Pheidippides’s BodyBlog

I ran my first 30K today, intending it to be a tune up for the marathon I’m running on Dec. 7.  Based upon the results, my running needs some more tuning.  My goal with this run had been to run most of it at my intended marathon pace (7:30 min/mile), and see if I could speed up a little at the end if I had enough in the tank to do so.

The race was in Clarksburg, a rural community south of Sacramento at the edge of the Sacramento River Delta region.  It’s very pretty, and the race travels along country roads through orchards, vineyards, sloughs, and farms.  It was especially pretty today, because a light pre-race rain had cleared the skies of the usual haze, and the sunny conditions allowed for views of the mountains looking both east and west.
Despite beautiful (if just a bit windy) conditions (mid-50s at the start, and sunny), things didn’t go according to plan.  I started too fast — 7:15 pace for the first four or five miles.  I slowed a bit over the next four miles roughly, and then slowed some more.  By ten miles, although I still felt O.K., I could sense things starting to unravel.  At the half marathon point, I was still a bit under 7:30 pace, but after that things fell apart completely.  My legs just felt burned out, and by the end they were leaden, and I was running slower than 8 min pace.  In the last two miles, some runners from my running group, whom I had beaten in the half marathon a month ago, were zipping by me, and I simply couldn’t keep up.  My final time was 2:24:14, about a 7:45 min/mile pace.  Not too bad, considering it was my first 18.6 mile race, but discouraging considering how poor my pacing was and how badly I missed my goal of running at goal marathon pace.

The key reasons I failed to achieve my goal, I think, were, one, poor pacing, and two, the fact that my legs were still sore from running 22 miles last Sunday.
My goal of running the marathon in 3:20 is now looking a lot more daunting than it did before.  If I am to have any hope of achieving that time, I am going to have to (a) taper effectively, so my legs and heart are well rested by race time, and (b) pace effectively, which means pacing at no faster than my goal marathon pace.  To beat 3:20, I have to run at a 7:38 pace or better.  That should, I think, be achievable, but only if I don’t run too fast at the beginning.

The marathon is 5 weeks away.  This last week was a strange one for training.  Discomfort in my right foot kept me from training more early in the week after my very hard Tuesday interval workout, so I only had one more run until today.  Today I ran my longest run yet — 22 miles.  As usual, started at the 13.5 mile mark on the bike trail by the river, but this time I ran downstream to the 3 mile mark.  At the start at 6:45 a.m., it was already 55 degrees, and the skies were clear despite the forecast for more showers.  I ran in a short sleeve top, which was ideal.  For the first 5 miles my shins hurt, but the pain faded away after that and didn’t return for the rest of the run.

As usual, I ran a 1.5 mile warmup and 1.5 mile cooldown, so the main set was 18 miles.  I finished that in 2:30:42, an 8:24 pace, and finished the full 21 miles in 3:02:21, an 8:37 pace.  I pushed to finish the last two miles of the 18 mile set in 16:09, but after that I slowed to a crawl, and ran the last 1.5 miles in over 17 minutes, about as slow as I ever run.  I ran about an extra mile of junk running between the car and my starting point.  Now, an hour and a half later, my legs are still fatigued (as is the rest of me).

That will be my longest run until the marathon. I run the 18.6 mile (30K to be precise) Clarksburg run next week, and then I’ll probably top out the next two long runs at 15-16 miles before tapering for the last 3 weeks.  Goal this next week: 45 total miles, which will be as long as I run for a week until the marathon.  After Clarksburg my emphasis will shift away from long runs and toward steady mileage and some stamina-tempo runs, with less hard speed work.