20 Miles

 

With less than five weeks until the Marathon I was scheduled to run 20 miles on Saturday morning.  This would be my first of two 20 Miler’s of this training session.  I arrived at Stony Creek around 7:20AM and began my run.  I was going to run 4 miles before our official group run was started and then run 16 more miles with the group.  I tried to slow myself down for the first 4 miles since I knew that I would have a total of 20 miles in the for the morning.  After the first mile being way too fast, I was able to slow down to a good pace.  After returning to the usual meeting place I downed some water, signed in, and listened to the words of encouragement before we all headed out together.  The rest of the run, the 16 miles, felt really good believe it or not.  We kept a good pace, had good conversation, and also plenty of water and Gel along the way.  I am a firm believer that longer runs are much easier when you are not running by yourself.  At the end of the run I knew this would be the true test.  Would my legs be shaking?  Would my calves cramp up?  To my surprise neither of those two things happened.  Yes my legs were sore and fatigued, but to be honest I did not feel like I ran 20 miles.  I actually felt better than I had after past 20 mile runs.  So it appears that with a little help from above and good training that I am actually improving.  However I will admit that when I ran 5 miles on Sunday that I could feel the fatigue from the previous days run.  It was not as bad as I was afraid it would be, but my legs simply felt really weak.  So this weeks runs will be shorter than normal just like the schedule calls for so that some recovery occurs. 

Advertisements