If I were smarter (and if I wanted to take a more scientific approach to this whole thing), I would have looked at the list of all the things that concerned me on last week's run and tweaked one thing to see if that would make a difference.
I'm not smart. I tweaked everything.
1. I ate a better dinner the night before. I've been trying to cut calories in a smart way during the week to drop some weight (it is taking forever), but I have to make sure that the night before a long run I'm not hungry. So I ate well last night.
2. I didn't have gels to take with me on the run. It was an emergency last Sunday morning but not enough of an emergency for me to actually sit down and order some online this week. So I found myself this morning staring down an 11 mile run without any nutrition again. I started rummaging around in the kitchen and came across this pack from Generation UCan . Seemed like a good idea this morning before I started, so I mixed it up and planned to drink it while I ran. I also tucked a couple of packets of my daughter's fruit snacks into my shorts.
3. I listened to a Runner's World podcast this week with Jeff Galloway talking about his run/walk intervals, and I was inspired to go shorter on my intervals. I have been running 2/1 for as long as it is sustainable (see the Wall) and then rolling with a survival of the fittest mentality for the remainder of the run. After listening to Galloway talk about intervals as short as 30/30, I was thinking it was time for a change. If you haven't heard this interview with him, it's worth a listen. (He's just so darn cool!).
4. I run the same direction every week when I run the lake. This week, I decided I'd run in the opposite direction. Not exactly sure why. But I was tweaking stuff. So why not tweak all the things?
How'd it go? Awesome. Which is kind of a problem. Because now I'm convinced that I have to do ALL these things every single time for a long run to go well. When really, one of the things might have been enough. What really worked, though?
The Galloway talk convinced me to try a 60 run/30 walk interval from the first step I took out the door. His argument is that the point of that frequency of run/walk intervals will prevent fatigue and allow for whatever is in the legs to last more consistently over the duration of the run. Since I've been running a 2/1 interval for as long as I could sustain it, the 60/30 interval is technically the same amount of walking. And it worked for me today. I not only maintained the 60/30 interval for the full 10.7 miles, but I felt like I could go even further.
The other significant shift for me was with nutrition. I mixed up the drink like a rookie--powder everywhere, too much water in the bottle on the front end. Mental note for next time: fill the water bottle halfway with water. Add the powder. Fill it the rest of the way with water. Mix it up. Yep. Gotta remember that for next time. My kitchen counter got half the powder.
Even though my kitchen counter got half the powder, the uCAN did the trick today. I took a small sip of my bottle every third or fourth walk interval all the way around the lake. I never got hungry (a problem in past runs). And I never had an energy dip (another problem on past runs). And the one packet (130 calories) was enough for the whole run. I did have to carry a second bottle of water (just water) with me because periodically it felt like I needed to drink something to water down the other thing I was drinking. And it ended up being a 2 hour, 14 minute run, so 130 calories in that time wasn't likely enough. I'll have to do some more research around this. But the point? No dips. Not a one. Picking up some more uCAN today to play around with it on long runs to come. Still need to find a better solution for carrying beverages on the run, though.
And the question of the day coming out of the run intervals is if I should be doing that interval for every run? Or should the shorter runs during the week be done differently? If so, how? Why? Another thing to research.
Run on friends.
This week's running log: 26.54 miles.
This year's running log: 793.79 miles.
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