Back in action and my refinement of training plan

The injury treatment caused some down time in my training program. I was only trained like less than 40% planned mileages in for the past 2 months. With some help of the acupuncture, I am back in action. There are still some mild issue on the right ankle with PF, I am going to continue the acupuncture treatment for another few more week and hopefully it will be cured.

Now, with only slightly more and a month left until the SIM, it will be unrealistic to still aim for a 330 FM. I need to adjust my training plan with a slower target time. Also, the Challenge 68 in slightly further down the route, I will need to put up some mileages specified for this race with 1900m elevation climb and 1.62x of the FM distances. As I am now very comfortable to the 400 FM training plan, my adjustment are concentrated to get myself ready to the complete the 68km with the 5:40min/km pace, and complete it with less than 7 hours. This will also enable me to complete SIM around 4 hours. The key challenge now will be how to stay injury free (and stay on the recovery curve from what I am currently suffered).

I started in midway of the new training plan, after a week of slow restart, I will straight jump into the week 5 of typical Hansons Marathon Method program (with 5x 1000km speed intervals). I completed that speed intervals this morning, and I still had the great feeling about the training pace in this plan. After all, I spent about 8 months working in this training regime last year before SCKLM 2014. I think as long as I stay injury free, and the cold weather in Seoul will help me to score another PB (being closer to 400 or even below it). Other key adjustment was increase the length of all Strength Intervals and tempo runs which scheduled after the SIM, plus some back to back 20-25km for most of the long run towards the 68km race.

Finally, I got my running sunglasses. I run with spec and don’t use contact lens, hence it was never consider as one of the essential running gear. But I am going to do more UltraMarathon and it will be great help to reduce the mental stress incurred with running under the hot sun. Anyway, as I usually run early morning, and most of the Malaysia race started early to avoid the heat, I need something slightly special. Wife got me a Rudy Project Impact X2 as Christmas gift. It came with a pair of photochromic lenses that change with UV light. I tested it out for my morning run on yesterday (5am), today (7am), plus some driving around. The lenses are clear enough for the morning run, and dark enough for driving under the hot sun. It will be under full test this Sunday as I plan to join the 30km LSD organized by MURA at Titi50 route. May be I will write out a review after that (put too many promise on gears review, but never materialized).

That’s for now, happy running.