Afternoon Ride

Farewell Ride

Strength

LBGR

Write up for 

I’m training for Black Canyon 100k and wanted a 35-40 mile training run so I decided to go back to my favorite place for a long run. This was supposed to be a training run more than anything but I figured it would be nice to get the FKT under 5 hours. 


The weather app was showing a chance of snow today but there weee just a few flurries. It was on the cold side in the low to mid 30s but I don’t mind that too much for this kind of run. My hands and toes were a bit cold in the first few miles but they warmed up quick and then everything was good. I had a hydration vest with a liter of sports drink, a couple granola bars and some sport gummies. 


I’m pretty deep in my training right now and my legs have felt pretty terrible all week. I’ve been taking it easy to try to be ready for today. Things were feeling better yesterday but definitely not great. Starting the run today my legs felt ok. They definitely weren’t peppy and fresh but they weren’t complaining too much. It seemed like they had accepted their fate. 


Decided to not look at my for the first half. I would check it at half way and decide if I was going for the FKT or just getting in the miles. The run was super uneventful, there were lots of people out which was nice but nothing particularly interesting happened. The miles didn’t crawl by but they weren’t flying by either. My legs weren’t great at the start but they weren’t really getting worse. 


I made it to half way and checked my watch and it was 2:20:41 I had to double check it because that was so much faster than I had planned on running. I felt like I was putting some effort into the run but I assumed the jankiness in my legs meant “some effort” would put me around 8 minute miles. 


I was excited from that point from a little bit but then went into a bit of a low patch. It wasn’t bad but I was thinking about having a long way to go and having gone out way too fast. The miles kept ticking by though and I slowly became more confident that I wasn’t going to blow up and die. 


Eventually I started realizing I was going too fast and tried to slow down but it wasn’t really working. This was supposed to just be another long run but sub-7 miles are not normal on my long runs. Trying to slow down didn’t really work. Then I thought I might slow down a bit near the end when it got hilly.  That didn’t really work either. At some point I got under 4:40 stuck in my head (you know because a sub 4:40 38.5 mile is such a big deal). 


By the time I was running the hilly last 6ish miles my legs were starting to complain and I was definitely counting down the mile (ok half miles and maybe a few quarter miles). Eventually I made it to the finish in 4:38:42. It was a lot faster than I expected but also a higher effort than I had planned. Overall, it’s awesome seeing that I can do this but hopefully I didn’t push to the point of needing excessive recovery. 



Top Sports

Dustin Mitchell

Parklands O&B FKT

12 Comments

Splits

Sign up to view more activities from Dustin Mitchell

Afternoon Ride

Farewell Ride

Strength

Strength

LBGR

Want to see more?

The #1 app for runners and cyclists

Sign Up for Free. Track your progress and reach goals. Join 100 million active people on Strava.

See More from Dustin