs (LICOs) defined by Statistics Canada that are set by family size and location of residence. Earning less than the LICO is used as a measure of economic hardship and may be thought of as a proxy poverty line. Using 2005 numbers, a family of two (single mum and 1 child) has a LICO from $17,429 to $25,319. The average Canadian single mum earns $42,800 per year, but the 50th percentile of earners gets right around $30,000. That means that with our current benefits package, half the single mums in the country will have to make due with a taxable income of at most $16,500 during their maternity/parental leave while the average mum will get 97% of the full benefit of $24,336. Remember, this is all before taxes. Should we be asking so many of our mothers to spend a year in poverty to raise a child? Keep in mind that Canada has one of the best maternity/parental leaves in the world. Is global society, at some level, fundamentally set up to discriminate against women? Food for thought...

Strange Injuries

What's the strangest way you've ever hurt yourself? Has anyone out there ever torn a rotator cuff opening a jar of peanut butter? Or maybe broken a finger by falling UP the stairs? Neither of those have happened to me but I've got a couple strange ones going on right now.

After spending a week being really good about my self-treatment (stretching, rolling out on a foam cylinder, working my feet out on a golf ball, etc.) I managed to sprain a ligament in my ankle in a speed workout. I didn't roll over on it or anything, I was just sprinting. It's a minor strain and I'll be back on the track (but only in flats) on Monday, one week later.

Well, time for a pool session! I can't possibly hurt myself suspended in water, can I? Wrong. When I got out of the pool I noticed that my clavicle was sticking out a bit right where it connects to my ribs under my throat. Turns out my shoulder muscles didn't like all the hand-over-headness of swimming and decided to dislocate my clavicle by rotating it part way off my chest. Great. Since it only came off a little bit I'll make a full recovery, but it's severely annoying.

Training update: Week 13

This week the emphasis is on speed. I've been blending speed into my sessions over the past month by integrating accelerations into my warm-ups, even on tempo days. Getting a training plan right for the 400m can be very challenging because of the wide range of energy systems that need to be in top form to produce a good 400m result. It's important that speed is done first on days where it's mixed with other types of running because, 1) you need to be fresh because if you're not running fast you're wasting your time, and, 2) your body adapts best to the first kind of training you do in a session, or over a day, when you're using mixed energy systems. Since speed is the most important component of a 400m this kind of running should come first (plyometrics can be done in the warm-up since this also require maximal speed contractions).

Here are my last few sessions:

Saturday:
-Light cleans: 3x10 hang cleans (60kg) 3x10 cleans (80kg)
-25 minutes of plyometrics (standing long jumps, tuck jumps, drop jumps, standing triple jump, hurdle hops)
-3x10m starts from a rollover position
-2x40m starts from a rollover position
-General weights (3x12 squat (full ROM), bench, pull-downs) 

Sunday: Off

Monday:
2x speedmakers* with 5 minutes rest
2x100m rhythm runs with a 3m run-in @ 10.high

Tuesday: Easy stretching

Wednesday:
-Light cleans: 3x10 hang cleans (60kg)
-Speed: 3x30m, 3x40m, 2x50m (2 min rest, 4 min for the 50s)
-Plyo: 15m on a Vertimax (speed squats, jumps for height, single leg speed step-ups, tuck jumps, running 'A')
-General upper-body weights (3x12 bench, 3x12 bent over row)

Thursday:
-Easy tempo (distance in hundreds of metres): 1-1-1-2-3-2-1-1-1-2-3-2-1-1-1-1-1 (2500m) with 20 seconds rest on grass. Mobility after, stretching at night.

Friday: The workout I'm planning is 2x600m @ 1:30 (10 min rest), 3x200m easy tempo (1 min rest), 3x200m @ 26 (3 min rest). Then weights.

*'Speedmakers' is an exercise made popular by Clyde Hart. It's usually done on the diagonals of a football field but I do it on a track. It is 4 sets of a 40m sprint, 40-50m easy deceleration, and a 10-20m walk done in a sequence. I start my 4 sprints at the 400m, 300m, 200m and 100m start lines so when I'm done I've completed one full lap.

Training AFTER a cold

I've been back at training for about a week since I came down with a bad cold. I went by the book as soon as I started feeling sick (see post). When I started backing off on my training I began to convince myself somehow that this would prevent me from actually getting sick. Wrong. I was actually surprised when I got the full-on cold symptoms and didn't feel like going out of the house.

Compared to how it used to go when I tried to train through an illness I did pretty well. As I described in the last post (see link) I would end up losing pretty much 2 weeks of training because I would be either, 1) too sick to train, or, 2) so sick that my sessions sucked and I wasn't able to recover properly and just ended up making everything worse.

Here's how the two weeks played out this time:

Monday-Saturday: Starting to feel sick. Low volume sessions of speed and weights. I feel relatively good.

Sunday-Tuesday: Blah. I'm super sick and have to save all my energy for complaining about how I don't have energy to do anything except complain. And then I would complain about how my throat hurt from too much complaining. And then I would be sad.

Wednesday: Able to do an easy tempo session. 2.5k 'run' then 600-500-400-300-200-100 with 3 minutes rest at 18 sec 100m pace.

Thursday-Monday: More tempo, circuits, and weights. The intensity is up now but it's still not full-on.

Tuesday: Back to hard training! Speed and weights/plyo.

So, instead of practically wasting 2 weeks with sessions where I end up over-training myself I was able to get in a lot of light/medium ones where I focused on maintenance and working on the things that are easy to neglect, like stabilizer muscles. Missing training is hard, but this was better than the alternative.