Sunday, 1 March 2009
Repetition is the spice of life?
Following supportive comments such as It can only get better!, and the very useful It's all part of the process […] Fighting the questions keeps you running; succumbing to the questions gets you to stop running. You get better at conditioning your brain for the challenge of training and the marathon (Thanks Ben! You know you can comment right here right?) I thought a lot about how I felt the other day. Saturday afternoon I realized I was actually looking forward to today’s long run, and decided I’d give the old brain a right old conditioning opportunity: I absolutely loath running laps, so why not do just that.
Victoria Park lies 3K from my house, and in order to run 30K this meant 6 laps. Pretty as the park may be, after a lap and a half I was already pretty fed up. But I kept going. A zebra crossing was being repaved which gave me something to look forward to, plus there was of course the usual selection of Sunday runners with comedy running styles to be overtaken by as I was doing my usual tortoise pace.
Having stopped twice to visit one of the more disgusting park loos I’ve ever seen (and switched off my garmin, cheating, I know…) I ended up with a time of 03:37:25 for 30,24K. I’d walked here and there, taking off my jacket, blow my nose, find a new MP3 playlist when my audio book finished, eat an energy gel, stuff like that. I’m sure I’ll manage to (stupidly) use some too fast runners as pacers in Paris, so I hope I’ll end up running faster than that on the day! Just because I’ll start in the last and slowest group it doesn’t mean I need to also finish last - right?
Oh - and over 30K – woo hoo! Longest ever distance!!!
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I hadn't thought about posting a comment. I was typing you an email reply on my cell phone when I was underground--a big way to maximize time! At least I think I was doing that. Anyway, I'm flattered that you'd post the advice, but more so I'm excited that you responded well to it, but even more so, I'm happy to hear you have some perspective about it all and are bounding toward the Big Parisian Goal!
ReplyDelete30K is a huge achievement. That you did it in 3:37 sounds great. But it makes me think, Man, you're out there for so long! So, the sooner you get done with the marathon, the sooner you're done! Kinda a tautology, but also rather true! :D
No worries Ben :) I'll post anything useful, I like being told what to do when it comes to training (as you might remember) so if it sounds like it'll help I'll give it a go.
ReplyDeleteI know it's a long time - it'll mean over 5 hours for Paris! Way too long. But there'll be people to run with and follow so hopefully will be done quicker than that!