The Long Run, Part II

No rest for the weary; the alarm went off at 4:45 and I had to get up. The biggest drawback of doing long run double headers during the week is the lack of sleep, I get just about 6 hours for two consecutive nights, and that’s not really enough for me. But at least the scenery outside the bedroom window looked inviting, and I got ready to go out. I was surprised to see water glistening all over the driveway; it must have been raining heavily all night. Looking up I could still see a very dark cloud completely blanking out one half of the sky. Luckily, the other half was entirely free and the stars put on a spectacular display, later to be joined by the moon once that big cloud had moved on. There were two slight worries on my mind, one that I might run out of energy at some stage due to Thursday’s run being a bit faster than planned, and secondly the pain in my left calf. As it happened, the first problem never materialised, and the calf did behave itself for most of the way. It only hurt on the downhill stretches, and even then it wasn’t particularly bad. I have run through worse pain. I did time myself after about 5 miles, and less than 41 minutes had passed, meaning I had averaged about 8:10 pace during that stretch. That’s good, I usually start slower. I got a nice surprise at one point. I had slightly lost track where I was and estimated I had covered about 12 miles when I saw some familiar landmarks ahead of me and realised that I was nearly on mile 14. Hurray. I felt tired when I passed our driveway after completing one loop after 17 miles, but continued on for another 3 miles to make up the full 20. The distance estimation might be slightly conservative, but it should be reasonably accurate.

I felt pretty good for the rest of the day, considering that I had covered about 37 miles in the last 2 days at roughly 8:00 pace average. But after sitting in the office chair for several hours, my calf started hurting again in the evening. That’s strange. How can a muscle take several hours of running without much notice, but start hurting after what should be several hours of rest?

Even so, that was the last I had felt of the pain. Today, Saturday, I am finally pain free again. I did go out for my 90 minutes recovery run, though as it turned out I ran at pretty much the same pace as I had done over the last few days. I should probably try to get some more variation into my legs; I covered the last 56 miles in the last 4 days all at nearly the same pace. The long-lasting soreness in my left calf has made up my mind about how many days of hill repeats I should do this week, it will remain at one. It took 4 days to get rid of the pain, and I don’t want to risk injury by bounding up the same hill again tomorrow. I’ll run the customary Sunday tempo run instead, and won’t bounce up the hill again until Tuesday. It means I won’t be getting a lot of hill running under my belt, but there is no point in forcing the issue. I should have started hill training earlier, now I have to adapt and get on with it.

9 Feb: 20 miles, 2:41:04, 8:03 pace, avg. HR 144
10 Feb: 11.5 miles, 1:32:59, 8:05 pace, avg. HR 150