Last week I’d been looking forward to rewarding my arrival at the end of my training week with a frothy coffee at Cafe Nero.  It was Friday morning, I’d done a good, long swim and had the luxury of a rest day on Saturday before a race on Sunday.

The coffee was nectar and, well, I had a second one.  (I really know how to live, don’t I?) Hmmmm. I didn’t quite finish the second one, but I must have been caffeined up good and proper because that night I couldn’t get to sleep. At all. I even decamped to the spare room for total silence, but really didn’t drop off until about 2.30am. And then I kept waking up.

So I probably ruined my rarer-than-hens’-teeth, longed-for, deep, post-training sleep and lie in combination by having a second coffee.

I’ve weaned myself off caffeine a bit over the last few months. I’ve found some good decaff (Lavazza blue label) which still gives that glorious coffee hit and feel but without the shakes and sleep probs.  Silly me for not ordering de-caff at Nero…

Well, I’m well and truly back into ironman training.  This is week 6 of a 30-week programme. At this stage it’s all low intensity endurance work, building up the ability over 10 weeks or so, to swim and bike the full ironman distance (swim 2.4 miles and bike 112 miles).  Running, for me, takes a bit of a back seat.  In fact to do an ironman at my level, full marathon training just isn’t necessary.

This has been brought home to me this week.  I did a 10 mile running  race at the weekend because it’s a great club outing and a hilly, challenging course. I didn’t race it, but used it as a training run, running to a heart rate that kept me firmly aerobic. At no time was I working hard and I had a lovely time. But that evening the tell-tale hammered legs syndrome kicked in and today, two days later, they’re still feeling heavy.

And that’s why you don’t do too much insane run training for ironman! It takes so much out of you that it can impede the rest of your training.

So the focus is fully on getting in the miles at the moment, recovering and resting well between efforts, eating well, then doing it all over again.  It’s a long haul to get to the start line unscathed and fighting fit – so it’s best not to blow it early on.

I’m doing so much training at the moment that, if were rich, I would have a massage every other day if I could. My shoulders and neck are suffering from getting used to my new bike position.  My arms and back are doing a lot of swimming – not really a problem but there are still things that could be smoothed out with a massage.  And my legs and glutes – well, you can imagine. They’re cycling and running and kicking and generally working very hard.

A friend and fellow massage therapist and I ‘swap’ massages every month which is great.  And I do have extra massages between the monthly ‘swaps’ regularly. But I still feel I could do with something more frequent.

I’ve researched The Stick and foam rollers which are advertised as self massage tools; and  I worry that the techniques that are supposed to be used with them are dodgy.  With legs and arms, massage strokes should always be towards the heart, so that blood and lymph are pushed in the direction that works with the non-return valves in the lymph and blood vessels.  Yet videos online show people sawing back and forth with The Stick as if they were rolling out pastry.  And with the foam roller we are told to roll our leg muscles  back and forth across the roller for best effect.

Hmm – not sure about that.

Anyway, I wanted to do what I can to self massage so I opted for the cheaper of the two products – the foam roller.

The jury’s still out, to be fair.  But I’m determined not to roll back and forth and ignore the ‘towards the heart’ rule which makes using it harder, probably, than it’s designed  to be.  Perhaps I haven’t worked out the best way of using it yet, but at the moment, I’m finding it hard work to take my bodyweight on my arms and shoulders so that I avoid the rolling back and forth business.  Because of this, I have to use – and therefore tense – some of the very muscles I’m  trying to work on.  That makes them harder to work on… and more painful.

So. We’ll see.  Lots of people swear by them, including physios so they can’t be all bad.

Did the  English National Cross Country Championships on Saturday and I have renewed respect for people who race cross country regularly.

You don’t need to qualify for these championships – just to be a member of a club.  I was making the trek to Leeds so that my son could run and, as a friend pointed out, it seemed a long way to go without having a run. But my thoughts of having a gentle run to heart rate were blown out of the water rather.

I’ve done the odd cross country race in the past – even bought some spikes a couple of years ago… (but they made my knee swell up almost instantly) – but it was a bit of a muddy step up going from a low key summer xc league race to the nationals.

If you’ve not raced across country and you are a club member and have access to xc races, give it a go.  They’re relatively short (the senior women’s race  on Saturday was only 8k) but they’re tough in lots of ways and will test you differently than road or trail races.

You can’t get into your rhythm because the terrain is always changing and you have to think about where your feet are going to land. Sharp gradients make you want to alter pace and stride rate – down can be as challenging as up. There can be MUD. Ankle deep, dark, slippy stuff which can put you off balance if you’re not relaxed and strong in the core. There always seems to be a camber. And 8k seems a lot longer than it does on the roads.

I came a glorious (ahem) 456th out of 543 starters so was kind of at the beginning of the stragglers. That’s another thing that’s challenging – I’m no Liz Yelling but in road races I’m usually in the middle of the pack. Competing against these well-hard racing ladies who race xc every weekend made me feel rather slow!

Anyway, it was a great experience and I’m very proud to be able to say I raced in the national championships with  Steph Twell (well, behind Steph Twell – she finished about 15 min ahead of me…)

Training for my ironman event this July I’m doing things slightly differently.  Rather than concentrating on distance and pace, as I would for marathon training, I’m training to time and heart rate.

This means that, in the current endurance base-building phase, rather than going out for a 9 or ten-mile run at x min/mile pace, I’ll run for 90 mins at within a certain heart rate zone.   In many ways it’s refreshing not to have to worry about pace. Blimey – no, it’s fanTAStic!  It almost feels lazy… but this being ironman training, it’s the frequency that’s been getting to me.

Anyway, that’s for another blog.  Heart rate.  I did my first race to heart rate a couple of weeks ago and it was very interesting.

My plan was to use the hilly Ryde 10 mile race on the Isle of Wight as a training run while on a bit of a Winchester & District AC jolly – it’s a club league race so quite a few of us were on the 9.20 ferry from Portsmouth to Ryde.  So – no racing, just a 90 min run at the top end of my endurance heart rate zone.  On my Garmin I only had heart rate and average pace showing.  The heart rate was the only thing I kept tabs on.

It required discipline, on the first hill inside the first mile, not to forge ahead with everyone else. I had to run slowly and so many people passed me which was horrid.  But I kept the heart rate down. Then when the terrain levelled out I kept to a heart rate just slightly lower than it had been on that hill because that felt good.

And that’s how the race progressed. I had no idea about elapsed time and just focused on heart rate.  I did go for it in the last mile a bit but it was a great result. I finished within a minute of my PB – and that was set earlier this year on a less hilly course.

I normally race trying to keep close to a certain pace.  That works most of the time, but on some days you’re just not up to it for whatever reason. On others you feel brilliant and can run harder than your target pace.  This experience has made me think that I should be braver and race according to heart rate just to get the best out of my body on that particular day.

In the excellent Lore of Running, author Tim Noakes talks about the differences between long distance runners internalising and externalising.  Some runners (often less experienced ones) externalise ie when the going gets tough they try to distract themselves from  how bad their body feels by listening to music, looking at the surroundings, thinking about anything other than how much their body hurts.

By contrast, experienced and elite runners tend to internalise. Ie they concentrate on how their bodies are feeling. They tune into their bodies, go into a mental state where they may not be consciously aware of their surroundings and run very intuitively.  They are able to let their body run the way it wants to on that day.

I’m sure it’s all more complicated than that because the complexities of racing come into it but I think that, at Ryde, I somehow ran the way my body wanted to and had a good experience. Running to heart rate might have had a lot to do with that because I had no other pressures of time, pace, race placing etc.

I’m starting to see a build up of new clients who are training for spring marathons.  Typically, a marathon training programme for a spring marathon will start around Christmas so, now that it’s mid-Feb, people have got a good six to eight weeks of training behind them… and the legs are starting to feel it.

It’s essential that we look after our bodies when you’re in heavy training, even if we’re coping with it all well at the moment.  So that means, good nutrition, lots of sleep (the most under-rated training tool), stretching after every run (yes, every run!), light training days between heavy days and, shock horror, days with no running at all.

Sports massage can help keep your muscles in good health and help nip potential over-use injuries in the bud.  And supple, healthy muscles tend not to get damaged as easily as tight, knotty, tired muscles.

A few weeks ago I saw a spate of runners with adductor problems. (Adductors are the inner thigh muscles that you use to squeeze your legs together). If I’m honest I can’t explain that particular situation, but some other spates of particular problems are easier to explain.

As I write we’re coming into the cross country season.  After a summer of running on roads in bouncy trainers, people are starting to run more off road and are doing more hill training.  The cross country (uncushioned) spikes are coming out.  It’s been really warm lately but soon many women will be abandonning flip flops and sandals for boots and higher heels.

All these things tend to bring out calf problems.  Running off road, if you haven’t done it for a few months, can mean the muscles that  flex, extend and stabilise the foot (they run down the inside and outside of the calf) start having to work harder as you run over uneven ground.  High heels tend to make your feet supinate so the muscles down the outside of your calf may work overtime as they struggle to keep your foot on an even keel.

A period of heavy rain in the winter makes the ground heavy and a summer drought or even a series of very hard frosts can make the ground hard – these things can affect runners so much.  So there probably is a logical explanation for why I see certain problems cropping up  a lot in a given period.

But I’m still not sure about all those adductors…

It really is time I started using this blog. I’ve been meaning to for ages…

I’ve started subscribing to Peak Performance, a research newsletter covering stamina, strength and fitness. There’s an article this month about why getting the right sort of nutrition inside you after a hard effort helps you not only recover better but can prevent the effects of overtraining. They’re saying that it looks like after a really hard session it helps to have some protein as well as carbs in that crucial first 30 mins after your session’s ended. What they didn’t say was what sort of proportions might be useful. I think getting the nutrition right makes such a difference during a heavy training period but I usually only really think about it in a major way after a long run when I def get the protein in as well as carbs. And if I’m having a rest day the next day I’ve not worried too much. But I’ll remember from now on to take something to the track with me, too, and the same for after tempo sessions.

Must remember to do the same for my son Jack. Getting the balance right with growing teenagers who train is another story…

At last I’ve started to build my sports massage website. It’s still very much work in progress but at least there’s some information here to explain the basics.

More soon!