Nothing interesting really, it was supposed to be an easy day after our long run but the weather was supposed to be bad so we switched to stairs and did 6 sets of 10 flights up and down. We didn’t want to push it after the 20 mile run and after the calf pain RW had afterwards.
Today was our first 20+ mile run. We parked a car at the 8 (12) mile lap and then drove to the start. Our big thing this run was to work on our pace which is a 9 minute run, 1 minute walk and a 11 min warmup. Our 11 minute warmup is 12-12:30 pacing. The remaining sections are negative splits by 15 seconds for each 1/3rd of 26.2 miles. i.e. if the first 9 miles is an 11:45, the next 9 is 11:30 and the last 9 is 11:15.
The averages are over both run and walk. The pacing is designed to have an average of around 11:27 per mile over the course of the marathon. This gets us just under a 5:00 marathon which is our primary goal. Our secondary goal is a 5:15 and our tertiary goal is just to finish before the race ends.
It’s important to have attainable goals.
We did 20.2 miles in 3:47 which leaves us enough time to do another 6 and break 5:00. Maybe.
One problem is that as is our usual thing we hit the 90% point of a run , regardless of distance and things go pear shaped. Around mile 18 to 19 it just got really hard (duh).
My RW did an amazing job and I really wanted to trip her to slow her down but I didn’t. She’s had problems with our last few longer runs, the last 17 mile we did and the last 19 (20) mile we did on trails but this time she just kept on going.
Afterwards we were both mostly okay but we had a superbowl party at a dear friends house and basically ate like pigs.
It’ll be interesting to see how things keep going as we’re about to go int our taper stages.
#NotASponsor but willing to accept
Background I’ve tried everything as fuel for long runs, Clif, Gu, Stinger, Huma, Hammer, UCann, a couple of more brands I can’t remember the name of and in all the forms each brand offers, gels, waffles, chews, bloks etc. I’ve DIY’d my own fuel of various recipes. Honey based, Brown Rice based, Malto based, Chia based. I’ve done ‘real’ foods like Picky bars, DIY energy bars, Lara bars, Clif bars, pretzels with PB, Oreos, Trail Mix, Nutter Butters, PBandJ, Bananas, Candied Ginger, some others.
Drink mixes I’ve used Skratch, Tailwind and one other brand I forget.
Long story slightly shorter is I have a ‘little’ bit of experience with a pretty good chunk of what’s available and in common usage.
So in Q4 2017 I picked up a couple of “eGel” gels. They were being offered as freebies by someone at a race. I took a couple and used one on a long run to validate no ‘issues’ but so far I can eat, drink anything without a problem. After all the crap I’ve put in my belly over the last few decades both natural and unnatural I would be surprised, barring an infection, to find something I couldn’t digest.
But still they sat easy on me.
I can say that after 20 months as of right now of fueling for running that eGel by CrankSports and their drink mix eFuel has made a very apparent difference in me in my ability to stay energetic over the course of long runs. I don’t know if their science is real or not, I’m not a food anthropologist as they say. But I can say that I’m willing to given them the benefit of the doubt. And valid or not they make a good argument for their stuff.
So I didn’t need to check the local shoe stores because I know exactly what they sell and this isn’t one of them. I popped over to Amazon and nothing. A google later and I found out their website and then found out they don’t sell on amazon preferring to bypass the fee amazon charges as savings to direct customers. There is one store in the state that sells them but it’s a 4 hour round trip to do it and just not worth it.
I ordered a sampler pack of gel and drink mix. And got a shipped notice same day I place the order. Each time I’ve placed an order it ships same day. Today it literally shipped 34 minutes after I placed the order at 5:30 p.m. on a Friday. This just put them over the top in my book s and prompted me to finally write this review. And after using them for 4 months give or take with the same results every time is also another reason to review them.
On long runs I take a gel 30 to 45 minutes pre run and then one gel every hour or so after that. I also alternate water and sips of the eFuel on the run.
And I have no highs or lows during our long runs, just steady sustained energy. Last Saturday we did a pretty long 30K trail run and energy level I was up and level for the entire 19.5 miles.
Flavor wise for the gels, honestly they’re all pretty close to the same to me. I can taste slight differences but not enough to have a favorite, they’re all acceptable. They’re also not as thick as Gu’s which I find hard to ingest as a result but not as thin as Huma. To me the Huma’s texture is just a bit offputting, not bad, just not preferred by me.
For the drink mix, Citrus Punch is hands down my favorite. The orange is just awful to me. No offense to Crank Sports or anyone who likes it but it’s just blech. The Raspberry is not bad, if you like raspberry as a drink. I don’t but I can say it’s okay. The Mountain flavor which might be supposed to be kind of like Mountain Dew maybe but it’s… I’m not sure. I got a sampler pack of the four flavors and the only one I enjoyed is the Citrus Punch. It’s super tart which I like and citrus punchy.
So now I carry 3 or 4 eGels with me on long Sunday’s and 2 500ml bottles of eFuel and then a bladder of water. I don’t use it all but I’d rather have it and not use it than vice versa. If it’s more than 2 hours I will also typically swap one of the eGel’s out with a Vanilla or Chocolate Gu or Huma just to have the variety of flavor. The eGels, again to me, you might have a different experience, are just too similar so having something that’s completely different in flavor is nice to have.
Lately I’ve also been bringing a vacuum sealed pack with some pb filled pretzels from Costco, a individual pack of oreos with 6 oreos in it and some candied ginger. Me and Bunny share those typically.
As of today, the 1st of January 2018 this is the gear I use and prefer –
After seeing the footage from our Greenleaf 30K I decided to look into ways to making that better and I settled on a Feiyu Tech G5 Gimbal. In just some quick playing around with it it works fairly well.
I’m going to have to 3D print some shells though to use 18650 batteries as the 22650 it comes with is just super hard to find and I have a bunch of 18650’s for flashlights of various purposes.
It’s heavier than I thought but the craftsmanship is pretty good.
I picked the G5 for a few reasons, looks, it’s just a cleaner look than the other one I was looking at, it has a ‘selfie’ button that makes it easy to do a 180 of the camera, and it was $50 less than the other one I looked at.
Also DC Rainmaker has several months of use with this model and he didn’t say anything bad about it so that’s a big plus.
And a big reason to get a gimbal, a powered one anyway, is I just like toys. All kinds of toys. I could have 3D printed a weight based gimbal that would have helped. But I needed a compact one that I can easily stow in my pack and this one fit the bill.
Today was threshold day of 25, 20, 25. Not a big fan. But it’s a run day so I run and I’m on a schedule and so I do the planned activity.
Cold, windy, not fun. 🙂
Today was technically a day off so we decided to do stairs. We went next door to the 12 story building and went up and down the stairs a few times. (Un)surprising how you use different muscles to go up stairs than you do to go up hills and just run flats.
Didn’t do more than 25 minutes just to avoid serious strain since we’re going to be doing our last long run on Sunday of about 20 miles in preperation for our marathon in Little Rock.
Nothing really exciting here. A set of 6 1K intervals with a 90 second recovery between them after a 15 minute warmup and with a post 10 minute cool down.
Stupidly windy, like 30mph so coming back sucked balls against that wind.
So today we ran the Greenleaf Trail 30K. It was a lot of fun. At 19.5(ish) miles it was our longest distance and it took us a looong time. At our skill levels there was just a lot of trail we couldn’t run without significant risk. And with our first marathon in 4 weeks we chose to err on the side of caution.
This run was primarily just to have a long weekend run and to push our selves a bit.
We had a great time being outraged at the lack of flat ground, having to go miles on the side of a hill trying to walk on ground sloped at 45 degree angle which is super hard on the ankles.
Around mile 10 we got passed by a 67 year old woman, never did catch her.
Around mile 15-16 we started running into cramping problems with muscles we don’t normally use for due to road running primarily. For me it was my inside groin muscles, the ones that run down the inside of your thighs. For my RW it was hamstrings and assorted other places.
I used a GoPro for the first time and filmed some snippets on each mile although mile 18 and 19 got lost although I was able to do a second mile 19. Battery failure. That was fun and I learned some things about filming on a run. I now have a gimbal to help with keeping video steady that I need to learn to use.
When I get around to putting the videos together I’ll post them on the Run Salty channel on Youtube primarily for friends and family to pretend to enjoy watching. It’s really about having the memories to look back on later on down the road.
All in all it was a good run for multiple reasons, a it was just a lot of fun, b it pushed us a bit in terms of effort both mental and physical, c it was a lot of fun.
Equipment used:
Lone Peak 3.5 from Altra – Held up well, they’re servicable, not my ideal shoe but good enough
Stryd FootPod – Does not work well with a mix of run hike. Was almost a mile and a half short of the 19.5 run.
Garmin Fenix 5X – Best option of the watches out there for me for various reasons.
Road ID – So someone can identify the body.
Google Pixel 2 XL – Wonderful camera for taking still images and streaming music.
Saloman Skin 12 – Wonderful vest, highly recommend. Not perfect but very close.
Ultimate Directiojn Soft Flasks with Extended Nipples – Lets you drink your fuel without having to take the flask out.
Source Hydration Bladder – The Milspec version 2L with insulated hose in Coyote Brown
EFuel – Wonderful drink mix for fueling. Works very well for me.
EGel – Wonderful gels for fueling. Works very well for me.
GoPro Hero 4 Silver – Audio sucks while its in it’s case. Just be aware. Mounted to a selfie stick of my own design and 3D printed on a MakerWorks MendelMax 3 printer in PLA.
Garmin HR Senson on Polar Chest Belt – HR monitoring sucked for some reason with a metric butt ton of drop outs and missing data.
Underarmor bike shorts, Champion shorts, REI Thin Base Layer shirt, Halo skull cap
Had to run solo today due to running wife getting stuck with work bullshit at last minute. Kept it low energy, just half an hour of up and down Lip Buster hill. Lip Buster is longish hill that varies from 30 to 45 degree angles. One up and down is 200′ of elevation change, 100 up, 100 down. That’s based on the altimeter on my Fenix 5X.
Calves were a little anxious the first couple of laps up and down but quieted down by the end but I have what is shaping up to be a hilly, wet, muddy, fun 31K in 4 days so I didn’t want to push it.