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Operation Move

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You are here: Home / 2017 / Archives for June 2017

Archives for June 2017

Podcast: Episode 48 – Taper crazy? How to develop mental resilience in your final week

OperationMove · June 28, 2017 · Leave a Comment

In this episode I’m talking about the taper

I recorded this podcast in a week where we had so many people heading to the Gold Coast, and for many people the end of the training cycle is the most mentally challenging. It’s where all the doubts come in. Phantom illnesses come in. Phantom injuries. And in general you spend way too much time thinking about how everything could go horribly wrong.

So I talked about getting your mental resilience game strong for your final week before an event.

Head over to iTunes to listen (and subscribe! and review!)

You can listen and download episodes in Itunes here.

Maybe recovery isn’t my super power

Zoey · June 27, 2017 · Leave a Comment

I’m fond of saying that my running superpower is recovery. I like that superpower because running is my favourite, so I enjoy bouncing back quickly from events. Because that means I get to run more. It’s probably also why I like the half marathon because it’s not as brutal a distance as 5 or 10km but it doesn’t require as much recovery as a marathon. But as I was getting ready for Surf Coast trail over the weekend, and then recovering from it – I realised something.

Recovery, isn’t my superpower – extremely rigorous preparation and post-event activities are. Those things are easy to skip, but when you like recovery as much as I do, you get pretty good at them.

Some things I did that helped over the weekend are

  • I had two coffees and my usual pre-workout (which is basically caffeine and amino acids) but it also meant I’d had a decent amount of water before I even started.
  • Even though it wasn’t a race for me, I had four of those new GU waffles in two and a half hours
  • And as soon as I finished I ate a whole heap more: they had snakes and chips at the finish so I had those and I also had an energy bar that I’d brought along with my usual post-workout (which is just an even mix of protein and carbohydrate)
  • And then, when we got back to the cabin I put on my compression tights and we went out to eat more.

You might be sensing a pattern here. And everyone will be different, but this is what I’ve come up with that works best for me. Fuelling is probably the biggest piece of the recovery picture. Easy to ignore – because eating while running doesn’t come naturally and it’s usually the last thing you feel like doing when you finish. So the key is usually finding a way to get carbohydrates in as soon as humanly possible – even if it’s in drink form when you aren’t quite up to stomaching food yet. The more you give your muscles to work with during an event and immediately after an event, the less work they have to do to repair themselves, the sooner you will be back out there.

So maybe recovery isn’t my superpower, but putting a lot of time and thought into my recovery is and I’m okay with that.

Podcast: Episode 47 – Meet Jo: Trail Lover, Ultra Badass and Low Heart Rate Runner

OperationMove · June 22, 2017 · Leave a Comment

In this podcast I am having a chat to Jo!

And we tackle some of the burning questions that people have like:

  • How do you fit in training for a 100km trail run AND work AND do mum/partner/life stuff too?
  • What does low heart training look like
  • How does she fuel her really long runs (it’s more delicious than you might think)
  • And why discipline will trump ego

You can check out Jo at her blog, on her instagram or in the community group.

Head over to iTunes to listen (and subscribe! and review!)

You can listen and download episodes in Itunes here.

 

Podcast: Episode 46 – Strategising your next half marathon pb

OperationMove · June 15, 2017 · Leave a Comment

This episode I talk about all of the strategy that goes into a half marathon event

Even after you’ve done all the training there is:

  • Nutrition in the lead up: should you be carb-loading or avoiding fiber?
  • Hydration before the big day: how to make sure you are actually absorbing all of that water
  • What’s your pacing strategy: why negative splits are terrifying, but can help you
  • What’s your on-day nutrition and fuelling strategy?
  • Why would you warm up when you are running a ridiculous amount of kilometres anyway?
  • And finally, your recovery plan

So I talk a bit about all of those things and I have a teeny little rant about those posters that reduce the distance of your run to a certain number of cupcakes or donuts. Don’t even get me started. And here’s that phat fudge recipe I was talking about.

Head over to iTunes to listen (and subscribe! and review!)

You can listen and download episodes in Itunes here.

Sometimes you forget to believe in yourself

OperationMove · June 13, 2017 · Leave a Comment

I wrote this in 2017 during a taper, when I had more time to think about things. Somewhere along the line, I’d stopped believing that I could do the really hard things. I’m not sure when it was exactly.

I’m not sure if it was after the Gold Coast in 2014, where I pushed my body to such a red-line effort, that it just refused to let me go back there.

I’m not sure if it was in 2015 in Melbourne where I tried to run under 4 hours and came up 8 minutes short.

Or maybe it was after that when I lost a training partner and I kind of floated for a year or so. It’s hard to say when exactly it was. Or if it was a lot of tiny steps along the way.

Which is funny really, because my literal job is to believe in people. That is the best, most rewarding and most vital part of my job. But it’s easy to give that to other people and it can be hard to give it to yourself. And it’s insidious too, you don’t even notice that you are doing it, or not doing it. Or maybe it’s just easier to let yourself off the hook.

So I had this idea in my head that I could maybe get back to a 1:55 half marathon if I worked really hard, but I could never get under 1:50 again. And as soon as I actually looked at that thought, I knew how weird it was. It’s five minutes. Anyone can improve by five minutes. Maybe it was to protect myself from failure, maybe it was because I just didn’t believe it was worth it to sit in that pain cave again. But there it was.

And it’s the kind of thing that isn’t about the time. It’s not. That belief, that I couldn’t improve, that I couldn’t get better, that I couldn’t achieve things that seemed impossible, that filters down into everything. It’s not the time that’s the problem, it’s the belief that is. The lack of belief wasn’t even overly responsive to logic. I’ve improved my mile time by at least 40 seconds since I ran that fast half at the Gold Coast. Which for a short distance, is a huge amount of time, and still I couldn’t match that objective information with an actual sense of belief.

I settled on the idea that I didn’t have to believe it, I just had to try. I set a pacing strategy based on going under 1:55 which seemed like a pretty aggressive goal for running on my own and with fuel but no water. I left some water in the car just in case I wanted to stop for it, but it was cool and so I decided not to waste the time in the end.

I fuelled up properly beforehand. I took three gels with me. I warmed up properly. I broke up the run into five sections.

1-3km – about 3% slower than goal pace to warm up

4-8km – about 1% slower than goal pace to work into it

9 – 13km goal pace

14 – 18km about 1% faster than goal pace

19 – 21km whatever I had left

The last 5km hurt. But mostly I felt pretty good. I had set up the pace zones as a workout on my watch with Garmin Connect, and so it defaults to just having the watch on that screen so I can’t see the overall time or the average pace. I thought about changing it over at certain points to see how I was going but I didn’t for a couple of reasons. One: I was terrified of accidentally knocking the wrong button and not having a proper recording of all that effort. If it’s not on Strava and all of that. But the second reason was that I knew if I could see the time, I would have taken the easy way out in the last 3km, and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to know that I could stay and do what was hard, right up until the end.

I was pretty shocked when I saw the time. Only 2 minutes shy of the Gold Coast. And enough to prove to me that I can still do things I don’t even believe I can do.

I don’t know what the answer is. Intuitively, I feel like it is that I do so much better with a training partner (even though those have always been virtual!) because they help to provide me with a context for what I’m doing, to push me to do better, to provide that extra sense of belief when I doubt it.

But for now, I’ll just have to find that for myself.

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