Sick Days

The past week has been a bad week of training on two fronts. First, the few extremely nice days we had early last week resulted in lazyiness once it got cold again. I just dont want to run on a treadmill after knowing how nice it is to run outside. Also, now that I have gotten out for a short ride on the new bike, I dont want to go to a small dark spin room. Second, the changing temperatures resulted in a bad stomach flu over the weekend and I am still attempting to fully get over it. Work in combination with being sick is not a good recipe for cardio workouts. while I feel better today, I am still fairly exausted from not eating well the past few days.

I definately believe its important to fully recover from an injury or sickness before going back into training, but today I am going to try a light and easy 5k on the treadmill. It might help to get the blood pumping and pick up my energy levels.

My nutrition has also been sub par the past week. I truely want to make a push to eat well and its is proving to be very difficult. This weekend I'll be stocking up at Sam's Club and the Local Market, so anyone out there with some advice on nutrition.... let me know now. Otherwise, I see a lot of chicken, eggs, and talapia dishes in my future.

I am not going to post the workout plan for the last week, because I didnt do it. I know, I know, not good, but its time to get back on the indoor bike and treadmill for a little while longer.

Crash Results and Recovery Week

I am going to be extremely brief. Below is my chart for the week and the recovery week.

I know its been a while

Its definitely been 2 :) long since my last blog post and I promise to wrap up a few things in a moment. However, I just ran one of the best 5k runs of my life so I am going to use this post to throw up the garmin stats.


As a result of this run, I am upping my goal in the Passionman at Bucknell to running the 3.1 miles in 20mins. The difference between the run I did today and the Bucknell course is a few hills and I will have already swam and biked. However, a 22min 5k today makes me think I can get there.


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Crash Workout Weeks, Pushing Intensity and Endurance

Very seldom do you find an endurance athlete who hasn’t had to, at one time or another, fight off the desire to push themselves into and anaerobic phase in every workout. We are competitive people, and want to work hard; harder than our competition, harder than we did the time before, and often end up working harder than we should. Overtraining occurs on two main fronts, intensity and volume. In other words pushing to hard (high heart rates and burning legs) or pushing for to long. Either one of these is usually a bad thing.

A Crash week is where you allow yourself to give into these desires. The key to a successful week of crashing is planning. You must plan three major facets. First, you need to plan you recovery week. Second, you need to choose whether you want to focus on speed, strength, form, endurance, or mental toughness (you should not choose ‘all of the above’ but rather one or two of these objectives. Finally, you need to plan you workouts during the CRASH week.

The benefits of a well-planned crash week are huge, especially for amateur athletes like myself. Pro athletes might find less value in crashing for a week, especially because their volume is already relatively high. However, the overall timing of a crash week is also very important. DO NOT crash close to a race. Many athletes fall into the trap of trying to get one final boost a few weeks before a race. In fact Googling crash workout weeks will bring up blogs for many of these people. But let me repeat that, DO NOT crash within a few weeks of a race.

Everyone is different and everyone’s workout plan for the week will be different. Average recovery time from a crash week is a week, but the gains might not be realized for another three or four weeks after that. I am in the midst of a crash week right now. I had a bit of a recovery week last week and below is the plan for the crash week and my recovery week.

Foot OverPronation

In order to fully demonstrate what I am talking about when I discuss my running form, here are some screenshots from the video analysis I took of myself running yesterday.

Good (Midfoot Strike and little pronation):

Bad (Over Pronation):  You can see how the ankle and foot cave inward.

Video Clip (Some Good and Some Bad):

One thing that jumps off the video to me is that my feet appear to be running down the center line of the treadmill.  In my next session I am going to try to focus on landing them on the sides of that imaginary line rather than directly on it.  I think this could be a big reason for the pronation.