Thursday, July 24, 2008

81 miles

When I'm tired in the middle of a run, I like to do math. At what point do I reach the half way mark? I run in miles but my Garmin is set to show me kilometre markers. So I do the conversion... 7 miles is ... well, 6 miles is 9.6K, add 1.6K and that's 11.2K. I find it's a good distraction.

So in the middle of my run, somewhere after the two-mile mark, I was passed by another runner. I wasn't going particularly fast, a 8:22 mile pace, because I was trying to take it easy. I took away my rest day at the beginning of the week so I could finish this week's runs before I take off for San Francisco on Sunday morning.

And then I started doing some math. From Monday to today, I put in 44 miles (10 + 15 + 6 + 13). I ran Friday (10 miles), Saturday (20 miles) and Sunday (6 miles), for a total of 37. You'd be surprised how you do math when you're trying to keep concentration on your pace but I finally figured out that in the past seven days, I'd run 81 miles. Do some more math and that comes in at 130K.

My jaw literally dropped... I had to slow down at mile 5 to pick it up. I don't think i've ever racked up this much mileage in a seven-day period. And even though this is a 70-mile a week peak program I'm doing, I didn't really think about how my mid-week runs are actually pretty high mileage..

So there you go, I'm piling on the miles. I have a key 12 mile pace run on Sunday and I've been taking it easy the past two days so I'm well rested for the effort. I have a 7 miler scheduled tomorrow but I very well make knock that down to four. I've earned this vacation...

5 comments:

Quinto Sol said...

Dude - Excellent... A few words to the wise: proceed with caution.

You are absolutely correct that those "long" runs with MP miles thrown in are the key to a successful 'thon.

Triseverance said...

WOW, awesome, I have heard a thousand times, "you want to get faster run more miles" I have never been able to put on those kinds of miles. I am interested to see what kind of results you get, my guess is they will be excellent.

Arcane said...

Another thing you might want to try is not tapering going into the marathon pace run. It does wonders for the confidence when you've put in a hard week and are still able to crank out a steady marathon pace effort after.

yumke said...

Thanks guys.. I'm in no man's land right now of training. I'm probably on theedge of overtrainign, but not there yet. thank god i've a recovery weekcoming..

gonna do as fran says, go into the mp run without a taper.. here goes nothing,...

Anonymous said...

impressive