This left Achilles tendon/Posterior Tibialis tendon crap (some sort of tendinosis/tendonitis) is for the birds or using better left unsaid words. Yeah, I am a bit frustrated with how 2-3 inches of the old body is stopping me from getting back to regular running.

Unfortunately, Achilles tendon issues take as long as they take, making this even more frustrating because I don’t know when it will resolve itself. Probably sometime over the next 6-10 weeks (It has been two weeks).

Although I am running around 2.0 miles at a mostly easy effort now and, the left leg doesn’t bother me too much during the run. Although I get to whine and gimp a bit after

So, I know I am making progress. It just isn’t as fast as I would like. 

What else is new when it comes to running and injuries. I am like any other runner I know who is injured. We want to get back out running as soon as possible, and patience is not always a noun, and often is more of an abstraction or a cuss word – as in “patience my arse, I just want to run.”

I am working hard at not being stoopid. 

Capping the mileage at just over 2.0 and keeping the runs at an easy effort worked well this week. On days when I want to do a little more, the weather is cold/nasty, or the leg has a bad day, I can get on the Elliptical. It isn’t running, but it doesn’t bother the leg and gets the heart rate up a bit for an extended period.

So those were both good things from this week, and you never know, someday I might even get to be a bit smahter.

Stryd

While I am not using this new “toy” a whole lot yet, I am learning a LOT about running with Power and using Stryd. The Stryd site, their YouTube videos, and the Facebook group gave me lots of information and ideas about how I will be using Stryd in the future. 

An excellent recommendation that someone made was to follow the Palladino Power Project Facebook group as well. Reading his explanations and ideas has clarified some questions that I had about running with Power and Stryd. 

Both of the Facebook communities are fantastic about answering questions and/or finding answers to question that others had that I didn’t know I needed to know. Often you have to know enough to ask the right questions, and at this point, I don’t have enough knowledge to know what questions I should be asking.

I mostly keep my mouth shut, read articles, watch videos while absorbing information about Stryd, running with Power, and simplifying my training methods.

As a result of the Achilles situation, I did change the start date for the Intro to Stryd training plan back another week. There is no way my leg will be ready to start this week. 

Through the Palladino group, I did find out a work-around to the Stryd Critical Power calculation while I am injured, and it made a lot of sense. Here is the link if you are interested.

Training Thoughts

This week, I thought a lot about what I want to do after the leg decides to let me run well again. Initially, I thought about focusing on training for a 5K on July 4th, but I worried about the intensity level that I knew that 5K training would bring to the table, even with Stryd helping me train smarter. 

I also knew that I could not start Half Marathon training with this injury setting me back so far. So I opted for a 10K plan, which I believe will give me enough intensity to run a decent 5K (for me) by July 4th and better set me up for what I decide upon for my primary Fall race.

The hard part is that I am focusing on simplifying my philosophy regarding how I should be training in the future. That idea that I cannot keep moving to the next shiny thing in training plans as I have been known to do. 

Attempting to incorporate all the different training philosophies that I come across in books, the Internet, or wherever into one coherent training plan to works well for me isn’t working.  

Yeah, that Achilles thingy is telling me that too!

It is time to run with power for more than a month and see how the body does with it. I have a feeling that the monetary pinch investment I have made will encourage me to stick with it longer than I usually do all the free stuff that is in the books I have around the house or from the Internet.

Running Watch

Also, I have been doing a lot of research on what I want/need in a new running watch. At first, I was pretty sure that I wanted an Apple Watch, I have gone all in to Apple. However, the more I thought about it and read the reviews, having a touch screen to control functions when I am hot, sweaty, or it is cold outside, brings issues to the forefront, that I hadn’t thought about before. Plus, the battery life isn’t that great. The Apple Watch is a smart watch that does some running stuff, it is not a running focused watch that does some smart watch stuff.

Update, I saw the Apple Watch SE at Sam’s Club on Monday morning, and they are not Harold the Destroyer proof. Not something that would work all that great for me at this time, I don’t bubble-wrap my watches or myself.

A good friend highly recommended the Polar M2 when it comes out, and looking at the ecosystem behind the watch, it was very robust, which intrigued me. While I liked the better user interface on the Polar Flow app/website and some of the features/capabilities on either the Polar or Apple watches, I kept thinking about when it came to switching to a new running watch and the changes it would mean. 

Are the different features of another brand of watch and the apps/websites that come with them worth changing everything, especially since I have moved to primarily tracking my running using Stryd?

I have used Garmin running watches since 2012, am familiar with most of their peculiarities, and while I am not a huge fan of the Connect app or site (I preferred the old site). Garmin Connect provides the data that I need when I want it, I have a pretty good idea of where to look, and the FR 245 integrates well with Stryd. 

The learning curve would be a lot less staying within the Garmin ecosystem, and it is nice to go back over almost nine years of data to look at different trends or crunch data when I want to.

So I have pretty much decided to go with a Garmin 245 at some point this Spring. The Apple Watch is intriguing, and the health monitoring aspects, as an old fart, make me ask do I need the health tracking more than the run tracking. Polar has some features that I think that I would love, but getting those features do not put the Vantage M2 ahead of the 245. For me I would need to go up to the Polar Vantage v2 and at that price it won’t happen.

My answer is: at this point, I am reasonably healthy, and the Garmin 245 has some of the health tracking features I am looking at in the Apple watch, so for now, the 245 wins. If my health changes dramatically, my choices might quickly change.

What did I learn this week?

Overall, it was a pretty good week despite still recovering from that Left Achilles misery. I am looking forward to using Stryd and running with Power. Although both have pretty steep learning curves, but I am finding the subjects fascinating and see the possibilities of using these methods to train. So this injury has given me a bit of time to figure out a few things versus my usual jumping in headfirst and then figuring out where the rocks are.

Also, I learned more about running watches, their features, capabilities, etc. As a result of the research, I concluded that staying in the Garmin ecosystem is probably the best choice. Price-wise and feature-wise, the Garmin 245 is on par with the other watches I was looking at. My familiarity with Garmin watches will help me quickly get up to speed with using it.

Now to get the leg so that it doesn’t complain too much about going for a run and then not force me to gimp around on it the rest of the day will be a good thing. 

Yeah, I learned a lot this week.

Did you notice – not a word about running shoes. I think that is a first for any week in review for me. 🤪