Plugging Away

The last few weeks have been pretty repetitive on the running front

Monday - Day off.

Tuesday - Speedwork in the form of intervals at the track

Wednesday - Easy recovery run or day off.

Thursday - Speedwork in the form of a 5k tempo run

Friday - Day off

Saturday - Long Run

Sunday - Longer run

With all the days off I'm able to recover from the back to back weekend long runs and still get 2 speed workouts in - although i'm not as fast as I used to be.

The key workouts for the 100k are obviously the long runs and I finally appear to be getting my head and body used to them. Simple as it may sound it took a while for me to get the last key training element nailed - eating. Twice in the last month, towards the end of a 4 and 5 hour long run I suffered badly due to lack of fuel. Over a period of 10 minutes I went from feeling reasonably ok to a state where every step was a huge effort - the classic bonk/hitting the wall experience. While a few gels and water will get me around a marathon course reasonably intact, going longer demands a higher and more varied calorific intake.

This weekend I completed my last and longest back to back runs covering 64 miles over two days. The 4:05 hour 29.8 mile run on Saturday was the faster of the two, leaving my legs in a suitably fatigued state for Sundays 5 hour run. I managed to get by on Perpeteum and High 5 on Saturday but I was up before 6 on Sunday morning with my chicken noodle soup simmering away on the hob. I had carb loaded on beer and food the night before celebrating a neighbour's son's communion so breakfast consisted of the a cup of coffee to wake me up. Luckily I had the company of Paul Daly, another 100k nutter, for the 5 hours, which included an 11.2 mile club run out the now "very" familiar Passage, Monkstown, Rafeen loop. I stuck to GU gels and perpeteum for the first 3 hours and thereafter resorted to picnicing on soup, fig rolls (newtons in the new world), jellies, coke and anything else we could hoover up, took a few walking breaks when energy levels dipped and while the legs would be stiff once we resumed running we were able to shake the feeling off after a few 100 yards.

To be honest when I set out at 6:40 I didn't know whether I could last 5 hours as I did not feel great - energy was so-so and legs were stiff. However 2 hours in I felt better and by the time i had finished I felt no worse than when I had started. The average pace for the 5 hours was 8:45 which we managed to reduce from 8:50 over the last mile and a half as we chased down a "hare" out for his Sunday run - both of us pleasantly surprised that out legs complied. `We finished on the Marina with a dip in the river to cool the legs down, joined by a few crabs crawling over our feet.

My biggset concern now is the weather - with a veritable heat wave forcast from next weekend, pacing 3:30 in Cork this day week may be harder work than I bargained for.