Long Run = Very Tired!

This afternoon I completed my longest run since early September. I was aiming for 18 miles, mostly down and flat for 4 miles to Coypool then up the Plym Valley Trail for 5 miles to Leighbeer Tunnel before turning around and retracing my steps. The problem with this route is that the last 2-3 miles are uphill all the way which is exactly what you don’t want for the final section of a long run. The other issue with this run today was that in an attempt to catch the best weather (clear, reasonably warm and even a little sunny) I was setting out at 2:30pm which is not a time that I normally start a longer run. In fact, on some previous occasions when I have done this I have found I have struggled a lot. And it turned out that today fitted that pattern.

I was in pretty good shape to the halfway point, which was disappointingly a couple of tenths of a mile short of 9 miles and was expecting to find the long downhill stretch between 9 and 14 miles to be quite a lot easier and faster. It didn’t really turn out that way. I was a bit quicker than on the way up but not as much as I expected and by the time I was back at Coypool (14 miles) I was feeling pretty tired. I decided to split the last 4 miles into 4 sections and then deployed a variety of techniques to get myself through them. First, I spent a whole mile focussing only on my breath, essentially completing my mindfulness meditation practice while I ran. Then, I decided to count my steps for a mile, reaching 1900 in total. For the penultimate mile I went through the alphabet, first trying to think of a film title beginning with each letter (I succeeded apart from X – later on my wife suggested the somewhat obvious X-Men) and then the name of a classical composer (failing only on Q). That left me with just the last mile to get myself through but by then I was really, really tired and just plodded home, taking a slight shortcut such that, in the end, I completed 17.4 miles.

Tonight I feel much more tired than I hoped I would and can really feel that my legs have been working hard. I guess that is to be expected but it would be nice to be a bit further advanced in my training. The Grizzly is going to be tough next weekend…

One good thing was that I passed the 25 mile mark for the week (actually reaching 32.4 miles) so I have got that streak going again. I’ve hit this target 9 times in the 10 weeks of 2018 so far and will easily hit the target again next week assuming that I do complete The Grizzly on Sunday.