18 miler of death
February 22, 2010
so yesterday I ran 18 miles. I ran from my front door all the way to the edge of the bolsa chica wetlands/state beach. that is really far considering during the summer i sometimes have a hard time justifying driving all the way down there just to go to the beach.
but i did it.
and i am still really sore. my quads are sore and my shins are sore. i’ve been having shin issues lately, so I shouldn’t be too surprised, but they kind of hurt just walking around, which is definitely not a good thing. i know i’m not supposed to do this, but i’m going to try and push through this week and get in all my mileage – mostly because, until the marathon, this is my last REALLY intensive week of training and my highest mileage – and i don’t think it’s a good idea to mess with it too much since the marathon is in less than a month. I understand, though, why people don’t walk so well after they run a marathon. It freaking hurts!
the run itself was just fine. that is until the 13th or 14th mile when everything just started hurting. i pulled out my knee brace for my left knee with 2 miles to go and that seemed to help a lot. Also, in the last 3 miles I cut my walking down to 1 minute for every 9 minutes of running, since it felt like anything longer than that and my body hurt more trying to get back into motion. Once I hit about 45 seconds my body seemed to enjoy walking a little too much.
i ate a moderately real breakfast for the first time on a long run – a bowl of high fiber oatmeal about 40 minutes before the run. I didn’t really feel the effects of it until about 40 minutes into the run which I guess was fine. I then ate 2 Gu – one at about 1:30:00 and one at about 2:08:00. They seemed to help since I didn’t get really hungry until the last mile which isn’t so unusual.
after the run we ate breakfast at the bixby and then i went to work where my legs felt like they wanted to be chopped off, especially by the 2nd hour. i stopped providing the kind of customer service where you place the book in their hands and started pointing them in the right direction. everything hurt!
i’m not too worried though – i’m fairly certain i’ll finish the 20 miles feeling just slightly worse than i did yesterday and i’m pretty sure i’ll feel horrible once I finish the marathon. My saving grace is that I ran the 18 miles in 03:34:26, which means that I’ll probably run the 20 miles in 4:15 or less, which further means that if I can keep up about a 17 minute pace for the last 6.2 miles I’ll still make it to the finish line in less than 6 hours. Lets pray that once I hit the wall I can do that =) I’m pretty certain though that I’ll come in under by at least 15 minutes.
