Training log - Week ending 10/12/2025

This week was 59 miles of running and 21 "miles" of pool-running.

I changed my plans for this week at least four times. My original plan was to race the Army 10 Miler on Sunday. However, as of the beginning of the week, it seemed likely that Army would be cancelled. So at that time I decided to make this a high volume week, with my 20+ long run on Sunday, and then race the week after.

Then on Thursday, Army announced that the race was still on. So, I was racing it after all.

And then I checked the weather forecast and noted that a tropical storm was also scheduled to roll through the area this weekend, complete with wind gusts of up to 40mph.  Not especially fun conditions for a race that includes a stretch on the 14th Street Bridge.

Between the weather, the fact that Army wasn't a goal race, and my lack of taper, I decided to skip Army anyway and do a tempo workout on Friday followed by a weekend long run.  Since the storm could last through Monday, I moved my long run to Saturday and kept it at mostly easy pace.

Despite all the back and forth, I managed to hit 80 "miles" (combined land and pool) for the week, which is where I want to be.

The other thing of note is that I discovered that my lungs - specifically my diaphragm and my intercostal muscles - are really weak. Given how much I run, this was a surprise.

I discovered this during speech therapy (which I started because I noted my voice getting a bit softer, and because the big rule in Parkinsons is: start speech therapy and physical therapy before you've fallen apart - it's much easier to preserve than to rebuild). The strength of those muscles is graded by maximum inspiratory pressure (MIP) and maximum expiratory pressure (MEP) - essentially how much resistance you can breathe through.

My MIP was 37 cmH20 (centimeters of water is a unit of pressure management).  The expected normal value for my age/sex/BMI is 97 cmH20.  So, my MIP is about 38 % of the norm.  That's a significant difference. This was obviously a big surprise to both me and the speech therapist.

The good news is that there's an easy way to improve it - just do daily breathing exercises with a respiration trainer.  There is some evidence (mixed) that respiratory training improves performance in trained athletes, and fairly solid evidence that respiratory training improves walking speed in people with Parkinsons. So, it seems like improving my MIP should probably improve my running, especially my faster running.  By how much remains to be seen. We'll see how the next few weeks play out.

Dailies:

Monday: 10 miles (10:10) with 8 strides. PT exercises in afternoon. Foam rolling in evening.

Tuesday: 10 miles on the treadmill, including a workout of 6x4:00/1:12 jog plus 4x30 seconds on/1:30 jog. The longer intervals were at 7.9/8.0 mph; the shorter intervals were 8.5-8.8 mph.  All jogs at 6 mph.  Pollowed with leg strengthwork.  Foam rolling in evening.

Wednesday: 8 "miles" of pool-running in the morning.  Foam rolling in evening.

Thursday: 6 miles very easy (11:59) on trails in the morning plus PT exercises. Streaming Pilates + foam rolling in evening.

Friday: 12 miles, including a 8115m tempo in 30:52 (7:59/7:46/7:37/7:30) followed by two hill sprints.  Followed with leg strengthwork.  Foam rolling at night.

Saturday: 21 miles mostly very easy (9:50) with 8x(1 minute up tempo/8 minutes very easy) in the third hour. Foam rolling in evening.

Sunday: 9 "miles" of pool-running plus upperbody weights/core and PT exercises. Foam rolling in evening.