I’ve been focused (obsessed?) with this weekend’s Houston Half Marathon, which was the USATF Half Marathon Championship race. Brent and Renee were both running their first half marathons and so the focus was as much about “Are they ready to run the distance well” as it was “How competitive will they be in the race?” Brent finished 3rd in his debut; Renee finished 4th in her debut. Good results and after a couple of days to analyze the performances I’m quite pleased. A lot of work and thought went into that race and I’d like to take the next couple post to discuss topics that are germane to preparation, race execution and recovery. But I’d like to work backwards and start with recovery because it’s what the athletes are doing today and because Eric Richey (@HCXCdistance on twitter) asked, “Can you blog about Renee, Brent, and Austin’s recovery from the 1/2. What will this week look like?”
Below is a PDF of the document I sent to Brent and Renee following the race, a document I wrote on the plane the day before the race. You can download the PDF (1.5MB) by clicking on the image.
Two weeks following 2010 Houston Half Marathon
The top half is for “B.V.” or Brent Vaughn and the bottom is for “R.M.B.” or Renee Metivier Baillie. They don’t have the same goals in the coming weeks as Renee may run the US cross country race while Brent will probably not run it. They both want to run well outdoors, yet between now and then are a lot of race opportunities.
The orange ink denotes places where our physio, Dr. Richard Hansen (@ARTSportsChiro on twitter or watch videos of him working here, here and here), or other local physios should/will work on Renee and Brent. Renee’s husband, Austin Baillie, is a certified massage therapist (watch him at work here) so with Renee I don’t plan as much therapy as I do for Brent. Bottom line is we don’t want to start training again until range of motion (ROM) is normal and until they look good and feel good doing some 200m strides at 10,000m pace, my arbitrary threshold of what distance and pace they need to be able run before we can go for a serious long run or fartlek.
I promise I will answer comments promptly from this post and with that in mind I’ll stop writing. Thanks.