50 Days Remaining – Felt Like A Turd With A Turd In His Pocket

I did not have it in me today. Everyone who goes through training has these days. Today was my day. I was up early to eat my waffle and coffee as normal. Met up with Chad, Katie, and John at 4:30 to begin the first loop. My training called for 12 miles with 7 at marathon pace. I knew from the start this was not going to be an easy run.

Mile 1 – The legs still had that tired feeling that I have been battling all week. It is not soreness nor does it feel like I should not be training, but they just don’t have that bounce that I have felt the last month or so.

Mile 2 – This is when I knew it was going downhill and would be a mental battle the rest of the way. My left calf cramped right in the middle. It hurt and never really left the rest of the run. Even now after the run with compression socks it is pretty tender from the cramp. My usual cramp that I have dealt with all week in my right calf kicked in and I just had to focus on keeping good stride.

Mile 3 my watch started going crazy on me again and I had to delete some history and reset it to get it going again.

Here is the first part that my watch recorded. Nice and slow. Any other time I would be mad about the mile times, but today  I struggled to keep up with the rest at this pace. Thank goodness I had Katie, Chad, and John out running with me because I would have just quit.

We looped back to the Crow Creek at 6 am and was joined by many others. It is such an awesome site to see others up early ready to get some running done. I headed back out for 3 more miles to get my 12 miles in. Chad came back with and that helped to get me back to Crow Creek.

I never did get to my marathon race pace of 7:54, but that is okay. What is more important is listening to my body. Some days you have it and other days you don’t. This is a reminder about the importance of sleep, hydration, proper nutrition, and rest.

I have a big bike ride tomorrow that I will hopefully be completing on a new bike. I hope to have a good ride to end the week of training and then take Monday off to rest and let my body have some downtime. Then come Tuesday it will be back to the grind picking up the training a little bit more. Hard to believe that in 50 days I will be knocking out my first half Ironman.