Apologies for the late post, but it’s been a busy week. After Tuesday’s solid run, I was quite looking forward to the 8 mile “Planned Marathon Pace” run on Thursday evening. Goal pace was 6:48 per mile, but I decided to try something slightly different and start off a bit quicker for the first 4 miles with the aim of easing off for the second half of the run.
All sounds quite straightforward on paper, and if you were to see my average pace for the 8 miles at the end of the run (6:47 per mile), you’d think everything went exactly to plan. I wish I could say that were true….
The first 4 miles felt pretty good (6:27, 6:23, 6:29, 6:27) and I was happy to have ducked under my planned 6:29 per mile pace. All of a sudden though, everything seemed to go wrong. My legs felt heavy, my breathing laboured and generally I felt terrible. I slowed to a disappointing 7:17 mile and tried really hard to pick it up for the 6th mile. Somehow I managed a 6:58, but it took so much out of me I had to slow down again to recover. Mile 7 was another sluggish 7:17 and by now I was just wishing the workout was over. How can things change so dramatically in such a short space of time? With all the effort in the world, I squeezed out a 7 minute mile to finish, but felt wiped out and totally drained.
I walked around for a while, sipped Gatorade and hoped the bad feeling would soon pass. It didn’t, so I jumped in the car, drove home and took a long, cool shower. An hour later, after a light meal, I went to bed feeling worse than I’d felt for a while and slept for almost 10 hours straight. Friday wasn’t much better, but I managed to get through the day and felt pretty much back to normal by early evening. Not quite sure what went wrong, but I’m hoping I’m not coming down with something that will disrupt my marathon taper. Sunday calls for an important 20 mile raining run, so fingers crossed I can pull myself together in time. Fun, fun, fun….