I woke up in a bit of a panic a couple of weeks ago, and after some thought I've decided to take a step back and take a longer term view of my goals.
The injuries I sustained in the Christchurch Marathon have been taking a long time to get over. For those who haven't read the recap I wrote, I flared up an old(ish) achilles injury in my right foot, and sustained a stress fracture in my left tibia. They didn't feel that bad during the race but I could barely walk the next day.
Both of these injuries are not the kind of thing you recover from quickly. The stress fracture meant 6-8 weeks of rest, then start at a level where your running sessions consist of 1 minute gentle jog / 5 minute walk repeated a few times, and building up slowly from there. So you're looking at 6 months to get back to any decent kind of running.
The lesson from that was that I should be careful... my coach doesn't know my body as well as I do so I need to take a bit of care with the programme, especially regarding speed work.
I have the Rolf Prima Half Ironman coming up in about a week and I'm not going to be able to complete the run. The plan is to jog/walk it and probably pull out after about 10km. Other than that it'll just be an expensive swim / bike / transition training session.
I'm trying to work through another medical issue which has been causing trouble in longer sessions (I don't know the cause of it yet) so I doubt I'd get through the run in good shape anyway.
I'd expressed some concern about the injuries with my coach and he said it'd be feasible for me to get up to marathon level by mid-January, but the more I thought about it the more I realised I'd just be grovelling my way around the course, praying that I don't injure myself during the race. I am utterly sick of being injured and another 6-month recovery is not acceptable. Getting from maybe-10k to a full marathon in 10 weeks sounds pretty risky to me. Especially since the first week would be a rest week!
As a result of all this I have scaled back my Challenge Wanaka plans. I have changed to the half-distance event, which I should be able to complete in much better shape than I did last year given the training I've had up to now. If I can do the run under 2 hours I'll be happy and that's not going to need anything in the way of speed work.
Am I disappointed? Not really, because I had a Plan B Backup Goal. I've been wanting to have a really good go at a fast half ironman so this is an opportunity to do that instead. After that I can spend a full year doing a good solid buildup for the full distance in 2015. In hindsight it's what I should have done anyway as I was underprepared for Wanaka this year. To do an ironman you need to be in top shape so it's best not to rush the training.
I plan to be much more careful from now on, particularly with the running and especially the speed work. It'd be nice to get a good marathon in at some stage but maybe not as early in the year as the Christchurch one. My physio said that people with a cycling background tend to be very prone to running injuries and I'm no exception to that.
