Sandwiched

Getting up at 4:45 am two days in a row isn’t the easiest thing to do, and in a way it was the most difficult part of my sandwich. As soon as my feet touched the ground I could feel the heavy legs from Thursday’s 20 mile run, and the thought of repeating the entire exercise wasn’t overly appealing. However, as soon as I stepped out of the house, I felt fine. The legs weren’t exactly fresh, but they were entirely adequate, and for the entire distance I never felt out of my depth. The one problem area was my right foot again. Just like the day before, it started hurting at mile 15, was rather sore for a while, but subsided with a mile or two to go. I had a similar pain last year when thoughts of a neuroma entered my head, but that had gone away after a few days. I’m hoping for a repeat. I wore a different pair of shoes, so it’s definitely not the Vomeros that are to blame. It could be just one of those niggles that are part of running. It could definitely be an injury brought on by my aggressive increase in mileage, who knows. I checked my feet last night. The balls of my right foot are definitely swollen (noticeable when compared to my left one), but the two shorter runs over the weekend were both fine. It seems like the problem only appears after about 2 hours on the road. I expect it to go away again. I sure don’t want to get into trouble 15 miles into the ultra, when there’s almost a marathon still left to do.

My Dad is here for a short visit, he’ll fly back from Cork on Monday. The drive to collect him was a bit of a nightmare, I got stuck behind an accident that had completely blocked the road, and had no choice but to sit there for almost an hour until the road was cleared. I can always feel long hours in the car in my hamstrings, and this time was no exception.

After that tasty sandwich, a couple of recovery efforts were all that was on the menu for the weekend. I duly started out slowly on Saturday, and ran the first half of my run comfortably at about 8:15 pace. The legs then had different ideas and took off, so much so that the average pace for the run had dropped below 8:00 by the time I was back home. That’s definitely not my recovery pace, and when the first 3 miles today flew by at 8:06 pace I decided to make two changes. I slowed down noticeably, and I decided to cut the run at 8 miles. I felt perfectly fine, but after a couple of high mileage efforts the general consensus is to take it easy. With 5 weeks to go to Connemara I really don’t want to invite a serious problem.

I’ll have to get up at 4:15 am on Monday, not to run but to drive my Dad to Cork to catch his plane back home. Of course I won’t be able to run. I might sneak in a few miles at lunchtime, and maybe a second run back home from work, but the weather forecast doesn’t look promising. In combination with next week’s race this might turn into a cutback week as far as mileage is concerned. We’ll see.

29 Feb

20 miles, 2:47:12, 8:21 pace, HR 143

1 Mar

10 miles, 1:19:58, 7:59 pace, HR 146

2 Mar

8 miles, 1:06:05, 8:15 pace, HR 142

Weekly mileage: 100+ in 9 runs
Monthly mileage: 327.6