Tuesday: 6 miles. 45 minutes. Easy down Summit and back. Anybody who runs occasionally gets to experience a run like this. I was running easy, keeping my heart rate low. Even so, I ran around 20-30 seconds per mile faster than I usually do at that heart rate. A breakthrough run, where, after weeks and months of work, everything seems to come together, and you make what seems to be inordinate progress. More likely, the rest day, combined with the slightly lower mileage the week before, let my muscles recover enough for me to realize the effects of my training.
We runners live for those days.
Wednesday: 7 miles, 51 minutes. 5x4 minutes up-tempo on a hilly course. Had it been a flat course, I would have run these at 6:10-6-30 pace. Given the hills, the intervals were either a bit faster or slower than that. I tried to keep the effort honest, though.
Thursday: 4 miles, 32 minutes. Easy (recovery) run down Summit.
Friday: 6 miles, 45 minutes. Mostly easy, with 7x20s sprints. These proved to be a little too much, or I ran them too hard. Either way, my calves felt like they used to after track practice in high school, where I was a sprinter. The only difference is, in high school I was more ready for sprinting.
Saturday: Rest. Walked a good bit, but no running today.
Sunday: 12.5 miles, 1:53. Did a double lap of the River Gorge loop, plus a little extra added on the second loop.
Total: 35.5 miles.
Sunday was a great morning to be out running. Sunny, 40-50 degrees, just a bit of a wind, and the tail end of the fall colors made for a perfect morning.
And I reveled in it.
I tried to keep this at a low pace, as a trial run for the race. And in general I managed fairly well. Even so, I couldn't help picking up the pace for the quarter-mile across the Ford Bridge. I may be an ultramarathoner now, but that doesn't mean I have to run slowly all the time.
As with my first 50k, I'm coming into this without as many long runs, or long enough runs, to be as prepared as I would like. As I get more experienced in these, I get less worried about my training. I know I can run the distance and time required. When I signed up for this race, 8 hours seemed like an almost impossibly-long time to be running. But I realized that it's only about an hour and 45 minutes longer than I have before (at the Golden Gate Dirty Thirty).
I certainly feel more prepared for this race than I did for my first Ultra.
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