OK. Rewinding to the beginning of the week:
Monday: refereed for 2 hours of middle school boys 3-on-3 on what is approximately a 2/3s size basketball court at the YMCA. Nearly doesn't count because it was super duper easy, but it was 1 official per court, so I got
some running in. I was nervous because of how badly I bruised my leg on Sunday, but it was doable with compression socks and the fact that I didn't really have to
run.
Tuesday: 5mi easy I don't remember all of the details, but this run didn't happen. I think it was probably because my leg was crabby, DH had golf, all of the kids were busy in the evening, and by the time I could get on the treadmill I was massively unmotivated. Not a great beginning of the training week when I'm a month and a week out from race day.
Wednesday: 5mi easy. I was supposed to do 30sec almost-sprint repeats as well, but my bruise felt heavy in my leg on the small downhills along my route, so I opted to just take it super easy, get the miles in, and call it at day.
Thursday: 5mi easy More missing childcare, and then DD took for.ev.er. to get to sleep, and hauling myself onto the treadmill after 8pm sounded awful.
Friday: rest day. not that I needed it at this point. DH worked a half day, and then we packed up to go camping for the weekend about 30min south of home. Just far enough away to not be in work-mode, and it also cut my drive to the trailhead on Saturday in half. Attempted to carb load a little bit on Thursday night and Friday. I had picked up some unflavored tailwind, more gels and stroopwaffles from Fleet Feet during the week, and I tested out the tailwind to make sure it wasn't going to do weird things to my guts (and get some bonus carbs in liquid form.) Did a little too much walking around in my oofos with the dogs and could definitely feel it in my lower legs. I also didn't get to bed as early as I had wanted, but that's always tricky when you're contending with kids and dogs at the campground.
Saturday: 20 miles--trail course preview.
Yeah. That deserves being in bold because holy cats who am I that I'm doing 20mi training runs? Backing up a little bit, I had looked at the course map, and then the garmin map (the full 50k course was in garmin connect!) and worked out how to chop off 11 miles. I mapped it all out in "courses" and THEN compared all of the twists and turns with the written directions from the race website so I knew the order of the post numbers and if I needed to stay left or right. I somehow managed to forget the piece of paper I had written it all out on, but DS1 stayed home and texted me a picture of it on Friday when I was getting all of my stuff ready. I had planned it so that I would run the most-hilly section of it first (miles 20-31 on race day) the stop back at the car to refill fluids and fuel, make a bathroom stop if needed, and then do part of the "less hilly" perimeter loop, cut off part of it using a seasonal road, and then finish up with what would be miles 16ish-20 on race day and then be back at my car.
I set my alarm for 5 AND 530am. I only got about 6 hours of interrupted sleep, and hauled myself out of bed after the 530 alarm. My friend was planning on running with me (driving separately) and he texted me at about 530 letting me know that his knee was really giving him trouble and that he wasn't going to make it down to run. Honestly, with as big of an issue as his knee has turned into, I am starting to doubt if he even starts the race. He said he had tested it on a 20 minute hilly walk on Friday and even that was causing problems.
We had planned to meet at the trailhead at 7, and I thought that maybe I could get started before then since I wouldn't have to wait, but there was that whole thing where I snoozed for an extra 30min. Of course the puppy woke up when I got up to get ready, and then she thought it was time to play for the day, and then woke up the other dog, who in turn woke DH and then DD up. So much for me being super quiet so everyone could sleep in!
A far as nutrition prep I had an empty gatorade bottle I poured some coke in that I shook up over and over on Friday night to get all of the bubbles out, and my collection of soft flasks, both reservoirs for my vest, the whole bag of tailwind, and extra bottle of gatorade. I stopped at a gas station on my way to the course to grab a bag of ice, and decided that pop tarts sounded better than the PBJ on a tortilla that I had packed, and that I could save those for after my run, or between "laps" for my course. I filled my vest with about 1L of water and 2 scoops of tailwind, a 500mL flask of plain water, 4 packs of nerds, 1 raspberry huma, and a bag with 4 500mg tylenol capsules.
I wore my running tights, one of DS1's shirts, my calf sleeves, and my janji toe socks. DS's shirt is an under armour tech t, heatgear, with raglan cut sleeves. All of the things I was looking for but not finding. I'm pretty sure these are on sale right now for like $19, so I'll have to decide if I really want a different color, or if I just want to borrow it again on race day.
It was about 64 degrees when I started, and nearly 80 when I finished, with the dew point somewhere around the mid-60s. This is pretty comparable to the average for next month's race day.
Loop 1:
It was a VERY good plan to have my intersection posts/directions already ordered out because I would have gotten "lost" very quickly without them. I set my intervals for 20/30, but planned to walk the up-hills and take things very easy in general. My interval timer is also set to remind me to drink or fuel every 15 cycles which ends up being around every 0.8mi when I'm going slow. Right after I hit the 1mi mark, just after I finished my first pack of nerds, I caught a root at the bottom of a hill (while transitioning to a walk
thank goodness!) and fell. My lower right leg took the brunt of the impact, along with the heel of my left hand. I did a quick inventory of "am I injured or does this just hurt" and decided I was OK to keep going, and would re-revaluate when I finished my loop. If things got worse, I would navigate back to the car sooner using the maps at each post.
This hilly part of the course was not as difficult as I was expecting. It's like a grown-up version of the trail I've been running on since spring. The up and down hill sections are longer, but not really steeper than the worst of the hills on my nearby course. It's about the same in terms of roots, but is a little narrower. While I think this will be more challenging on legs that already have 20 miles in them instead of legs that have 0 miles, this seems doable on race day without sacrificing too much to the fatigue gods. I ate 3 packs of nerds, drank almost all of my tailwind, and all of the 8oz of flat coke I had in my my vest during the run. I ate the huma as I exited the woods and walked to my car. I refilled my vest with gatorade, another scoop of tailwind (with more water), 2 additional packs of nerds (total of 3 in the vest), and grabbed a stroopwaffle as well.
Loop 2:
This part of the course looks flatter on an elevation profile than it feels. On the course description on the website it talks about your "first big climb" at mile 4 and it's not lying. It's almost a mile of uphill in the valley between other hills. It just keeps.going.up. and my watch says its about a total of 300ft of ascent. This is something that is hard for me to replicate at home
on roads that are safe for me to use. There's a hill along the highway that would definitely replicate this, but there's no way I'm going out on the side of that with the speeds the cars go. AND I missed a turn. I'm not sure how I missed it, but I did, and instead of hitting the outside left perimeter loop, I ended up back on one of the internal loops. I tried to fix this (when I realized what had happened) by jumping onto a seasonal road that I knew would cross the other road I had planned on using as a cut point. But then my phone was in SOS mode, my maps were in offline mode, and things got pretty tricky for a few miles. My achilles issue that I've been dealing with was really flared up in both legs, and I did a
lot of walking while I tried to figure out where I was and where I needed to be. Of course, there were thunderstorms passing through in about 2 hours and I had no clue how much distance I would be adding or subtracting from my route with this detour. I ended up almost accidentally coming across the intersection/post that I needed to find; I'm chalking that up to how much time I had spent routing my course and studying the maps. There had been several places where the trail had intersected the road, but none of them had seemed like the right one until I came to this one, and then there was a course marker post with the number I needed from my list. Hurray! The top outer loop of the course is lovely and quite flat, but the mosquitos were out in full force, and I nearly got sprayed by a skunk I ran up on (it was about 10ft off the trail and was into a handstand by the time I noticed it off to my left.) The problem I had with this part of the trail was that, since it's a fat tire trail, it's one rather narrow rut through the woods. And that meant that where my feet wanted to land was continually on the \__/ sloped edges of the trough. And my ankles
hated it.
With my detour I actually ended up being exactly right for mileage and not 0.86 over like my manually-routed course was planned to be. I put a fleece blanket on the ground behind my car in the parking lot, opened the hatch on the back, and laid on the ground with my legs up for about 10min before I peeled off my socks and compression sleeves, and then I laid there for about 5 more minutes. The whole thing took me about 30min longer than I was hoping it would, but I had to stop 8 or 9 times to dump things out of my shoes, top and trail/map posts to confirm I was going the correct way, I took a little longer during my re-fueling stop than I intended, and then that whole getting off-course thing.
Left: what I did Right: what I was supposed to do. hahahaha! That little tail at the bottom is where I missed my turn.
Stats:
20 miles
5:23:53
avg pace 16:12 (moving pace 15:53)
avg HR 149 (yessssss!)
1,572ft ascent--that means that the race-website published ascent is waaaay off because there's no way they're getting another 3k ft on the outer loop that appears to be quite flat on the course profile.
ALL of my miles were under the cut-off pace for race day, and I would have "banked" about 25min, or 2:16 per mile to have as a buffer over the minimum pace to use in the last 11 miles (so I could go as slow as I did in this run, and then go 19:41/mi for the last 11 miles.) And I really did try to take it easy for this run. I need to get more carb in. And definitely plan for "real food" midway-ish. I'll likely just grab stuff from an aid station for that since nothing has ever really upset my stomach on a run.
Sunday: I'm supposed to do 8 miles with strides today. I very much feel like I have "post Dopey" legs today, and the part of my leg I landed on is cranky. I think what I'll end up doing is walking today, maaaaybe run/walk 1 or 2 miles if things loosen up during the walk, but I'm not putting a lot of emphasis on doing all 8 miles unless things feel good. That's another 2-2:15 training run for DH to have to ride herd on all the kids, and I might be really pushing my luck with that.
