I am dropping Jeff (Galloway's halvmarathon plan)

I decided a few days ago to stop (pause) the Garmin Coach halvmarathon plan by Jeff Galloway.
Here is why:

While I somehow love the idea to get ready-made workouts on my watch, and also like doing them so I do not have to think about who to do a workout, I also at the same do not like the rigidity of a pre-made plan.
That's mostly because I am changing preferences all the time: some days I like to "just follow a plan", on others I prefer to "train the way I think is right for me".

Btw, the Garmin Coach Plan do not have to be done the exact way they are laid out. You won't get expelled from them when you chose to do more, or less.

But I wonder, what is the purpose of following a ready-made training plan, when you don't follow it but accostum it so much that you could actually just train the way you want to?

One other thing with Jeff's workout is, that the two shorter workouts (well, the one with the 800m repeats is 55min long actually, including warm-up and cool-down) are done at medium intensity.
They are neither easy nor really hard.

And I have successfully avoided that this year:
Until may this year, I did most of my training really easy.
As in: I could chat with someone while running, and I'd walk when heartrate went up.
That way, my recovery time stayed short, I felt refreshed and energized after my runs and bike rides, and was also able to do more strength training.
Once a week, I'd go to the track and do a short workout of 1min repeats of hard and fast running, with a minute rest in between. From five to ten repeats were enough.
And I love them!

What I will take with me from Jeff Galloway's Garmin Coach plan are:

•  the drills: I think working on cadence will benefit me, so I'll continue doing them. 
• the Magic Mile: I "hated" doing it - not short enough to go all-out, not long enough so I was able to plan the laps - but I think it is a fun way of testing oneself
• the walk/run-method: although I will just incorporate the walking part based on how my heartrate is (walking up hills) - not using predefined walk/run ratios
• the hill drills

I found out that three workouts, with two of them being at medium intensity, left no room for my bike rides, and I didn't appreciate Jeff Galloway saying in one of his videos that "You can cross train for sure, but it will have no benefit for your running" (I am not quoting him literally here, just by what I remember).
I strongly disagree - but will not further elaborate my opinion right now (maybe later).

One big thing that seems not to work for me is the simple follow-a-plan-and-stick-to-it way of training. I need flexibility since my energy levels are greatly fluctuationg throughout my week, and in order to follow a training plan, I must be able to fully customize it.

Meaning that I'd rather want to be doing the long run on tuesday since I felt good, had enough sleep, my stomach was ok, weather good, legs fine, and so on - and postpone the short intervals for a quick workout on saturday afternoon.
Or whatever.

My training is strongly influenced by the way I feel.  I do think that you do not have to feel great in order to work out, but I have to use my feelings to my advantage in training. Meaning that, on an "angry" day after a night with nightmares and an emotional flashback from cPTSD during the day, I can use that kind of negative energy for a good hard hill workout on the bike.
On a "sad" day, I love to be on my bike and do an easy ride.
On a balanced day, strength training is what I do.
And so on.

It would be great to be able to have a more steady way of live and to be able to "just follow a plan" but that is not a good option for me right now. I don't like the feeling of not going a good job, so I'd rather make a good job at following my own, highy customized plan than doing a mediocre job on a pre-made plan.

So thanks for the training input, Jeff!
I will certainly look into your books and use some of your training tips and technique, but apart from that, you are better off without me 😊

Garmin Coach Training Plan - how I found a workout I had missed.

Yesterday I was supposed to do a workout consisting of a warm up, two blocks of drills (cadende and acceleration drills), the Magic Mile, and a cool-down.

It was freeing outside, raining, and I was not focused at all, so I managed to hit the lap button when I wasn't supposed to, and then, since on my oldest Garmin watch the "return button" is the lower right on, I even pused the lap button again which ended the whole workout.

No way of getting it back or repeat it.

I tried to upload again from the app, transfer it to my watch, but gave up soon, since it was freezing and windy and raining, and I soon got cold and also had not eaten enough, so I felt drained and thought I could find out how to fix that later.

I think I have the solution here, but will try it out later today:

I just use my watch, press "START", choose "Running" as a workout, hold down the "UP" button to get into settings, select"Training" - "My workouts" - and there they are: all the different workouts I either had done so before in my plan, or those being scheduled for later this week or next week!

If it works, it would be actually pretty easy to do a missed workout (to good to be true? We will see...) 😄

Pollen fight!?

When I was young, I never had allergies.
Although I think that I did have a predisposition to get allergies, since I had atopic eczema. There is some degree of correlation between atopic eczema and allergies.

The summer when I filled 21, I experienced  my first signs of allergy though, and it was against mugwort. It was exhausting, but lasted only a few weeks. I can't remember taking any medication against it, I was still living at home, and my parents somehow weren't too fond about taking medication that you don't necessarily need to survive.
And I was still livint at my parents home, and also financially dependent on them.

Fast forward to today, over 20 years later, when allergies came and disappeard, then came again and disappeared again. All depending of my general levels of stress. The worst bout I remember was when I started my master studies and at the same time had a job at our university as a teacher's assistant.
What an irony that I had developed a full-blown pollen allergy against both grass and flowers, and my job was joining our teacher outside on our excursion on botany.
I remember it being both fun and exhausting, since the students were all really nice, while my body battled against the pollen in the field.

During the recent years, I haven't had allergies, only minor reations against dust inside my appartments from time to time. Fortunately!

But this year, it flared up again.
For real.

Looking through my medicine closet, I realized I was almost running out of antihistamines (I am using Loratadine against pollen allergy, if anyone is wondering about it) - so I started taking what I had left, and ordered a new recipe at my doctor.

The recipe is supposed to be available today.
And I really hope that the fresh pills will do a better job than the ones I had left at home (ok, they can't be that old, but you never know).
Because my allergy is bad. Despite the medicine I have been taken.

Even Garmin recognizes the stress my body is under.
Usually, my stress levels are below 25, and rather variable.
And the last days and weeks, the physiological stress was rather low (the psychological though, quite high):

Yesterday though, and through last night, it looked like this:

I spend some time trying to figure out the cause.
Was it severe mental stress?
But it couldn't have been, since I just had decided to just give in and accept that there are things I don't like to do, but that are the right thing to do.

I haven't been training too much either - for usually, after too much high intensity training, the stress usually starts right after the workout, and keeps getting up and down, but calms down at night.

So I decided that the cause must be the ongoing allergy, which doesn't give my body any break at all, and I can feel it all the time.

But! I was thinking that even though my body is stressed out, there really is no need to stress about it.
After all, if I didn't have my fancy little Garmin watch, I wouldn't have known about it, and just thought that "Oh no, that annoying allergy is bad, I am exhausted, I hate it." - and tried to do the best about it.

Also, I am not sure if training or not is right, but I am guessing that light training AWAY from pollen could actually be benefitial.
So maybe I will go for an easy hike up in the valley today, where there is no mugwort but only refreshing mountain air.

I could even go as far as to take my tent and sleep in the mountains tonight.
But I am not so sure about how restful that night's sleep will be, and there is stille the sprint triathlon om two days.

And not that I am planning to do a great race, but I'd rather not be in brain fog when I am there.
So, today will be an easy day - hiking, and picking out the necessary race gear, and washing my mountain bike so it's ready for saturday.

Also, taking small breaks and giving my mind a rest, since it is actually rather disturbing feeling the body at high alert with the faster heart rate - but I'll just do the best about it 💪👍