What Went Wrong Log- Part One

The November 2009 Running Times had an interesting article called "The What Went Wrong Log" by Greg McMillan about looking at the 21 days of training before a bad race or an injury.   I initially figured I would not go through the exercise since my injury was the result of me falling off of a curb.  But after talking to Coach Dean about this article and how I wondered if my injury could be result of being tired or overtraining, he thought it would be a great idea.   I remember reading once that even sprained ankles are a result of overtraining and when the athlete gets tired and over trained injuries are prone to happen.  I don’t think my injury is related to overtraining since I was only running 4 days a week and this was my second week of hitting 40 for a weekly mileage.  It’s not like I jumped up that high (although I did ignore the 10% rule the week before). 

I build my own running schedules so this is good feedback for me with my training.  And  actually I can use this process on a good race too and look for patterns that will help with my future performances.  Let me state at this point, I have NOT completed this exercise and don’t know what the outcome is.  I’m worried that I will tie it back to something I did or didn’t do right and give myself a reason to take out the mental baseball bat and beat myself up.  I’ve already taking a bruising (physical and mental) that this injury did occur, I don’t know if I really want to know the answer if it was chance or if could have been prevented. 

This post will go over the process I took and the next post will analyze the data (like I know what I’m looking for).

Step one according to the article is to write down on a piece of paper 1 -21.  This represents the 3 weeks before the day of the bad race or the injury.  The numbers need to be written down as a column and not in week format because you’re body only knows what was done the day before and doesn’t recognize starting a new week.  We may mentally say it’s a new week but the body only knows the day(s) before.    In my case, since I’m geeky like this,  I put it into a spreadsheet.  I also did 22 days with day 22 being the day of the face fall.   This way I could also capture my long run which occurred 21 days before.  

Labeling the days down and the dates next to it I labeled across the top I put activity, miles, pace, runner information and personal information.  I have all the data numbers since mileage and pace is something I always keep track of.  What I don’t have, unless I blogged about it is how I felt, the weather conditions, sleep deprivation, diet, etc.  The article says it's a good idea to include weather conditions, cold weather, wind, hilly terrain, etc, in to your running log.  These types of items are what I labeled as runner information.  Personal information are events that occurred personally that may play a factor.  Once again unless something really sticks out in my mind, I don't keep track of the personal items.

The next step using my Buckeyeoutdoors running log, I filled out the activity, mileage and pace.  I filled in runner information where possible.  After that I looked through my blogs to find other relevant information.

Awarenesses up to this point:

• When I start up my training again I’ll at least keep track of resting heart rate. 
• My nutrition was not a factor since I was very good with that
• Being tired was a consistent item
• Stressors on the personal side are a lot

Part Two- Next step identifying particularly stressful training days