Training Log - Sunday, July 17, 2011

Wow, I am going to try to never postpone a training run again. Having been busy all day, I decided to run my long run on Sunday evening. I arrived at Richard's house near 5 Points around 8:45 PM and we decided to run a section of the Rocket City Marathon course for an 18 mile out and back. We ended up cutting the run just 2 miles short, but it was definitely a tough run.

The second lesson I learned Sunday night is not to eat large amounts of Taco Bell food just 2 hours before any run. Actually, I will probably avoid any amounts of Taco Bell food prior to any run in the future. My stomach really didn't appreciate this type of fuel at all.

I hadn't been doing any long runs on roads it quite some time, so this was actually feeling kind of new to me. Having completed my first week of real training coupled with a 5K race on Saturday (first short distance race in months) and a poor choice of fuel, this long run really presented a challenge. Just 10 miles in I was ready to quit and walk it in. Thankfully I realized rather quickly that it would take me forever to walk back, so I opted to continue on with my run. The temperatures dropped into the lower 70s about an hour into our run, so that made it slightly less intense, but the humidity seemed to stay pretty high.

Rich and I both started to struggle just a little after we hit our first "aid station" (Texaco station about 8 miles into our run just after our turnaround point). The Gatordade refill came just at the right time. I was extremely thirsty and being able to get a refill for the remainder of the run did ease my mind just a little. I also remembered that even road running has its challenges at night. We often felt like we were stepping inmto a black hole, unable to see the road surface or ground we were supposedly stepping on. I do remember an encounter with the local wildlife just standing in the middle of the raod with its eyes staring at us without moving a muscle. It was the friendly neighborhood opposum and not a cute little cat as I initially thought.

Two and a half hours later, we finally completed our run, only to remember that Monday called for another hill workout. Oh, how I hate Mondays;-)