August Extravaganza Bonanza Update - Halfway Done!

Heads-up, this is super fucking long.

TBH, I wouldn't recommend my "training regimen" to anybody. I have an "ideal" regimen that I simply can't find a way to maintain because my training is repeatedly punctuated by long periods of not-running due to all sorts of extenuating circumstances. I never ran track in high school (small school, no track team), and I turned down an opportunity to run in college because I was very burnt out from both being over-relied upon on my small high school XC team, I'd repeatedly sustained injuries in high school due to poor coaching, and I simply figured I wasn't good enough (honestly, who wants an NCAA DI runner who never ran track?). After 2+ years of general inactivity upon starting college, I decided to start running at the intercollegiate level and I raced unattached at a lot of collegiate DI-DIII track meets, and I generally did well across the board. The club team I raced for actually had some very good coaching (professional certified coaches for men and women in sprints, jumps, throws, mid-distance, long distance, etc.), and I did do some assistant coaching after I graduated. The first time I went sub-19 was in late July of last year, when I hit 18:45 (road) on primarily base mileage for marathon training (55-65mpw), but just over a month afterward, I spontaneously sustained three stress fractures in my right femur without any warning signs at all, including one in my femoral neck, so I was on crutches for 6 weeks, then I slowly started walking again, then low-resistance biking, then high-resistance biking, etc. In late December I started "running" again, as in "1 minute jogging, 4 minutes walking, x5", which I kept up for a month. Then I had a full month of no more than 20mins of running 3x/week. It was slow and tedious.

Despite all of this, I somehow PR'd the 5k in mid-May. At the time, I was finally up to running 5x/week, totaling about 30mpw. To be honest, I felt dreadfully unfit. I still wasn't able to run anywhere near the volume I was used to, and my longest run post-injury was a whopping 8 whole miles. I ran an 18:30 that day, weirdly enough. But my unorthodox performance streak on minimal training ended that very day, because literally while at that track meet, I got a phone call offering me an internship position a very rural part of the Sonoran Desert, starting 10 days later. I had to take it, because it was a really great opportunity working with endangered species (I'm a zoologist), but it was walking outside for 10 miles each day in 100-120°F heat, starting at 4AM and ending at 10AM, so morning running was out, and night running was also out because I had to wake up so early, and there are some genuine safety concerns that close to the border (like, I was literally living and working 200m from the border, not an exaggeration). So I literally PR'd then stopping running for the summer.

I just started running again about a month ago, now that I've moved back to the Upper Midwest, which despite the -40°F winters, is a place I consider generally pleasant and hospitable year-round. I wish I could tell you that X amount of miles works for me, but everything is so scattered that even I don't know for sure how to reach my peak. I know I'm nowhere near it, though, due to all my inconsistencies. One thing I do believe, though (and my former coach believes this as well) is that I'm not a high mileage runner. I'm at my fittest when I'm consistently at ~45mpw, with lots of additional cross training. I usually lift pretty heavy, believe it or not, though I don't have a gym membership in my new city. I also generally swim or bike 1-2x/week. I don't look like the rest of the girls at the waterfall start for a track 5k. I'm 5'4", 122ish lbs when I'm fit, and I've ripped through 3 pairs of jeans. But I've been a very skinny runner before (like, 105lbs skinny), back when I was re-starting in college, when I was having some very bad anxiety issues that developed into somewhat disordered eating, and I'm just not nearly as fast when I'm light/agile as I am when I'm a huge fucking truck comin' in hot. You might want to experiment with adding in something unorthodox to your training if you think you might be stalling. Lifting and swimming weirdly helped me, because they both provided an outlet for me to gain muscle mass, which surprisingly enough was exactly what I needed. Other people can get by on miles alone, some others really benefit from yoga, etc. While I definitely agree with /r/running that generally speaking, people need to be running more to reach their goals, I've seen some pretty great results on lower mileage with a lot of supplemental crosstraining and strength work. I don't race the mile very often, but the first time I raced it I somehow pulled a 5:34 out of my ass on 25mpw, so... I guess that works for me? It makes me very nervous to really dedicate myself to the marathon, though, because apart from the fact that I broke my femur in marathon training, I almost fear that I'm a very narrow-ranged distance runner, and that I'm putting myself through a lot of unnecessary risk by even running 65mpw, but from a marathon training perspective, isn't very much at all.

I'm running a road 5k tomorrow morning, so when those results are out I'll have a better sense of how fit/unfit I currently am, and I can let you know how the results compares to my current training (which is mostly just 40mpw easy anyway). I feel extraordinarily unfit, but then again, I felt super unfit when I ran the 18:30 as well, so that seems to be a poor indicator for me. I'm quite confident that with your damn sharp recent 19:09 5k, you'll blow me out of the water. I'm just hoping that my fitness comes back in time for the Twin Cities 10-Mile, which is actually the national championship course, but it's a regular 10-miler as well. It's just that there will be loads of super fast people there, and I definitely want to do what I can to hold on to like... top 50 or something haha.

/r/running Thread Parent