After my 34k run yesterday, I'm still sore. Not as bad as I would have been last year but I definately know my legs aren't very happy with me.
One more big week of mileage and the tapering for the Bluenose begins. I'm excited. This was the first week of implementing the new paces my coach gave to me. He based them on my 5k time from the Lung Run last week.
Tuesday was a blazing (well it was fast for me) 15k run at a 5:44 min/km pace. I beat my best 15k time by almost 15 minutes. I didn't think i could pull off that pace but after starting out fast, I thought to myself "gee this feels pretty comfortable, lets see how it turns out." surprise, surprise it turned out pretty good.
Wednesday I biked to work (25k) and back to Bedford in the afternoon (15k).
Thursday was my workout run, on the track after a 4k warmup. I maintained a 4:35 pace for the tougher part of the workout. Again, I was pretty pleased.
I moved my recovery run to Friday just in case the forecast made me move my long run from Sunday to Saturday. Nothing major to report here, it is what it is, a slow run of 5k. Sometimes I feel like the extra day of rest before my long run allows my legs to feel a little fresher.
I decided to start moving the start times for my long runs to the mornings instead of around 12:30 or 1pm so this was the first week for that. Got up at 6:30 and stuffed my face with 2 large bagels, 2 glasses of water. I waited another hour or so and ate again, this time a bowl of oatmeal and a glass of OJ. There was about 1000 calories of fuel, good enough for at least an hour and a half of running. the rest will be fuelled by gatorade and a gel. I've never run 34k in a training run before so I was a bit nervous, especially since I was expected to run it faster than before.
My course was to run 8.5 km away from the house and back and then do that over again, basically creating 2 x 17km loops. once back at the house at the halfway point I could quickly grab another bottle of gatorade. So the first half goes by pretty good, no major pains. I didn't take my mp3 player for the first half because i thought that having headphones on for that long would get hard on the ears. I finished the first 17k in 1:46, not as fast as I would have liked it to be but still faster than last weeks long run. The extra breakfast (bagels) didn't come back to haunt me, which is good as they gave me extra energy. After a quick bathroom break, I grabbed my mp3 player, a new bottle of premixed gatorade and headed back for the next 17k. This one seemed to be going well until my Garmin forerunner buzzed me at the 21k mark (half marathon distance). It buzzes my arm every 1k, showing my pace for that 1k. I quickly checked my time after 21k and it read 2:10! For some reason, I was hoping to crack 2 hrs at this point. It was now that my mind started playing games with me. I started thinking "f**k, I'm no faster than I was last year, there's no point even bothering to run the Bluenose again if i do it in the same time" as well as "might as well quit if you're this slow". This was at 21k and I've got another 13k to go!!! wtf am I gonna do now if I'm having a meltdown at this stupid point.
This kind of mental BS continued for the next 5 minutes or so. It got to the point where I come to a quick stop, closed my eyes, took some deep breaths and tried to refocus. I thought "forget about the time, just run you idiot." so this idiot ran. This idiot ran the second 17k a total of 3 minutes faster than the first, which is good. You always should try to run negative half splits, meaning the second half should be faster than your first. I'm glad I only had to run 34k today as it seemed my legs were getting pretty rubbery for the last kilometer (being uphill certainly didn't help matters, lol). The weather was warm and humid for running, which explained why i had no trouble drinking 2 bottles of gatorade. Normally I don't drink half that much for a long run. My overall pace was 6:10, i took almost 37000 steps and burned 2131 calories!
Like I said earlier, this week is a 62k week, 32 of which will be next sunday's long run. the last one before the tapering starts. less than a month to go to the Bluenose marathon.
onward and upward
PS: everyone has moments of self doubt. the question is, do you let those voices "win" or are you going to fight back? I could have packed it in at 21k and went home but that's not what I'm about anymore.
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