Track and Field Blogs - Reid Coolsaet

It's closing in on one year since my last Floblog. I know it's been a long time but, it's been even longer since I've raced (so not much excitement). I just raced this past Sunday, I'll get to that after answering the question "What the heck happened?"

Last April I pinched my sciatic nerve and after 2.5 months of x-training and trying to race at the Olympic trials (which didn't happen) I took some much needed recovery time. I started back up running in August and was just logging miles until I did a 25km trail race at the beginning of October. After that trail race I started getting fit and doing workouts again. I rabbitted 16km of a marathon at 3:07/km pace and started to plan some races...

And then on November 6th I broke my foot (5th metatarsal) pretty bad. I went over my foot on a run and completely fractured the bone. I couldn't walk for seven weeks and wasn't able to run for three months.

By January I was able to bike, pool run, XC ski and use the elliptical, I completely submerged myself into X-training. The running ramp-up started in February and was really slow as I started with 1km and could only add 10% per day.

The past seven weeks or so my training has been pretty good and I still X-train quite a bit to keep my overall volume high. With the amount of volume I had been doing between running and x-training I felt more geared towards longer stuff but I kept the 5000m as my goal. After reviewing my training, my coach pitched the idea of running a marathon to me and I was all over it.

The plan is to do the Ottawa Marathon on May 24th with the goal of running 2:15 in the attempt to qualify for the Canadian World Champs team. I'll likely have to run around 2:16 to qualify depending on how the other Canucks do in Ottawa. I know this won't be an ideal build-up however, I'm not trying to run an equivalent time to my 5 and 10k PB's.

This past Sunday I did my first race back at the Billy Taylor 15km in Guelph. To give myself a marathon training stimulus I warmed up for 16km (10miles) in 64 minutes and then ran the 15km race in 47:14 and then ran another 8km (5miles) in 32 minutes. 39 km (24miles) for the day and I actually felt pretty good on my run this morning.

Stay tuned for an Ottawa wrap-up, it should be interesting either way...