Just bombed my state race, legs have felt flat, how to fix?

Also, potential elephant-in-room confounder: COVID-19

We don’t know how it might affect maximal performance in otherwise asymptomatic individuals. Its reasonable to suspect that there were/are a fair amount of HS kids that may be carrying and competing with the virus despite no symptoms at rest (high temp, etc.).

It might really benefit you long term to go get a test *today* to rule that out so you can identify whether it was a training error or else.

Thanks everyone for their advice. Looks like I killed my chances by not taking it easy after the region meet. Our team also finished 2nd instead of our projected 1st, so not a great day all around. But, I guess you live and you learn. Don't think I'm iron deficient, I've felt good all year up till now, but I might get that checked regardless. I also don't think it was covid, I quarantined for 2 weeks before state just so I had no shot at becoming a contact or coming down with the virus and making me ineligible. I'll just take it easy for a few days, light workouts until the postseason is done, then take some time off and build for track.

Dawg, you're fine. Schools. often times, care more about place than time in XC. So you had an off day. It could be for a number of reasons. Find a school you like & keep rolling.

Run easy and no strides for a week, real easy.

You need to do some serious reflection. Meditate and ask yourself why you are underwater.

More sleep. Nutrition. Stress. A vice. Overtraining. Mental health. Love or lack thereof. Naps. Friendship. Belonging. Higher purpose.

D1 athlete wrote:

Looking at this training log from the days leading up, I think you simply dug yourself a hole by running 11, then 10 miles the days after a race effort. For a lower mileage guy, this likely fatigued you enough that your next workout was failed, and then doing another workout fatigued you even more. Again, in my opinion it’s not mental. We as runners know what it’s like to feel good in the legs, and when you don’t have it, there’s nothing you can do to push through it.

I agree with this

Burnsy wrote:

Also, potential elephant-in-room confounder: COVID-19

We don’t know how it might affect maximal performance in otherwise asymptomatic individuals. Its reasonable to suspect that there were/are a fair amount of HS kids that may be carrying and competing with the virus despite no symptoms at rest (high temp, etc.).

It might really benefit you long term to go get a test *today* to rule that out so you can identify whether it was a training error or else.

Doubtful.

OP was just mentally exhausted by the election.

Another anecdote. I bombed my HS senior year state meet. I’d been fighting the last month of season to keep the 7th spot so I could run in states for first time (PR was 17:5x) and absolutely overcooked myself by hammering every workout. Ran 18:4x, feeling totally dead the whole way. So that was that, senior year, felt like a bust.

3/4 weeks later, after just doing light workouts in the meantime, went to the FootLocker regional meet with some of the team, no pressure and fresh legs, & ran 17:23 for huge PR. Beat a couple teammates who’d been ahead of me at states.

Another poster said you might be about ready to hit a big PR and that was certainly the case for me. If you have a chance to do so, I’d recommend giving it a whirl after some downtime. Have fun!

You could cut off your legs. That would likely stop them from feeling flat. You're welcome.

runners& wrote:

Hi CoachB, would you follow the same aggressive warm-up, per Tinman, for the 5k distance, as done for the mile or 3200m? Any differences?

Yes. Our warm up has changed a bit since that original thread 11 years ago. We used to run the whole course, kind of just to be bad ass (we'd run the whole thing as a cool down too). Now, we'll run the technically difficult sections of the course or the most important part of the course, usually we'll go 1-2 miles depending on the kid. We now do a lot more dynamic type drills that bring the heart rate up quite a bit and stimulate a little anaerobic production. Creating some high CO2 levels is a great stimulus to open up the blood vessels into your running muscles (the hard 150s did that for us back in the day, but it's easier to get the kids to go through all the drills and get them done at the right time).

We do mostly the same warm up for cross and track. I probably would have kids do less if we were racing 10k, but not for 5k in cross.

^This x 100. Looking back on my racing days, there were many seasons where I'd fall apart in the last month, then after a few weeks off/easy, I'd go to some low key all comers meet or road race or something and set a PR.

Poor taper? Honestly, this is one of those things were not having very much information makes it very hard to offer suggestions.

For tapering, I would recommend finding Inigo Mujika's book; There is a chapter on distance running in it. Also, if you can find any of his presentations online or papers, look into them as well.

I'd like to see some evidence for this claim about 10 days of recovery for a single hard workout.

Dangerous Corn Man wrote:

You are likely iron deficient. I had the same exact problem my junior and senior year, before I even knew iron supplements were a thing.

Have you ever felt lightheaded? Unusually cold? Dizzy when you stand up, or seeing stars?

Sometimes aerobically you'll feel fine, and workouts will be alright, but because you're not getting enough oxygen to your muscles they lack power.

Try taking a generic iron supplement with a vitamin C supplement every night before bed. Eat lots of red meats and fruit. Then report back to us.

Get checked for iron deficiency by a doctor if you're really concerned, but I didn't have to. I saw immediate massive gains, and races more in-line with my workouts. Made me a bit pissed I didn't know sooner honestly haha

I love this sort of thing. I supposed the answer for this person to any issue is "iron deficiency".

If you saw "immediate gains" then I doubt you were iron deficient as it takes a bit for iron status to be restored.

I remember talking with a female friend who said she had started to taken iron supplements. She talked about how great they were. After talking for a bit I asked how long she had been taking them: 2 days. Uh, no those iron pills have done nothing in 2 days.

Plus I discourage people from taking iron supplements willy nilly. First get tested. Then get on an appropriate protocol then after 6 weeks get checked again. Also if you come from an ethnic group with a high rate of hemochromatosis then get checked.

To recover from fatigue, get more sleep by going to bed earlier, no screens an hour prior to bed,

take a day off completely, light running the next day, and eat more foods with iron in them (get a serum ferritin check if you can).

OP, is college the purpose of the whole running thing? If running is not it's own reward, I think it will be hard to stay passionate about it.

You dug yourself a hole with the race followed by long runs followed by the attempted workout followed by the makeup workout. Take a week of running 20-45 minutes easy every other day, then when you come back do 10-14 days of nothing but easy running with one or two tempo-effort fartleks (1-2-3-4-4-3-2-1 minutes with a minute easy jogging recovery, or something like that) or slower-than-usual continuous tempo runs (30 or so minutes at 45-50s/mile slower than 5k pace, picking it up a bit from that the final mile if you feel good), and at least one slow long run of around 90 minutes. Skip any race opportunities during these next 2-3 weeks, or treat them as workouts. You’ll be able to do some sharpening workouts and race well for 2-4 weeks after this recovery period—your fitness gained during the season won’t go away, you just need to cool off for a bit after overcooking it to give it a chance to show itself.

Its a race.

You might be over done, or not. In which case you have to concentrate harder. It will feel harder.

You may not have your best day, but you don't have to have a bad day.

Youngsters who are in a big competition, and don't feel perfect, often drop their bundle.

You need to find out where your fitness and conditioning sweet spot, bit more than anything you have to remember its a race, not a perfect training session with all the laps planned.

If you think this is a purely a physical preparation thing, then yo won't improve as much as you wish.

Harden up