Jan 2018 Training: Drinking the Koop Kool-aid

For Nathan's birthday last October, he knew to expect that one of his presents was Jason Koop's book, Training Essentials for Ultrarunning. He may not have expected that I would finish the book before he did. This left me in a dangerous situation: I was more excited about training for my next goal race (IMTUF 100) than racing the upcoming one. Fortunately, I pulled it together and had a great race at the Blood Rock 100.

It has been seven years since I truly felt well prepared for a race, with a several year struggle to pregnancy and clinical responsibilities both to blame. After Nathan and I exhausted our affordable options for becoming parents for the second time early in the year, I was ready to move forward and hopeful to break my streak of barely adequate ultramarathon training. I embarked on the FIRST program which I had successfully used for marathon training in college, hoping the high intensity, low mileage plan would fit into my schedule better. Within a week, I had pulled a hamstring. Fast running was not something I could jump back into. Ultimately, I made it to the race with preparation I knew could bring me to the finish line, but didn't permit any loftier goals.

Once I was confident I had fully recovered from my race, I did a couple weeks easy base mileage and then started training based on Koop's philosophies laid out in his book. He recommends starting by optimizing your VO2max with interval training, something I have been scared off since pulling my hamstring. The part I found unique was that he recommends uphill intervals, which means fewer injuries AND better climbing fitness. Work outs are time based, not distance based, but the sample schedule for the interval phase provided in his book was still a bit higher mileage than I was ready to start with, so I adjusted the times downward a bit, with one exception: I'm still planning to build long runs to prepare for the OPSF 50k at the end of March. Here's what my first 2 weeks of this training have looked like:



Yep, that's FIVE interval workouts in two weeks. The first one was a bit of a bust in which I overestimated by own abilities. But then mid last week when I tried the same workout at a more conservative pace, it felt so easy I actually switched treadmills to make sure the incline was functioning well on my machine. I'm amazed at how quickly I am reaping the benefits of the training (I guess I really needed it) and I'll try not to go crazy during the five day recovery period I have coming up next week.

Kool-aid ingested; bring on February!

-Jordan