[brianlcox]

The 6x 45min is your best bet. Once used to this, the next step would be to increase the length of one of these sessions a little bit per week to act as the weekly long run.

[brianlcox]

Here’s an update 11 days after my last post and about a month after the covid infection.

My lung pain is now nearly completely gone and my breathing feels close to normal. My resting heart rate is still about 10 bpm too high, and also my running heart rate is about 10 bpm too high compared to pace.

 

I’ve been back to really easy running for 3-4 days. I’m planning on keeping at this intensity for another week with around 1 hour per day for another week. After this, depending on how my resting heart rate improves, I plan to add strides for a week and then hopefully add more intensity the week after.

 

How are you recovering?

 

[brianlcox]

My AeT is in the low 160s and my LT is in the low 170s. I think that’s not so unusual for someone with a fairly well developed aerobic system.

I have no idea what my max is, as I’ve never tried. I’ve seen it near 180, but could probably go a bit higher if I had a good reason…

 

[brianlcox]

Thanks Andy and Rachel for the feedback. I feel like the bigger concern for me is the lung damage due to the bacterial infection rather than the covid damage. I still feel quite a bit of pain in my chest while breathing deeply, so I’ll keep things very easy until that passes. At this point I’m just happy to be well enough to leave the house and move my body again, albeit slowly.

 

I’ll check in from time to time to report my progress.

[brianlcox]

Sorry to hear of your health troubles Risto!

I am also recovering from a covid case that turned into pneumonia. I’ve been off training for two weeks, and before that I spent 3 weeks at around 50% volume to deal with a case of achilles tendonitis. I’m still off work for another week, so I’m pretty early in the recovery process.

Starting yesterday my doctor has allowed me to walk, but nothing too strenuous. I’m planning on walking about an hour a day, trying to keep the average heart rate under 110bpm, with no spikes above 130 bpm on hills. My AeT is 160, so this is theoretically very easy for me, but at 130 bpm I feel like I am working too hard and start coughing, so I try to avoid that. I plan to keep at this intensity for a week or two before increasing the heart rate cap to around 140 bpm, while trying to keep the average around 125. This will allow me to run the flats and downhills, but probably walk on the steeper uphills. I will probably increase my weekly volume up to around 8-9 hours during these weeks. After these two weeks I will increase the heart rate cap by another 10 beats a minute (which is pretty much my normal easy running intensity) and increase the volume back to my “normal” healthy volume which is around 10 hours. After two weeks like this I will start to add some strides and short speed work, depending how I’m feeling.

 

Best, Brian

[brianlcox]

Hi Nick,

Thanks for the reply. I agree that holding kettlebells are probably the way to go once the backpack gets too heavy. I will get a 12kg and a 16kg from my brother-in-law to try out.

My thought is that I might not really need to go heavier though. I’m already at 55-60% of body weight, which seems to be around the point where adding more strength stops helping improve running as much.  Maybe I should just move to 2x per week hill sprints now.

I also do speed work (such as 16x 200m or 8x 400m) onceper week to help with running economy.

Best,

Brian

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