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Podcast: Episode 61 – The Struggle is REAL: Picking a Running Coach

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I recorded this podcast at a time when I was trying to find (and commit to) a running coach. It’s a lot like dating, and I’m reminded of how somehow back in the nether regions of my memory, I recall why I hated dating so much before I got married. Anyway, I digress. Finding a coach! I often get asked why I would need a coach, because clearly I don’t have any issues with motivation, but the truth is that motivation and accountability are only a small part of what a coach does. And frankly, I’d be suspicious of any coach who didn’t have a coach, because how much do they really believe in the process if it doesn’t apply to them?

So in this podcast I talk about:

  • When you know you are ready to take that next step and start working with a coach
  • What are some of the reasons why you might need a coach
  • And what are the best way to find a coach who is going to work for you.

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

You can listen and download episodes in Itunes here.

Podcast: Episode 60 – What Happens When You Get To The Finish

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This week, I’m meeting the Operation Move team in Melbourne!

And in honour of getting to start lines, I decided to talk a bit about some of the many feelings that can overcrowd you at the end of a training cycle, and how to get over some of the mental hurdles that a race can throw at you.

Questions like:

  • Why do I feel so down at the end of the training cycle?
  • How come I always get sick during taper?
  • Is my ego stopping me or helping me?
  • And other adventures in mental gymnastics.

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

You can listen and download episodes in Itunes here.

Food preparation tips to fuel your training

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I’m very excited to have Nicole from Planning with Kids sharing some of her great tips and strategies for planning ahead to make sure you are getting everything you need in your week and you are never stuck for something to eat when you get busy or have to grab something between a run and work or getting the kids to school.

If you’d like to get Nicole to help you with streamlining more than just your food, you can sign up for her 7 week online course, Planned and Present.

A consequence of training quite a bit, is that you need to eat quite a bit. Nutrition plays such an important role in both performance and recovery for training and racing. I am not a nutritionist and have sought advice in the last few years to help me come up with the right nutrition plan for me. To be able to execute the plan, I have become very practiced at prepping and cooking lots of food to keep me fuelled for my training.

Each weekend I undertake a weekly prep session to make sure that I eat enough of the right foods to make sure I can train the way I want to. There are weeks when for whatever the reason, I don’t get a chance to do a weekly prep session or only do a very small session. I always find I don’t eat as well when this happens and it does have an impact on my training. I might find that towards the end of my end long run for example, that I feel like the tank is empty, when usually I wouldn’t feel like that at all. The upside to experiencing this occasionally is that it reinforces to me how important my weekly prep is.

Having been at this food prep game for a number of years now, I have learnt ways to make it as easy and as efficient as possible for myself:

1. Determine what to cook

I don’t plan out every single meal and snack I have across the week, but I make sure I have a pretty good idea of how it will go:

  • Breakfasts – I have a few different smoothies that I will have for breakfast, like this Choc Coconut Smoothie or something similar with big handfuls of greens and protein powder instead of eggs. Weekly prep wise I make sure I cut up and flash freeze plenty of bananas so I have plenty to make my breakfasts.
  • Lunch – my lunches and dinners are interchangeable. They contain a starchy carb, veggies, protein and a some fat. Think left over taco meat, sweet potato, avocado and broccoli. I will look at my week ahead and work out what starchy carbs I will need for my lunches and what veggies I want to have with them.
  • Dinners – I create weekly menu plans for the family dinners and I use this as the base for my dinners too. I try to eat what the family eats as much as possible but I do need to make some substitutions and additions to cater for my food preferences and the quantity of food I eat. For example when the family has Spaghetti Bolognese., I will sub out the spaghetti and have the meat with either rice or sweet potato and veggies.
  • Sweet treats – I do have a bit of a sweet tooth, so most weeks I will make something that I can have as a dessert or sweet treat. I often like to experiment with these and copy raw treats I have had out and about, so will write up a list of ingredients I will need to make it.
  • Condiments – I do eat a lot of veggies now but I am not one of those people that love veggies. I don’t jump with excitement at the thought of a plate of broccoli! To help me with my veggie intake I make a number of my own condiments like dukkah, garlic aioli, fresh salsa, kimchi, etc. Dukkah seriously makes everything taste better! I will look at what condiments I have on hand and generally make at least one each weekend.

2.Work out when to cook it

With five kids who have sporting and social activities, a husband who plays weekend sport and trains himself, to fit my long run in and food prep I need to plan out in advance when I will cook so it actually happnens. By Thursday I tend to know all the details for the commitments we have on the weekend and I can determine when I will have time for prepping food. By looking at this in advance it means that I can then make sure I have been shopping so I have all the ingredients on hand when I start to cook.

As I have cooked most of the items before, I have a rough idea of how long each recipe will take me. Food prep however tends to take longer than you think at it is always completed amongst the usual activities of family life – making kids something to eat, talking with the kids, helping with homework, resolving disputes etc, so you need to always allow for more time than you think you need!

There is a bit of art to working out what to cook when, so you can minimize the time in the kitchen and the amount of clean up you have to do:

  • Making recipes in bulk – I also incorporate weekly prep for the kids’ school lunches on the weekend, so planning out the meals I cook means that I can get a lot of bang for my buck from one meal cooked in bulk. For example I might cook up 2kg of taco meat (using my own seasoning) and this will be for:
    • Dinner that night
    • The protein element for my lunches
    • Taco parcels for the kids’ lunches
  • I try to make at least two things each time I cook to save on set up, pack up and clean up time. Each time I cook, I have to wipe benches, stack dishwasher etc, afterwards so it makes sense to limit the number of times I have to do this.
  • I take into account things like cooking time or setting time, so I can make other things while that is happening. For example with kimchi, I need to leave the salted cabbage for a couple of hours, so will prepare that first off and when I have cakes/muffins etc for the kids’ lunches in the oven baking, I will wash and prep veggies to eat through out the week.
  • If I am using the food processor for a few things, I will work out if there is a recipe I should make first so I don’t have to wash it in between uses. For example if I am going to be making my own chicken mince (throwing chicken breasts into the food processor!), I will do that after I have used the food processor for grating veggies. I am happy to have grated veggie scraps in my chicken mince, but once raw chicken has been in the food processor it has to be washed.

3. Storing the food

How much food I have to store varies each week. I generally don’t put anything in the freezer and find that most food lasts until Friday if I store it well. I use glass containers with lids where possible. You can find some good advice on food storage times here, but you need to make your own decision on how long you store your food for.

For things like cut veggies sticks (carrot, capsicum, celery etc), I have found using glass jars with lids with a few drops of water at the bottom keep them fresh for 3 – 4 days. We have a comparatively small fridge, so I always do a clean out each weekend of anything old (if there is anything left) to make room for the new and start all over again.

Nicole Avery is a Melbourne mum to five beautiful kids aged 8 to 18, who loves running, CrossFit, tea and spreadsheets. She has run 5 marathons, the most recent being the Great Wall of China Marathon with her husband to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. Nicole is the creator of the Planned & Present e-course, a 7 week online course designed for mums to help them streamline the known repetitive tasks of family life, so there is more time for the fun bits of life – like running!

Podcast: Episode 59 – Planning Your Off-Season

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This week on the podcast I decided to talk about your off-season

For lots of us October and November mean we are coming to the end of the racing calendar *sob*

And for the highly structured, the off-season can be a bit of a challenge, but there are a few important things you need to make sure you get in your off-season, whether you love structure or not!

1) Time off. Really. Actual time off. Time without running.
2) Allow yourself to get bored and antsy from the time off.
3) Incorporating base training into your off-season
4) Working your way backwards from next years goals

And I also have a few tips for anyone who is tapering at the moment!

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

You can listen and download episodes in Itunes here.

On the fly

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Darrel Chapman Masters Half Marathon. 10th September, 2017

At the start line, anything is possible. There are no bad races. There is no fatigue. There are no road blocks. There is only you and the expanse of uncharted opportunity before you.

You get one, very imperfect chance to find out where your limits are.

There are almost no perfect lead ups to races and this was no different. A couple of weeks before I’d been sick with stomach flu in a way that I can’t remember ever being sick before. Completely incapacitated with it. And I didn’t bounce back, like I normally do. It took more time than I would have liked. And in perfect hindsight, I over-did the water in the morning and I should have planned ahead and used the same gels/fuel that I always use instead of grabbing something from the supermarket at the last minute. But that’s why races are races, and that’s part of what they will teach you that you just can’t learn anywhere else.

This race was different though. I was treating it as one of my threshold sessions in my training plan. So instead of my usual negative split strategy, I was following my threshold sets instead, with a bit of a longer warm up.

So the plan was:
3km @ 5:15 min/km pace
1km @ 5:30 min/km pace (this is a rather unfortunately paced hill on the course so I didn’t want to destroy myself getting up there)
1km @ 5:10 min/km pace
5km @ 4:50 min/km pace
5:00 Recovery at 5:48 min/km pace
3km @ 4:50 min/km pace
4:00 minutes Recovery at 5:48 min/km pace
2km @ 4:50 min/km pace
2:00 minutes Recovery at 5:48 min/km pace
2km @ 4:50 min/km pace
That would end my quality set. But to finish off my plan was
1:00 minute Recovery at 5:48 min/km pace, followed by
2-3km (depending on what was left) @ 4:50 min/km pace

The main thing that concerned me was managing the hills on the Lismore course at those paces. But if you go up, you get to come down.

First up, there was a warm up. Never under-estimate the warm up.

It felt pretty good, and even though I couldn’t feel my hands I was relieved that it wasn’t going to be too warm.

Next step, COFFEE.

It was at this point that I felt like I’d probably had a bit too much water to drink, so I ditched the coffee half way through. BLASPHEMY.

But you can’t beat a start line. This is the third year I’ve run the Lismore half, and it’s a bit special, so dodgy stomach or not, on pace or not, I soaked it all up.

I had a bit of a watch malfunction at the start. I’d set up all my paces as a workout through garmin connect, so I didn’t need to be constantly looking at my watch. And although it seemed to have started, it got stuck on the start screen. So I had to stop and start a few times with the buttons while running until it kicked into gear.

As I was running along, I felt like I was slow. I was on pace, but everyone was ages in front of me. And I started to feel like maybe the watch malfunction was stil going and it was reflecting pace incorrectly. Turns out, I was just behind a whole lot of men, who run reasonably quickly. But after I got to a landmark where I knew how far I’d gone and I could see that the watch wasn’t wrong, I settled in.

First 3km done at 5:10 min/km pace, and it felt comfortable.

Then came the hill. It’s interesting only running something once a year, because you can definitely tell the difference in your fitness. It wasn’t as bad as I remembered it and I was able to run up this year, instead of hiking.

That kilometre was done at 5:27 min/km pace, right on target thanks to the downhill.

Now I knew I had about 1 kilometre before my first and probably hardest effort would be, so I had a gel and tried to settle in.

That kilometre was done in 5:13 min/km pace.

Then came the next 5km. I’d made the mistake of running some of the course a few days before, so I knew what I was in for. Which was kind of good and kind of bad, but at least I wasn’t surprised when the hills came.

5km done in 4:50 min/km pace.

The 5:00 recovery was up a hill. So I knew if I was going to sacrifice pace somewhere, this would be the spot to do it. So isntead of managing 5:48 pace it was more like 6:20. And it’s about this point that I started feeling like my stomach wasn’t happy, but I had another gel anyway.

3km done in 4:51 min/km pace.

Stomach distress had kicked in and I had no choice but to slow down. But that 1 second off pace was still slightly annoying. I knew that in order to manage the next few quality sets I was going to have to go slower in my recovery periods. So this 4:00 recovery was at 6:18 pace.

2km done in 4:54 min/km pace

In a whole heap of discomfort, and just making the best of it. Recovery for 2:00 at 7:07 pace in the hope that I could find something for the last 2km.

2km done in 4:51 min/km pace. Yeah that extra second was annoying.

But it was done, and I was relieved that in less than ideal circumstances, I’d done the best I could do. Did my 1:00 of easy recovery at 7:29 min/km pace while I weighed my options for the last 3km.

I knew I was winning the masters division. And I’d done 18.8km in 1:36:30. So I knew to equal a PB I would need to absolutely blitz those 2.3km, and although lungs and legs felt great, stomach was unwilling to cooperate. So, I just ran at what I could manage comfortably.

2.5km @ 4:59 min/km pace

Second best half marathon effort, I will take that!

And any day you get two medals is a good one.

Making decisions mid-race are hard, and it’s easy to second guess yourself. But there were a few things that really helped me on the day. One was being really clear about what my goals were: and my goals were those 5km, 3km, 2km and 2km sets. One was being pragmatic about what was achievable. Given I’d achieved my main goal for the session, I was ahead of anyone else in the masters by about ten minutes, there was no need to absolutely kill myself in the last few kilometres to probably only equal my PB. All that extra effort would take a whole heap away from my training in the next week and it wouldn’t give me a whole lot of benefit on the day.

What I’ve learned about making decisions in races is: don’t make decisions too early – give yourself a chance to settle in, but don’t be afraid of making a decision either. Some things are just outside of your control, and the sooner you accept that and adapt, the better off you will be.

When you are able to make decisions like that you can learn to believe in yourself a bit more, trust yourself a bit more and learn what you need to know the next time you line up at a start line, anything is possible.