N Steps Forward, N+1 Steps Back

It’s pretty appropriate that this post is late.

As recently as Friday this blog was going to be about recovery, momentum, and forward progress. Today, it’s still about recovery, and still about momentum, but not the kind of momentum that leads to forward progress.

After my PT appointment last week, I settled into a rhythm of nightly rehab exercises as follows:

• 3 x 10 Knee Extensions with Squeeze
• 3 x 10 Single Leg Glute Bridges
• 2 x 10 Clamshells
• 2 x 10 Side-lying Leg Raise
• 3 x 8 Step Down
• 20 Calf Raises
• 4 x 20″ Wall Sits
• 2′ Balance

Even better, I added this to the routine without sacrificing Core on Tuesday or Strength on Wednesday. This was going great. I could run a little farther every day before my knee started to feel weird, and I stopped once it did. By Friday I was cruising six miles uptempo with minimal discomfort.

The problem is that on Thursday, my son was sick with a stomach bug. By Friday night, I was sick with a stomach bug. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, I threw up some blood and got myself to the ER. By the normal hours of Saturday morning, I was home again after an IV bag of saline and two hours of sleep. My wife, after taking care of me before my hospital visit, was working with four. Our son, by this time, had gotten over his stomach bug and was working on an ear infection. He was cranky. We were cranky.

Saturday was very hard for all of us.

Sunday was a little better. After barely eating all day Saturday because I was too queasy, I was finally able to eat a modest amount of bland food. My son’s antibiotics had another day to do their work. Naps were taken. Chores got done. But my 15-miler with 2 x 4 miles at marathon pace did not.

The longer I am unable to fully jump into this marathon block, the more worried I get that I’ll never be able to. When my friend and I were already hurting after a couple weeks of Pfitz’s 18/70 plan, I decided to rewrite the plan to soften things up for us and give us a chance to get to the start line healthy. Now, I can’t even get to the start of the training program healthy.

This blog was supposed to be about rewriting Pfitz’s program. I’m still going to talk about it now, but I feel less smart about it and a lot more desperate.

As the gold standard for dedicated hobbyists like me, Pete Pfitzinger’s plans have a lot of good ideas about training baked in. Unfortunately, those ideas are baked into plans that are trying to squeeze as much quality into as little time as possible. It’s a tightrope walk. One little slip on a snowy day and I lost two weeks of training. As a new dad, I need more margin for error.

For my first marathon back in 2019, I cobbled together a plan based on stuff I found online. That went well enough, right up until I bonked hard around mile 18. For my next one, I picked up a new edition of Daniels’ Running Formula and followed the 2Q plan. I ended up as a DNF there, but it wasn’t the fault of the training—I repeated the plan for a big PR a few months later.

While training with the 2Q plan, I came to a few principles that have worked for me while writing my training since:

• Long runs always count as quality. Trying to squeeze two workouts into a week after even an easy two hours on Sunday never seemed to click for me. This is the bedrock of the 2Q plan: a long run, with or without pace work, and one other workout every week.
• The hour run is undefeated. I read somewhere that fitness gains increase significantly at 30 minutes of exercise, and again at 60 minutes, so at some point around adopting 2Q I also tried to run for at least an hour as many times as possible every week. Whether I got fitter from the magic of 60 minutes or just from consistent higher mileage, it worked, and it stuck.

This basic approach got me to three PRs, 12 minutes in all, over the course of two years. I abandoned it for Pfitz because that’s what everyone else seems to be doing, and because it seems to be working, and because his principles make sense. That said, I think I need to make Pfitz’s principles work for me. Specifically:

• I need more work at marathon pace. Pfitz’s plans prescribe more of these workouts than I usually do, and the workouts themselves are bigger. This is the most specific work in any marathon plan, so it makes sense to do more of it.
• The MLR is a great idea. In past plans, my non-long-run quality day was often the second-longest day of the week. That’s the way it’s drawn up in the 2Q plan. But the MLR is more marathon-specific than, say, 800-meter repeats at 5K pace. So why is my interval day totaling 12 miles? I can spend some of those miles better elsewhere.
• I can’t neglect Strength, Core, or Strides. It may seem silly, but having the simple exercise routines from Advanced Marathoning has made it so much easier to go to the gym twice a week. I’m already seeing improvement. I want to keep this up, along with regular strides and rehab.
• Weekly routine is important. Pfitz’s plans are hyper-optimized to the point that workouts can fall on Tuesday, Friday, or even in place of the usual Wednesday MLR. I don’t like this. It may cost me a few workouts over the course of the training block, but a consistent routine serves my busy life better.

Most of Pfitz’s core principles actually fit into my pseudo-2Q plan pretty well; going forward, I’m going to run my workouts on Wednesday, with the MLR on Thursday. I’m going to keep the marathon-pace workouts and do my best to complete them, though I may soften them a bit—14 miles at marathon pace during peak mileage is almost too daunting to comprehend.

None of this is to say I think I know better than Pete Pfitzinger, who has led countless runners he’s never met to new PRs with his training plans. What I do know is I know myself, and that has been the most important knowledge in writing my training these last several years.

My attempt at 18/70 was off to a really rocky start, and maybe it wasn’t all the plan’s fault, but I have to trust my gut here and figure out the best way forward. We’re doing it my way.

Monday: 4 easy. Rehab in the evening.

Tuesday: 4 easy. Knee felt a little bit better. Core at lunch. Rehab in the evening.

Wednesday: 4 easy. A little better again. Strength at lunch. Rehab.

Thursday: 5 easy. Better still. Skipped rehab after a long day taking care of a sick baby.

Friday: 6 uptempo. Just a little tightness in the knee. My nightmare begins in the evening.

Saturday: Spent the wee hours of the morning in the ER. Terrible day.

Sunday: Utterly depleted. Almost as terrible as Saturday.

This Week: 23 miles. A fine rebuilding week until the rebuild fell apart.

Baby: As you may have gathered from the stomach bug and ear infection, my son had a rough weekend. Fortunately, he has his appetite back now and the antibiotics seem to finally be controlling his ear pain. His fever is gone. My wife and I are hopeful he will be happy and healthy for his first birthday in a few days. Whether we can say the same for ourselves remains to be seen.