Today was my challenging long run. I’ve been stressing about it. I missed my run yesterday because of it. I was thinking should I do my long run yesterday, and then thinking I was going to have to suffer so much only to fail. In the end I ended up doing a hard rowing session for an hour instead. After I’d burnt off some of the stress and frantic anxiety on the rower I got my head together. 11 miles at 7.45, I can do that. Then dig in for 6 fast miles. Then it’s just an 8 m/m trot home. I worked out a good route and a good strategy (to drink as much of my energy drinks as possible before the hard miles to minimise carried weight and maximise energy/ water uptake) and went for it.
I managed the 11 miles fairly comfortably, despite the wind, and was going strong. The fast miles should have been 7.00, 6.55, 6.50, 6.50, 6.45, 6.45, then 8.00 to finish.
I managed the 7.00 and the 6.55 but the wind was too much for me. I did the fast miles on a mile loop, but half of it was into a strong wind, so I had to work harder but I was going slower, then run a lot faster on the other half to make up the lost time, then try and push and hold on into the wind again. It was all hard, with no time to catch my breath or just maintain. I did a 6.56, 6.58 then I quit as I was getting nowhere. Started to jog home, then regrouped and carried on. It cost me a 7.14, but the main thing is I didn’t quit. I did a 6.56 then jogged home for an 8.02.
I’m happy with that. I reckon if it hadn’t been for the wind I could have done that. On previous attempts I couldn’t get below 7.00 so I quit straight away.
Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better.
Apart from the one weak mile where I failed mentally I was only a few seconds off the pace.
I got back, put my rower on to it’s toughest setting and did half an hour to teach my lazy arse a lesson. How quickly we forget. It was only last week I was writing about triggering the plague weakness by doing a hard session on the rower. Now I have to wait, fingers crossed, to see if I got away with it.
Buck.