Hill Intervals and Suspected Stress Fracture

Location: Lickey Hills, South Birmingham (map)
Date: 2pm, 25th September

Workout

• 5-minute warm-up jog
• 3 x hill intervals. 70-75 seconds each, 3-minutes rest between.
• 5 minutes of mobility work in the sun.

Total Time: 20 minutes

First part of the hill

Second part of the hill...with a sting in the tail

Nutrition (for my Leangains experiment I saw this as sort-of intense workout)
45 minutes before: 10g BCAA
2 hours after: 10g BCAA
4.5 hours after, huge dinner:

Chicken-bone broth with leftover lamb

Bakes sea bass, courgette, fennel, tomato, kale

Foot Problem

It's been two weeks since the big fell race in Wales. My right foot was pretty sore after the race - those rocky descents had given it a fair pummelling. It had slowly recovered, so that yesterday it was fine to run downstairs on.

However, when I started jogging yesterday, I could tell it was not 100%; and once I hit a couple of tree roots on the intervals, I got warning shots of pain.

'The Internet' tells me this is probably not a broken foot (no swelling, okay to walk on etc) but possibly a stress fracture. 6-8 weeks rest is recommended, if so.

I have another race scheduled for 9th October. Also big and gnarly. That gives me another 2 weeks of rest from running. Leading up to the race I will do some careful evaluation of the foot. I would not like to start a race like that unless 100%.

Intervals

In spite of that I did manage to do the intervals as planned by avoiding uneven parts of the trail. I did not push it too hard, but given the likely enforced rest period (which I had already figured out as I was running) I did go into leg jelly territory for the third interval.

Feast

It was a funny day of eating. I felt like I needed a full 24-hour fast, but was very hungry by the evening so I ate pretty much everything in the fridge!