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Also before consultation are there any results that would be useful to have on hand?  I imagine a DEXA scan?  What about blood work, which I have records of for the past several years.  Probably a calorie count/meal track for a couple of weeks?  Anything else?

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Thanks!  DEXA scan is something I have been considering.  I am 5’10” and 175-180, so I think there is plenty to lose, I just need to prioritize it instead of constantly moving to the next thing.  I have done myfitnesspal for a few weeks at a time every once in a while to check on my macro/micro nutrient profile.

I will look into a consult.  Also I should probably look into having and “OFF season” as I just go from thing to thing right now.

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Agree with Scott what a bummer.  I hope by now you are finding some relief.  I have had covid three times now and it has always kicked my ass.  After the first bout I wasn’t able to get active again and started to think about long covid as a thing I was dealing with.  This was the same time that I started looking into mountaineering and fell in with evoke.  At the time I was aerobically deficient and so I started out with a relatively small volume of low end zone 2 work.  This felt super easy for me at the time but I stuck with it for 4 weeks before starting the 16 week mountaineering plan, which honestly starts pretty light in order to transition the athlete in.  I felt like all this light work really helped me get past the exhaustion and PEM I was experiencing.

The other thing I worked really well for me was breath work.  My focus with this was aid my body shifting into the para-sympathetic nervous system, so I do it a lot for post exercise recovery, but also if I feel exhausted and rest just isn’t restful enough.  One general idea governed my work and two specific exercises helped.  Generally when I wanted to calm down I  would try to focus on belly breathing.  For me this meant using my diaphragm to breathe and not my chest (chest breathing I tried to associate with hard work and/or exercise).  The two specific exercises were:

1.  Box breathing (breathe in for x seconds, hold x seconds, breathe out for x seconds, hold for x seconds, repeat).  This I did only belly breathing
2. The physiological sigh as described by Dr. Huberman This one I started with chest breathing and then slow shifted to belly only breathing to end my session.  I will occasionally do this when running/hiking if I am trying to stay in zone 2.  If I come to a short hill and don’t slow my pace enough and shoot into Z3 I will slow down a bit and do 2-3 physiological sighs.  I have noticed that it drops my heart rate between 3-10 bpm.  My experience is that you should NOT do this when trying to do high intensity work.  I thought it would be great for recovery periods in stuff like 30/30’s but my anecdotal experience was that it reduced my performance and any speed or Z3 work I was trying to do suffered

Good luck, hope you feel better,

Steve

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I enjoyed reading your story.  Hope you made it on some of those outings this year

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Helps a lot and is very much appreciated!

Steve

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5:45!!!

Last Friday was the day!  I had planned on it being Saturday/Sunday but due to weather I moved the day up, I wasn’t feeling all that great and had been counting on another day of rest, but still felt that I could pull it off and I wanted to start my mountaineering plan this week without anything else hanging over me.

Thanks Scott for the training advice it really worked!  I got sick and went on a cruise with the family but was able to stick to it enough to pull it off.  Thanks SKMS for the excellent suggestion about strength training, easing off was very helpful to feeling fresher in my speed focused workouts

Question about on going maintenance: Should I do these same type of workouts every 7-10 days?  Or shift to hill sprints every 7-10 days?  Or just leave them be for now and do another block of them in x number of weeks?  I would like to keep my pace near the 6 min mark as I do feel great and that it helped pull my pace per beat down quite a bit.  Note that last year my AeT was ~135bpm at slower than 12 min mile and today I ran the outdoor test at 9:30 pace with a drift of only 1.4% (138 -> 141 bpm)  But with that sort of improvement I am happy to repeat the test, I just didn’t think that I would have improved so much .. I am sure this has more to do with a year of base building than 10 weeks of speed training, but I would still like to stay my fastest ever self for a while

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Thanks for the info!  Very much appreciated

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Scott,

After putting your suggestions in training peaks and looking over my other workouts I have a couple of follow up Qs.  Note that I will roll straight into the 16 week Mountaineering course after I am done with this.  No specific objectives this year other than be ready for WA volcano ski season: Mt Adams, Mt St Helens, maybe Mt Baker again.  Anyways on to the Qs:

1. I should probably have a rest week in the next 8 weeks.  What would that look like?
   • Keep intensity but lower the volume?
   • replace 4×800 @ 6 min pace and 2x10min @ 7 min pace with Z1 recovery workouts and keep the strides workout?
2. I plan to keep strength training 2-3x per week (as I already have been doing)  Is there any reason to modify this or be concerned about the days this happens?  (I plan to have speed and strength on different days)

James,

Agreed that my all out mile has improved over the last year of focusing on aerobic base, but I am still 37 seconds short of beating my 7th grade self 😉

 

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Thanks Scott, this is really helpful!  After posting I found Jack’s article on speed and so started adding in strides/hill sprints 1 per week each, but your detail is very helpful!  We’ll see how I do, but your comments are very appreciated!

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Thanks Scott.  The explanation about sympathetic vs parasympathetic nervous system makes a lot of sense!  Thanks for taking the time to answer and share you knowledge!

Steve

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