Floris Gierman breaks down how an injury forced a shift toward foundational habits: 7 hours of running weekly paired with 1.5 hours of strength and mobility work. He uses Strava logs to spot patterns, like how a 10-mile pace run a month before a marathon predicted race performance, and argues that sleep, breathing, and journaling matter as much as the miles.
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Since the arm break and taking a couple of weeks off of running, that's been a really good opportunity to dial in like sleep and nutrition. And I've started working some more back on like breathing exercises and nasal breathing again, because when you have time to do all of your run training, it's, it's hard to also nail all those basics. And so it's a good time to kind of set those foundations so that when you can really run well, those things are established and habits already.
That's the thing, right? Like, let's say I have 10 hours a week available to train. I'm so much focused often on, all right, I will be running for pretty much 10 hours at that point versus like, all right, I'll probably benefit more from 7 hours of running, hour and a half of strength, like some mobility work, like Yeah, I think that's a very valid point there that right now you're injured or you have a bit of a setback. So focusing on that is, is, is a good time right there.
I think, Flores, to add on to that, I think it's a self-evaluation to where you're at right now too. So we talked before about, you know, the use of Strava. I'm not endorsed by Strava. I paid for the plan so I can keep a log and go back and look at everything. But it's amazing what I found out when I go back. And all the trials and errors that I did before and what I learned from them based on my notes that I kept and where I was at, at a running level. I mean, I even went back and looked at some of my best racing and found out that, say for a marathon, about a month out, I would look and do a 10-mile pace run. So I'm 43. My math is usually like the low 140s. And I was looking at a month out, if I ran a 3-mile warmup and a 10-mile pace run, if I stayed around like low 150s, and did a 3-mile cooldown. That 10-mile pace run average is what I ran a month later at the marathon. It just— every single time it worked out. And I— so that's my go-to now when I look at things. So use all this time, if you've had some free time, to go back and look at notes, look at everything that you did before, and then reevaluate where you are now. Because you might find a little thing. I didn't find that out until like a couple weeks ago. I go, geez, I always wondered what race I was going to do and what the pace I was going to be at, and it was all sitting right there in front of me this entire time. I just didn't go back and look. Now that you extra minutes. I did just find out what worked well and what didn't and just go back and see what did I learn from it. I think it's so important when you keep a manual log or a digital log, just go and spend the time to do it because you might find something that you can work on right now before racing starts again.
