Week 18, 2012

Visitors-week + one super long run.

For most of the week I had guests so not much time (nor energy :) to do any sports. In fact I didn't do anything the whole week so when they were leaving on Sunday morning I decided to at least finish off with a long run. They dropped me off in Baarn and I set off from there.

It didn't start well. It was cold and windy and right away I lost my way; or rather what I thought would be a bridge turned out to be a ferry crossing point, with the ferry not operating on Sunday. Since there weren't any close bridges this mistake cost me dearly: 9K. That meant that instead of the planned 45K I'd have to do 54K. I decided that 50K will be (more than?) enough and walked the last stretch. What I didn't realize was that the GPS was not very reliable and according to my watch I did "only" 48K. Anyhow, it was a fairly long run that took me 5h to finish.

The nice part is that after not doing any running this week I decided to try to do this long run at a faster pace than usual. I set my watch for the 5:40-6:00 min/km range... and in the end ended up going faster. My average over the whole race was 5:36min/km and the best part was that I managed to keep steady pace throughout this training. Interestingly enough this is only 8 seconds per kilometer slower than what I did last year in the 50K of Assen. Granted, I took 3 breaks today (24mins in total) and I didn't have this luxury in Assen. But then again, we're comparing a training with a race! Another interesting thing was that I did not look at my watch at all (if only because its strap is broken and it stayed in my backpack for the whole time) and my heart rate was climbing like crazy, starting below 140 and reaching 170 by the end of the training.

After coming home I felt sooo tired. Ok, I guess it's understandable but I do mean sooo tired. I was crashing so decided to take a nap. Set the alarm in 1h but was so dead that it took me another hour to get up. And now I'm still dead tired; thankfully I should be able to sleep it off tomorrow.

Conclusions. I think I like the idea of doing long runs somewhat faster. But the downside is that I cannot do it too often: it will take time to recover after what I did today and doing something like that every week is out of the question. I guess I'll have to find a balance. Off. To. Bed. Now.

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