Long and Windind

I managed to find a spreadsheet with the results from Sunday’s race (Google Docs are cool, btw). I came 43rd out of 200 runners, which isn’t particularly remarkable. What surprised me most was the fact that the fastest woman was over 2 minutes slower than me. I think that’s more a sign of the lack of class in the women’s field rather than my blistering pace.

A few weeks ago I was wondering if I should run that race, as it’s only 3 weeks out from my ultra. Olga advised me to run, and do a long run the day after. I’m in no position to argue with her experience, so I followed her advice to the letter. I wasn’t sure how far a long run was supposed to be – for her, it’s probably in the range of 30 miles, but that’s out of my league. I settled for 22. It meant getting up at 4:25 in the morning, after about 5 hours of sleep, and since the race had started in the afternoon it also meant much less recovery time than I’m accustomed to between runs. No wonder I was tired, but I didn’t notice any soreness from the race and felt in good enough shape to last the distance. One thought did cross my mind though, namely that I was almost definitely the only runner of yesterday’s race that was mad enough to be running again, before even 5am in the morning.

I started with what I thought was about 8:40 pace, but when I checked the time after 3 miles I realised I had been going at 9:00 pace instead. Maybe the race had take more out of me than I thought, but I wasn’t worried about my run. I did worry about being late for work later on, but that’s a different matter. After about an hour my MP3 player went silent – the battery had died. I had meant to change it, but forgot. For the rest of the run I had only the sound of chirping birds to accompany me, which was not a bad option either. The sky had been very clear to start with, with half a moon and plenty of stars, but when I looked up around 6 miles into the run all I could see was black. Uh-oh. Indeed, 5 minutes later the heavens opened and I got a good trenching of freezing cold water (did I mention that it was quite windy). At least it stopped after a few minutes, and when the road entered Ahane woodland I got some shelter from the wind. The next 10 miles seemed to fly by. I think I was still half asleep and didn’t really register anything, just kept going on autopilot. Conscious thoughts didn’t return until the end of the lake loop, 17 miles into the run. Now it was time for an experiment. I had left out a bottle half filled with a mixture of slim-fast powder and soya milk. It’s my usual recovery drink after a long run, and I’m toying with the idea of planting a bottle of that some way along the ultra. This was a test if my stomach would take it. It didn’t taste very nice (the strawberry powder taste is just plain awful – I’ll pass on that in future), and my stomach felt a little bit funny for the next few miles, but on the other hand I kept running for 5 more miles and never felt fatigued. Of course I don’t know for sure if that drink made a difference, but my feeling is that I would have been just fine without it. I haven’t made up my mind yet, but I think I’ll do without on race day.

Anyway, I was very pleased with the way I felt after 22 miles, just half a day after a (for me) storming fast 10k race. Fatigue was never an issue, the legs felt fine, and the hills didn’t bother me, though they were mostly in the first half of the run. My main thought as I entered our driveway again was “training’s over, now I’m tapering”. I hope I can go through that period without going nuts again.

The first run of said taper was today’s 11-miler. My legs were definitely sorer than the day before, but if it’s a delayed reaction from the race or a result of the long run I can’t tell for sure. There’s not much to tell, I started the first 2 miles at 9:00 pace again, did the next 3 at 8:00, and picked it up a bit more further on, but it was still all at easy effort. I started doing strides, mostly as a wake-up call to the stiff muscles. Usually they start feeling much more responsive by the time of the fourth or fifth sprint, but when they still felt as stiff after 7, I gave up and was content to jog home from there. I got lucky, 10 minutes after getting home the heavens opened to a torrential rain shower. Good timing.

12 Mar: 22 miles, 3:03:48, 8:21 pace, HR 142
13 Mar: 11 miles, 1:28:55, 8:05 pace, HR 143, including 7x100 strides