Three Hours Later

This was week 8 of the 18 week training cycle for this fall's marathon. This morning was my first 20 miler of the training cycle. The weather was great for August, mid 60's, humid (as always) but with a cool breeze. I was hoping for a great run but was nervous because of all the mileage I've been putting in lately. Over 100 miles over the last 12 days, which is a lot for me.

Sure enough, I had very little energy and bonked by mile 12. At that point, I could have made things more miserable for myself by sulking but instead I decided to use the run to practice running when I'm on fumes. I toughed it out and actually caught a second wind around mile 14 but by mile 17 it was the survival shuffle. I clocked in at 2:58:54, an 8:56 pace and my slowest 20 mile training run ever, by far.

On the bright side, I set a personal best in weekly mileage and my other hard workouts this week went extremely well. So I won't let one bad run bother me. Plus, I checked my training log from last year and sure enough, I bonked on the exact same run last year, only on that run it was much hotter and I actually had to cut the run short.

It must be the accumulation of miles that catches up to me at this point in the training cycle. This is where mileage peaks and then I maintain the peak mileage up until 3 weeks before the race when I start to taper. The idea is to get the mileage up high early in the cycle, then maintain that level of mileage while shifting into more race specific training, speed work, tempo runs, vo2max runs, marathon pace runs, etc. If I make it through all of that injury free then I'm ready to race.