three things thursday
1. I've had a knot in my calf since Sunday. Felt fine on the recovery run, fine at yoga, and about 10 minutes after I got home something woke up and started yelling. I iced, advil'd, foam rolled, and stretched Sunday & Monday. Tuesday it was quiet so I figured it had gone away, but track on Tuesday night woke it up again. I rolled, advil'd, and stretched my brains out all day yesterday, but add that to the tangled hip/piriformis mess that came back with a vengeance during step back week and by the time I got home I was beyond cranky. I scheduled a sports massage for Friday morning and then sat in this for 20 minutes to try and calm everything down.
It looks kind of badass but really I was just too lazy to ice one part at a time. I started a new pair of shoes last Saturday (same model, new pair), so I'm hoping that once my legs adjust the calf thing will go away. The hip/piriformis mess it appears I am just going to have to live with, as I've been treating it for over 3 months now and it is neither getting better nor worse.
2. I've decided to take my recovery run to the St. Patrick's Day 8K this Sunday. I swear I'm going to take it easy, and I'll wear my Garmin to make sure I stay at my recovery pace. But I'm going to make it a race-day-clothing test run just to make sure that nothing moves or rubs or twitches oddly before I take it out for 13.1. Plus I get to partake in a St. Patrick's Day race without dumping me out of training for the surrounding days. Sounds like a good reason to celebrate with a post-race beer!
3. I've been talking to some training partners lately about periodization, and we had a particularly interesting conversation yesterday via email about focusing your training and culling the junk out, taking rest seasons, and moving through cycles of training within one training cycle. My year is pretty carefully mapped out until the Kinetic 70.3 in May. I'm signed up for the San Francisco Half Marathon in July, but that will most likely be a fun destination race instead of a PR-attempt, based both on the course (hilly) and the weather in the 8 weeks preceding the race (ridiculously hot). The past 8-12 weeks have been really focused on running, and I wanted and needed it to get back in shape after having surgery. And I very definitely have something to prove - if only to myself - at the National Half in a few weeks.
But I really miss cycling at the volume I was doing last summer - who ever would've thought? I've had the conversation with a triathlete friend several times - I love triathlon training, I love the variety and the balance, but triathlons are expensive and race day is a pain in the ass. So instead of racing the fall 70.3 that I was sorta kinda thinking about - or just instead of making it my A race - I think that I might take the June-October months to really focus on cycling - still run and maintain a good base, but not with quite the same intensity I've been training at for the past 2 months. I'd really like to get revenge on the Reston Century in particular, and I'm hoping that a sub-6-hour century isn't all that far away for me. Then when the cold rolls back in, I'll pick a winter half marathon to try and knock out a PR. What do you guys think? Does your training move in cycles? Do you take rest seasons? I think this is a very different conversation depending on whether you are a runner or a triathlete, and I'm interested in both sides.