farfromfearless
Day 50… Done!
Well, day fifty is in the bag!
It’s gone by pretty fast, to be honest, but looking back now it feels like a reasonable accomplishment. I’m not sure exactly how many miles I’ve done to date as I didn’t actually start tracking my mileage until I got my Garmin watch on July 2. Since then, it tells me I’ve done 79.24 miles. If we assume an average of three miles a day for the fifty, that’s over 150 miles in total. Okay, some people do that in a weekend, but it’s not a bad start.
I slept for ten hours last night. That’s the most I’ve had in literally months. I’m a big advocate of sleeping only as much as the body needs, so I guess I needed it! 
I felt great when I woke up, and that continued all day. I ate well, hydrated properly, watched an old Hawaii Ironman tape for motivation, and set off just after 3:30pm.
My legs felt amazing, and I shot out of the door like a rocket. After a minute or two I looked down at my Garmin and I was running better than 7-mins/mile. Wow, I thought, record time, here I come!
Half-a-mile later, it dawned on me that I was meant to be doing a five-mile run.
A 7:20 mile later, and my legs felt pretty much fried.
What a daft thing to do. As I said on here recently, one thing I really haven’t mastered yet is pacing. When I feel good, I just go. That really isn’t going to work for me in the long term. While it’s important to me that I continue to get faster, I really need and want to build up my overall mileage, and I simply won’t be able to do that if I try and make every single run a personal best.
A couple of miles in, and I knew that I didn’t have the legs for five miles. I needed to revise, and figured that because I’d gone so far, so fast already, I had a good chance at breaking my four-mile record. I was lucky enough to pass another runner just before my turnaround, and he (unknowingly) ended up pacing me for most of the way back. He was running around 7:45 or so and was probably a hundred yards ahead of me when this all started. I actually passed him around the 3.25-mile point, but I had to go around 7:25 to do so. He disappeared after that. I’m not sure whether he stopped or took some other route.
Anyway, I ended up doing a 30:51 for the four-miles, almost a minute off of my previous best, so it worked out well in the end. But as said I need to get my mind set on worrying less about speed, and more about distance. I need to be going out around 7:50, not 7:20, and trying to hold the former as long as I can. Tomorrow it’s my first long run of the week - at least six miles, I’m hoping - and I need to maintain an 8-minute pace.
Splits and chart:
What’s that? The big announcement? That’s coming up in the next post, anytime now…
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