As training for the Eden Project Marathon gets underway, I've notched up 35.44 miles this week, A mixture of trails and intervals, on minimalist and conventional running shoes.
The minimalist session was my longest one on five-fingers yet. An hour in these minimalist shoes, left my calf's in knots on Thursday and my 45 minute short run yesterday was exactly the cure I needed. That "short" run was a warm up to the main event which I did this morning.
MiCoach was insisting that I increase mileage to get marathon ready and so I headed out at 8am to do 2hours and 30 minutes on the road. Fortunately, the weather was good, great in fact, and in the allotted time I completed 16.5 miles.
This is great because
A) it's the furthest I have ever run, and
B) it's the longest time I've ever spent running.
A summary of stats showing the crazy increase between last week and this week.
And while I'm happy with this, running this sort of distance/time made me try new things and as I said at the start every day is a school day.
I tried carb-loading for the first time yesterday, I'm still not eating much sugar or starchy stuff so an evening of pasta and popcorn left me buzzing with energy this morning and allowed me to complete the run on little supplements (a couple of SiS gels).
I started hydrating on Friday. Regular drinking rather than when I was thirsty meant that I never felt that parched today and if truth be told, could have gone further.
Thirdly, knowing I'd get bored of music after a while I started on an audio book instead. This was a gamble as I love ,music to run to, but boy did it pay off. On a boring road session like this one, the story kept the mind entertained and let the legs get on with running. The miles literally flew by.
This week will see the donation page for Great Ormond Street set up and then I can really start publicising the run in October. Until then it's business as usual.
Me.
The road.
The biggest challenge yet....
Eden 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment