Week 3 Road to 50 Status

This is the end of Week 3 of our Run Salty 50 Plan.   Our runs this week were

• Monday – Core/Rest
• Tuesday – 2K Double which is a 2K warm up, 2K sprint, 1K recover, 2K sprint, 1K recover, 2K cooldown (10K total)
• Wednesday – 6K Slow
• Thursday – 10K Hill Repeats (we did repeats for 70 minutes and then had to bail due to commitments) on Lipbuster at Turkey Mountain
• Friday – Core/Rest
• Saturday – 15K Easy
• Sunday – 25K Easy
• Total 37 Miles, less than scheduled due to the Hill Repeats on Thursday getting cut short.

I was doing okay up until today, Sunday.   I’ve been trying to run continuously lately even though we race Run/Walk style in varying schedules.  Today for whatever reason was pretty brutal.  The first 15K went okayish but the last 10K and especially the last 5K everything fell apart.   Blame it on dieting while trying to train, removing all but a smidge of carbs from diet, the heat and the last 10K being in full sun, or something else but whatever the cause it was just bad for me out there.

So we ran 40K this weekend, just shy of a marathon.

On the way home, like usual, I stopped to pick up some iced tea for myself and my non-running wife and a doughnut for my kids, just something I do after a long Sunday run.   While waiting in line I was hit with a bad case of nausea and almost lost the contents of my stomach, not that there was anything in it but water and possibly whatever remained of the 2 tablespoons of peanut butter I had around mile 7.   But a few deep breaths and frankly iron clad willpower to not throw up inside a store I escaped without making an ass of myself and kept things tightly wrapped till the feeling passed.

I also made the mistake today of assuming things were going to go well and didn’t bring any cold frozen water and out of ALL the public water fountains on our entire ‘street running turf’ which is comprised of about 20 miles of Riverside Trail and Creek Turnpike Trail, there is a single water fountain that is remotely cool and we didn’t reach it today.  All the rest are low pressure, ambient air temperature at best.   I’ll try to make that mistake less often.

This coming up week 4 is is a light week and I’m considering dropping the 6K on Wednesday to add some more recovery time in there.   Every 4th week I scaled back the mileage to be in the low 20’s.   Each week the mileage goes up by roughly 7-10% other than off weeks.

Right now I couldn’t walk a 50K much less run/walk one.   My Paradigm 3.0’s are just about shot and I’m only ‘okay’ with the Paradigm 4.0’s I’ve got.   They’re nothing special or earthshaking in terms for me personally.  My Lone Peak 3.5’s are still doing okay for trail and I have a pair of Altra Olympus 4’s coming in size 13 to replace the size 14’s that were just too big.   Once again you just can’t tell what size Altra to get until you’ve put them on your feet.  Some I’m a 13, some I’m a 14.

I’m hoping training gets better as the heat goes down and we have some down time next week.  Assuming the heat goes down.

But to say I’m not at least a little concerned about DFL / DNF on our scheduled 50’s would be a lie.  50K in Nov, 50M in February, 50K in April and somewhere in there I’ve already entered a triple, back to back to back Halves race that I forgot about.  Early registration and the discounts can result in some schedule chaos.