Sometimes things go wrong – understanding and moving on

Sometimes things go wrong.

As most of you who read this already know, at the end of December I started experiencing a sharp pain in my right foot, which in January was diagnosed as a stress facture of the second metatarsal. The diagnosis ended my hopes of competing in the MDS in April this year.

It has been a bitter blow, but one I have already come to terms with and I am already looking forward. In the grand scheme of things, many people have to face up to much worse in life than a fractured foot.

So, where did things go wrong? It has now been over six weeks since I first experienced the pain and six weeks since I was forced to stop running. I have, in that time, done a lot of reading, spoken to physiotherapists, sports doctors, and fellow runners and I know exactly what went wrong.

It wasn’t something simple, like a fall or dropping something on my foot. A number of different things all helped over a good couple of months.

A major part of the problem was as a result of my stubborn minded approach to running, which seemed to have reached new heights as I strived to do what I felt I needed to in order to succeed in the MDS. I have always aimed towards a high mileage training regime since completing my first marathon in May 2007. After only three years of running I moved up to 80-100 mile weeks, running twice a day, far quicker than a lot of people advised, but to me it felt like what I needed to be doing in order to develop.

For most of last year I think my body coped remarkably well with the mileage. Apart from a very small Achilles injury I didn’t miss much training at all and on the whole felt very good.

Unfortunately, I didn’t settle for where I’d got to, but instead I wanted do more and to push harder. This was the start of my problems (or perhaps the culmination of them).

Ultimately, things came to ahead when the November snow came. I carried on as if it weren’t there and even increased my training. After completing my marathon in October, a marathon that emptied me both physically and mentally, I took only a very short rest of five days before jumping straight back into heavy mileage and hard runs. This was in order to get fit for my first ultramarathon, a 3-day 82 mile race, which I ran less than four weeks after my marathon. In that race, like in Amsterdam, I pushed it to the max refusing at any point to take it easy. After 2-days in the race I had racked up a 40-minute lead over my nearest competitor, yet on the last day I still felt as though I had to go all out to win the stage and not just beat my nearest rival, but beat them by as much as possible. My head was telling me to be sensible, but my body simply didn’t listen or chose not to.

Even after that race I still couldn’t back off. I had a slightly easier training week, but at the end of the week I found myself racing in the East League District cross country race, where instead of simply completing it at an easy pace I raced it as if it were an Olympic final.

Part of this behaviour comes from my nature, my will and desire to win. This isn’t a bad thing. In fact, I think in terms of what I want to achieve in running, it is a very good thing. I just need to control it better and channel it effectively. At the moment it clearly dictates me and my running, not the other way round.

Back to the snow. Quite simply, snow is more difficult to run on than the road. Your whole body, including your feet have to work harder to make progress. A snow mile can be, depending on the depth and other conditions, a minute slower than a normal weather mile. I was doing over 100 miles in a week and I didn’t let the snow stop me, I ran my normal mileage. Based on the above crude calculation this means I was adding at least another 100 minutes (the equivalent of about 14 miles) to my weekly training, which was already very high and on tired legs from the recent racing. Add to this, the fact that it was physically harder on the body too, you can begin to see why things went wrong.

If that wasn’t enough, when the snow got hard and compacted I switched to running from trainers to fell shoes. Fell shoes are hard-soled with little or no cushioning, but in the slippy, icy snow provided great grip. My feet were taking a real pounding on every run and I was giving them little time to recover, as I was still running twice a day and for longer. Finally, I was increasing my weekly long runs. I was now regularly doing over 26 miles including one of 32 miles, which took over four and a half hours to do – a considerable increase., especially in those conditions. Even in my designated ‘easy week’ I couldn’t help myself, turning up to training to do hard reps in the snow and ice, even though my body was aching for a rest and I knew it.

Writing it down on paper it is easy to understand why my foot broke. It seemed pretty inevitable that something would go wrong. In fact, reading back over this makes me feel pretty stupid. I was clearly overtraining (very obvious statement in light of what I’ve said above). There were other problems too. In the first week of December I was ill with a virus that left me very fatigued and tired, another obvious sign of overtraining. I did at least listen a little bit to this and took a few days off to get better, but as soon as I was feeling healthier I went straight back into the high mileage.

It’s easy to point out all these problems now, especially with the benefit of hindsight and a large amount of time to sit down and ponder what went wrong. Clearly, when the snow came I should have cut things back to reflect that and should have found ways to lessen the stress I was placing on my body. There is a whole range of ways to keep fit when you can’t run. Ironically, I am finding out all about cross-trainers, bikes, and swimming during my rehabilitation as I wait for the bone to heal.

It also goes further back. My post Amsterdam Marathon activity was pretty crazy. I should have worked in more time for recovery, if not after Amsterdam then definitely after the ultra.

Again, it is very easy to point all these things out now, but at the time I was so consumed with getting myself in shape to run the MDS that I didn’t realise I was actually putting myself on course to run myself out of the race. It hadn’t helped that I had entered a 45 mile race in January too. Following success in my first ultra in November I was now even more determined to do well. With the race in January I didn’t want to sacrifice any miles or training in December and risk not performing well. This was definitely influencing my mind during training as I pushed myself on and on.

Understanding how I broke my foot answers one question, but a more interesting question I have been asking myself is why? Why did I let myself get into a situation where I was clearly doing so many things wrong, but didn’t see it or simply ignored it to the point where I injured myself?

I have already mentioned my competitive streak and desire to win and recognised that in the past I have let it control me more than I should have, which I know is part of that answer.

Another important thing is that I have always considered myself to be an athlete with very little talent, but a lot of determination and will power. This has translated into a belief that I need to do more in order to beat the person next to me. So, more miles, more training, and fewer rest days was how I believed I could do it. Having come into this sport at the age of 29, I also have this sense that I have got less time to get good at it before age catches up on me. This has influenced my thinking to a massive degree and another reason why I have tried to push myself so hard, so quickly.

I think this sums up a big part of the why.

Knowing all of this I am forced to ask myself another interesting question – what am I going to do to avoid this happening again? A simple answer might be – don’t run and train for ultras! That is certainly a part of the answer, as I need to recover properly before thinking about that kind of racing. I have no intention of running an ultra this year or even a marathon. But this is only part of the next steps for me, as I think I need a return to some basics.

Reading through some of the coaching manuals and texts I have learnt quite a bit during my hiatus. I must add, that a lot of what I have read has been told to me, in one way or another, by my coaches in the past, but I’ve not listened as well as perhaps I should have. I am sure, if they’re reading this they’ll be nodding their heads in agreement.

Tim Noakes, in his book Lore of Running, talks about 15 Laws of Training. Law 6 is: Try and achieve as much as possible on a minimum of training. I have never done this. I have always increased my mileage after every marathon and although I have improved with increased mileage, I wonder if I had tried to achieve more on less how I would get on. It would certainly help me understand to what extend my running performances are down to talent versus mileage. With that in mind I am going to scale back my mileage significantly for a large part of this year. I kind of have to for the first part anyway, as I rebuild back up from my injury.

I am also going to get a little bit more scientific. I have always been good at following some basic principles of training (apart from overtraining!) and have generally balanced speed session, recovery runs and long runs, which have delivered some good runs and fast times. I have, however, been awful at recording those training sessions in a systematic way and then comparing them against previous training to see how and where progress is being made. I am going to be a lot more disciplined in recording my training and reviewing my progress. This will at least give me more information to learn from and help me make wiser training choices.

In short, this whole incident has given me some much needed time to reflect and recover. I have reassessed how and the way I run. I am going to miss out on a race I had poured my heart and soul into, but hopefully I will become a better runner as a result and when I do get another chance at the MDS I will do better than I would have if I ran it this year.

My motto for 2011 is, train smarter, get faster.