A good ass kicking

I've a good dozen running books in my library. In quite a few pages, I've read about recovery, but sometimes, I forget what it's like to get a good ass kicking.

As I wrote in the last post, I had a great 14 miler last night. Of course, feeling somewhat strong, and with dinner plans tonight, I decided to stack my schedule with a 11 miler the next morning, about 8 hours after completing the 14 miler.

So with 5 hours sleep, I found myself outside my condo, a nice cool morning ideal for running I might add, starting my run. Sluggish is the appropriate word. I felt tired. I lacked energy or the will to push the pace. I didn't plan to run it with the same pace as the evening before, but even a usually slow pace felt hard. So while my heart rate never really spiked, I found it a tough run. I pared down the run to 10 miles, doing the whole thing in about 8:26 mile pace. I did find the energy to do the last mile in 7:48 pace which suggests there is some mental aspect to all of this tiredness.

I'm not surprised though. I do know the hard/easy principle. I know all about breaking down your muscles with hard workouts and it's during the recovery that they rebuild themselves into freakishly stronger selves.

Which leads me to this weekend. Fran just wrote a comment saying he wouldn't do an 10 mile LT the day after a 21 mile long run and now I'm humbled enough to realize that's just stupid. So my new plan is to run the 21 miles Saturday morning, carbo load to replace the glycogen and rest the rest of the day. On race morning, I'll start the run doing marathon pace and if I feel it, after 5 miles i'll push it up to LT. If I don't even feel comfortable at marathon pace, i'll either stick with it and tough it out or... well, we'll let race morning complete this story...