Felt good at 18.2 miles in 2:50:36 – 4 laps of the neighbourhood plus a bit extra to balance it out – feeling pretty confident so far that I will be able to beat my marathon PR at the Goofy Challenge in January. I went out with the thought that I wanted to do the 18 miles in 3 hours or under – done and done. Slowest lap was the first one and after that my pace was remarkably steady for the rest of the run. I was feeling it by the end but it went well overall and I was actually contemplating going further at the end to round out 3 hours…but as I was doing an out and back along my route I looked at what I would have to cross if I went another 5 minutes out before turning around and decided against it. I counted a train crossing, 2 transitions between pavement and gravel where they are doing road construction and a road crossing with a traffic light – all of which I would have to cross twice on a there and back over a 10 minute period. Seems like a bit of a cop out now that I think about it but all I could think about at the time is how any one of those obstacles could ruin the run or cause an injury and considering how tired I was I figured that additional mileage would be for another weekend.
Still I more than met my planned goals for the weekend and feel pretty good a couple hours later – going to feel it in my legs tomorrow I’m sure but I still have energy right now so definitely a good sign I have the endurance and recovery speed I need – going to keep working on my speed though.
I tried a new fuelling strategy on the run this morning too. On my last greater than half marathon distance training run on October 6th, I bonked around 16.5 miles and I wanted to avoid that this time. If I can move the bonk further out than it will help the longer training runs be easier but also help with my race strategy in January at the Goofy Challenge. So what I did was to load up my running belt with 2 small bottles of fuel and a larger water bottle with fuel as well. I then forced myself to have one mouthful every 10 minutes. This worked very well – I never felt like I was on the verge of bonking and it had the benefit of breaking the run into manageable 10 minute chunks mentally. I want to train the body to run longer on the internal resources though so on the next very long run in 2 weeks I might back off to every 15 minutes instead of every 10. It would be nice to be at the point where I could get to near 20 miles before bonking with no extra fuel so I will have to work to improve but at least this was a good confidence builder that the strategy will work and should be able to make use of it during a race. Training schedule still has a 19 miler and 3 20s to go before tapering begins so I still have some time to experiment and build endurance further.
Things are looking good!
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