Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan T
Any aerobic fitness that you did lose from a few weeks off will come back quicker this time around anyways. I don't honestly think you'll have to worry too much about the aerobic fitness lost aspect here. The one thing that I personally would worry about for you is the physical difference between running and walking on your legs/feet/lower body.
Walking and running uses different muscle groups and it could be easy if rushed back in to encounter some weird leg pains such as shin splints, etc that you wouldn't have normally expected. So I think ramping back up miles even at an easy pace, just to get the miles under your legs after cleared to run will help reduce any risk there of injury. I don't think you would want to ramp that up quickly from 0 to 40 miles per week obviously.
Also since you have already been forced to taper due to surgery, you won't have 12+ weeks of build up fatigue in your legs. I don't know if you necessarily need a full two week taper before a half marathon. It might be more important in my opinion to get those miles built back up comfortably at this point. You probably want to back off the intensity of the workouts two weeks prior (partially because any aerobic gains from high intensity workouts is not going to even apply any longer within a two week window), but I would likely only start backing off on miles the week of the race myself.
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I could see that. Given that I ran hard 12 hours before the surgery and started pushing the heart rate again 3 days afterward, I'm assuming the taper you're speaking of is mainly leg tiredness.
There are so many wild cards involved here that I really don't know what to expect. As you said, the different muscles being used are a wild card. I'm really working *some* of the running muscles by doing this stuff, but not all of them. And then there's the fact that I weigh 10 pounds less than the last time I did a "self-race" to recalc training paces and whatnot. Oh yeah, and it has been 8-12 degrees cooler in the mornings the last week or so here than it has been for months. And knowing me, this week and a half coming up of mirroring run heart rates will yield higher heart rates than I was doing when I was running, thus likely pushing aerobic fitness up another notch and probably dropping a little more weight. And my running form may suffer a bit because I'm unintentionally trying to protect my right side from jostling too much.
All that taken into consideration, I figure that if I return to running next week, I'll either not run in the HM at all because of post-surgery pain/injury, or crush my HM goal time.
