Productively Unproductive

I treated myself to a new watch at the start of December, a Garmin Forerunner 245, and even though it is essentially an updated version of my previous watch (the Forerunner 235, which in turn was an updated version of my previous watch, the 225), I’m still in the period of learning about the watch. There are features I haven’t explored at all yet like mapping tools – all my runs this month have been local and on routes I am very familiar with, so I couldn’t see any benefits in using these tools just yet. Then there is information like Performance Condition, which feels completely incomprehensible to me. You get plus or minus numbers during the run which compare to a baseline figure which is generated from the first five or so minutes of the run, but although I understand that the higher positive numbers are the best, without understanding how the numbers are generated it feels entirely useless.

Training status reminds me on the first time I looked at heart rate data. It has the potential to be useful, but only within a broader context of what you are trying to achieve. Essentially it analyses your training programme as a whole and assigns a status reflecting the changes you should be seeing in your fitness. When I first used the watch, I was ‘Maintaining’ for about 10 days, meaning that my fitness levels were remaining pretty constant. Then I moved into ‘Productive’, indicating that I was getting fitter. However, over the past week, I’ve moved back to ‘Maintaining’ and then after today’s run into ‘Unproductive’. This suggests that my fitness is declining, a status which in different circumstances might be disappointing to see and lead me to make some big changes in my training. But not today.

I was already aware of the fact that my training hasn’t been particularly productive over the past week. My body told me that from how stiff it felt, both before and during runs. My scales told me that as it confirmed that I’ve put on a few Christmas pounds. And my bullet journal told me that by illustrating that a lot of my runs have been very similar recently. The occasionally icy roads have meant that I’ve been reluctant to do any interval sessions, as a fast pace and an unpredictable surface is a terrible combination, whilst the recent local flooding has made trail running difficult. There’s been a temptation to ease back completely, but I’ve resisted that partly because I’d like to run as often as possible whilst I’m off work, and also because I’m within striking distance of 2500km of running for the year (just 7.2km to go!) So, I’ve plodded on in the knowledge that once I’m back to work in January, it will be easier to focus on the structure of my training programme.

I think what annoyed me about the status of ‘Unproductive’ wasn’t what it said about my current training programme, but that I have a fundamentally different view of what a productive run is. A productive run is just one which improves your fitness, but can also be one where you enjoy yourself or learn something, and today was a tick in both of those boxes. The weather was nice and the overnight frost made off-road routes an option for the first time in a while, and the variety that brought was nice. Right now I feel like I’ll attack my next road run with much more purpose than I had during my last road run, though we’ll see whether my body is still quite so keen tomorrow.

There were times when I felt like Bambi on ice today, though not as you might expect on the actual icy sections of the route. Instead, it was the heavily rutted sections that were proving tricky today. Such sections are never easy to run on, but there is a knack to it and today I didn’t have that knack. My cadence was all wrong. Having done a lot of road running recently, my body wanted to settle into a consistent 175-180 steps per minute, but you have to be more flexible when you run off-road. Sometimes you’ll need to take lots of quick, short strides, other times you’ll need to lower your cadence and be a bit more deliberate about where your foot lands on each stride. I was already planning to do plenty of trail running next year, but today reminded me that it really needs to become my default option before June if I am to feel truly comfortable during Race to the Tower.

The Boxing Day 10k Revival

The Boxing Day 10k is my oldest running tradition, dating back to before a time when I ran regularly. It’s probably the only Christmas tradition which is truly mine too, though sadly the tradition slowly disappeared in recent years. My parents moved out from my childhood home in 2017, meaning that my preferred 10k route was no longer on my doorstep. I still intended to do a 10k on an alternative route that year, but struck down by a nasty cold, I was only able to do a steady 5k instead. In 2018 I was less than a week away from the New Year’s Day Liverbird Marathon, so moved the 10k forward to Christmas Eve, whilst travel prevented a Boxing Day run last year. A week ago it looked like travel would once again prevent the 10k this year, but as those plans were cancelled, I at least had the opportunity to revive the Boxing Day 10k today.

There are a couple of things you need to know about the Boxing Day 10k. Firstly, it has never been 10k. My old route in Coventry was 10.2k, and today’s route was the 12k loop I used for my Sunday runs in the first lockdown. Secondly, whilst there are no other runners or closed roads, I approach it as a race, albeit one for which I prepare particularly poorly for due to the indulgences of Christmas Day. But I always feel a little better about enjoying myself on Boxing Day if I put in a big effort during the run, and with traffic typically very quiet on Boxing Day morning, the opportunity is there for a fast time if I’m in good running form.

My Boxing Day run in 2016 is probably in my top 5 running performances ever. My time of 41:46 was a course PB of 35 seconds, which was a huge improvement given how many times I’d taken on that route.

Today though promised a much bigger improvement. Every aspect of my running has improved since the first lockdown, meaning that I was able to knock more than 2 minutes off my best time from lockdown when I ran the route in November. That run hadn’t been a flat out effort though, so I knew that if I gave it my best today, a course PB was virtually guaranteed.

One of the differences between today’s route and my old Boxing Day 10k route is that today’s route is much more exposed to the wind, and for the first 5k today, that wind was mainly behind me. That always makes pace calculations tricky – the numbers looked good, but how good were my legs? Was I pushing too hard, or indeed, not enough?

The hill up to Hampton on the Hill would be the moment of truth, as indeed it always is on this route. Today I had the added challenge of the fact that I had now turned into a headwind, and I simply had to embrace the fact that the next mile was going to hurt. I reminded myself that the final stretch of the hill is the steepest and therefore I needed to keep something back. By the time I reached that section, I started reminding myself that I had a nice downhill stretch just around the corner.

By the time I reached 10k, I was starting to feel the extent of my effort, but having committed to a 12k route, I didn’t want to let things slip now. I tried to focus on my form, and maintained decent splits despite the increasing fatigue. When I reached the final 200m I attempted a sprint which never fully materialised, which in many respects is the best type of sprint at the end of a run like this. If you can only marginally lift your pace, it shows you’ve come pretty close to emptying the tank. And the result was a time of 54:54 – almost 3 minutes faster than November, more than 5 minutes faster than May and more than 12 minutes faster than the first time I attempted this route in March. All told, a nice reward for a year which though awful in so many ways has at least gotten me back on track when it comes to my running.

Not So Marginal Gains

It’s the time of year when many of us start to look ahead to next year, one which surely must be better than 2020 from a global perspective. Yet from a personal running perspective, 2020 will be tough to surpass. I’ve smashed my previous records in terms of weekly, monthly and annual mileage, recorded a 100 day run streak and have been able to work back towards paces not a million miles off my PB pace across pretty much every distance.

All of this has been achieved by finding a balance in my training which works very nicely for me. Currently I’m running 6 times per week, taking a rest day on Mondays after a long run on Sundays. There’s variety in terms of locations, routes and types of sessions, and keeping a bullet journal has been a great tool for helping me to monitor when things might be getting a bit stale and in need of freshening up. So in terms of my general training plan, I have no intention of making significant changes. Instead, I’ll just tweak the sessions based on the goals I have at that time, whether that be building stamina, improving my speed or honing my technique.

When it comes to my diet, it’s a broadly similar situation. On the whole, it’s reasonably health. I could, and at some stage next year probably will, replace a few of my snacks for healthier options and reduce the number of treats I have each week, but I’m cautious about changing too much. Two years ago I drastically changed my diet, lost too much weight and didn’t have the necessary energy levels to fuel my runs properly or recover quickly enough afterwards. I definitely don’t want to make that mistake again, so again small tweaks are the order of the day.

All of this probably sounds a lot like marginal gains, so what’s with the title of this blog? Well, there is one area where I can make big improvements, and I’ve already mentioned it – technique. When it comes to my road-running technique, whilst I’m certainly not an orthodox runner, it seems to work for me. I probably need a little more focus on my form when I’m tired or attempting faster efforts, though that is easier said than done. When your heart is pumping quickly, keeping focussed on anything is tricky, and getting a tired body to do what you want it to do certainly isn’t a cake walk either.

However, my big goal for next year is to complete my first Ultra Marathon, which will be off-road. Trail running is something I enjoy a lot but am not well-practiced at. Indeed, I’ve only ever owned two pairs of trail shoes, both of which I still own (albeit one pair probably will never be worn again), making it easy for me to see how many proper trail runs I’ve done. My Garmin data tells me that I’ve done 775km in those two pairs of shoes, one of which I bought in 2017, the other in 2018. I’ve done off-road runs in my road shoes during that time too, but those have mainly been on canal towpaths and firm, dry footpaths. When I’ve taken on a more technical route, I’ve worn my trail shoes, and that figure of 775km highlights that I haven’t tackled too many technical routes in my time.

My room for improvement on the trails is huge. In my first trail event, the Howgills Half Marathon, few runners overtook me on the uphill sections or the flat sections of the course, but on the downhills they were flying past me. That was back in 2017 and I’ve improved since then, but I certainly wouldn’t describe myself as a confident descender. Six months might not be enough time to reach that level, but it is more than enough time to make big improvements.

But then we reach the elephant in the room – Covid-19. I don’t have steep, long, technical climbs on my doorstep. Some meet one or two of those criteria, but none meet all three. Finding such climbs requires travel, something which might not be as feasible as I’d hoped even a few weeks ago when I started booking my annual leave for next year. I might have to make do with repeats of steep, technical but short climbs, a few of which I do have locally. Fingers crossed it won’t come to that, but if 2020 has taught us anything, it is the value of being adaptable.

And Now The Fun Begins

It might be less than a week since I ran a Marathon, but it feels like a very long time since my last run. A sense of impatience has been building, which though something you have to be wary of giving into, can be viewed as a good sign provided you maintain control and don’t rush your return. It’s a good sign because it suggests that your physical recovery is going well (albeit you never really know how well until the first run), but it’s an even better sign in terms of mentality.

Preparing for and running a Marathon is a major endeavour, and doesn’t necessarily encourage you to continue running. I went through that after setting my PB in 2016 – I even considered concentrating on shorter distances in the future, and it was more than four months until I really committed to running regularly again. But today I’m looking forward to the new running challenges that lie ahead in 2021, and hopefully can maintain that feeling through the training blocks which I have planned.

But that is for 2021. I have a Marathon scheduled for Easter Sunday (and will probably do a solo Marathon on that date even if the event I’ve signed up for is postponed/cancelled), followed by the Race to the Tower Ultra on 5th June. That’s quite a short turnaround, and whilst I’m certainly not going to be aiming for a fast time during the Marathon (currently the plan is to try to reach the finish with as much kept in reserve as possible), it means that my Spring will be very busy. There’s a balance that always needs to be struck between giving yourself enough time to prepare and not burning out (either mentally or physically) before you reach the event, and January feels like the right time to start my training block for the Marathon. If I started now, I’m not sure I’ll be able to find the intensity in the training when I need it most, the period between 8 weeks out and 4 weeks out when I would normally look to complete the longest of my training runs.

All that being said, I’d still like to start that training block in the best shape possible. But I don’t want to focus on things like speed and distance over the next few weeks, because that mindset can be draining, particularly if progress is not as fast as you might hope.

Instead, I want to focus on having fun. I haven’t done much off-road running in recent weeks, nor have I spent much time exploring new routes. I’ve done a lot of similar types of run, and it would be nice to rectify that with some more variety. And the good news is that a varied training programme is great for building all-round running fitness, which should hopefully help me start the next training block in good shape without being a slave to the data.

Football’s Perfect Storm

The 2020-21 Football season is shaping up to be one of the most unpredictable seasons so far this Century. I wrote a few weeks back that there could be multiple ‘Leicesters’ this season, by which I mean massive outsiders winning major trophies, and since then things have only gotten stranger. Huge wins, goals aplenty, teams following up shock wins with meek defeats, all of this has given the league tables a rather different complexion to what we’ve come to expect. But why?

It’s Covid, right? Well, yes, but also, no. If you look below Europe’s top leagues, things are a little different. Take the Championship for example. Often described as a more exciting, unpredictable league than the Premier League, this season that really isn’t the case. At time of writing, the three clubs relegated from the Premier League sit 1st, 2nd and 5th. Brentford, losing playoff finalists last season, sit 4th. The three clubs promoted from League One find themselves in the bottom six. So far the Championship has been about as predictable as it is possible for a Football league to be. Many of the explanations provided for the unpredictability of the Premier League, such as the short turnaround between seasons and the high volume of games apply just as much to the Championship, indeed even more so if you exclude the Premier League clubs playing in Europe from the equation. But there are a few key differences too which help explain the perfect storm of unpredictability we see in the Premier League.

The first is the scheduling. In the Championship, it looks like any other season. The majority of the weekend fixtures are still played Saturdays at 3pm, with midweek games Tuesday or Wednesday. In the Premier League, we’ve gone from a situation where there would sometimes be as many as six Saturday 3pm kickoffs last season to a maximum of one this season. We now regularly have games kicking off after 7:30pm on Saturdays and Sundays, two Monday fixtures and even more 12/12:30 kickoffs. Whether there is a correlation between this schedule and the high number of injuries we’ve seen is something which would require in-depth study over a longer period of time, but purely in terms of unpredictability, it must be harder for teams to prepare when they are handed a different kickoff time from week to week.

That challenge is one which has been facing the top Premier League clubs for years though, and by and large the best teams found a way to deal with it and maintain consistency across the season in previous years. This season, no one seems to have found a solution to deliver that sort of consistency, highlighted by the fact that Tottenham and Liverpool currently occupy the top two places, both having accumulated 21 points from 10 games. That gives a points per game average of 2.1, and the last time a team won the Premier League with a lower points per game average was last Century. And neither Tottenham, Liverpool or indeed any of the other contenders have really given the impression that they will string the type run together which would push the average up much. I would be amazed if the Premier League winners picked up more than 85 points this season, quite a drop after four consecutive seasons of the winner picking up at least 93 points.

So why has no one found that consistency? For me, it is the trend towards high energy, high pressing which is key. It is a style of play which can be incredibly effective if done well, as Liverpool have demonstrated across the previous two seasons. However, it is also a very physically demanding style. So physically demanding that injuries are virtually guaranteed if players enter a match short of their required condition. That’s a scenario that becomes more frequent once the injury list starts to grow as there are fewer available players to cover and rotate, and also something that becomes more common when you have players recovering from Covid.

The problem is, with this style of play, you cannot just dial down the intensity. A high press requires a high defensive line, and if that initial press is beaten, something which becomes a lot easier as the intensity drops, it leaves a huge amount of space in behind for attackers to run into. It’s something we saw in Aston Villa’s thrashing of Liverpool multiple times, and if you’ve watched any Bundesliga (the league which really popularised this style) games over recent years, you’ll have seen this happen in almost every game.

Again, see the contrast to the Championship, where although teams press higher now than they did 5 or 10 years ago, the defensive lines are rarely as high as in the Premier League. Deeper defensive lines might limit the attacking threat a team poses, but it requires less energy and makes opponents work harder to create their opportunities.

Some clubs might be able to maintain a high pressing style by virtue of not playing in Europe and therefore having a bit more recovery time between fixtures. Southampton for example. But for those clubs playing in Europe, or unable to play with high energy due to injuries or illnesses, a more pragmatic approach might be called for. It’s no surprise to see a Jose Mourinho team top of the league, as although he’s always had a preferred style of play which can actually be quite entertaining, he’s never been afraid to adopt a different style if the quality of the opposition or absences in his own squad demand it. Would the likes of Jürgen Klopp or Pep Guardiola do the same? So far they haven’t, and their results have suffered in a relative sense. And with the Christmas fixture list as busy as ever, if they don’t, that perfect storm of unpredictability will only gain in intensity.