Sunday, August 18, 2013

EndurRun stage 7, Marathon, plus week 47 summary

548TSS on 9.1 hours

A big week, 90+km.

The marathon today was going to be slow, intentionally and deliberately slow. Mission accomplished! I finished in 3:57:21, my slowest marathon ever. However, considering that my longest two training runs were 28 and 25km and done two weeks and one week ago, this was a good volume bump.

Started out very slow at the back of the small group, for the first 4km, I ran at their pace, skipped my first walk break, then took the second, and fell to the rear a little. They were running about 5:45, which was too slow for my walk/run strategy of 5:30 for 10min, walk 1 min. When my run resumed, I passed up through them and was off the front (of that group, the field had already stretched out quite a bit). They almost caught up on the next walk, but after that, I never saw them again.

The race was two laps of a 21.1km course, the first lap was very relaxed, the sun wasn't up fully, and there was lots of shade, I was feeling fresh. I thought "don't screw up what's already working", so I didn't increase my pace at all. After 25km or so, I was having problems keeping my HR in zone 2 where it had been in the first part of the race, often climbing to high 3 or low 4. There were a lot of rolling hills, so that was part of it, it was also getting hot, and cardiac drift. I switched from pace to just keeping my HR in zone 3 until the last 5km, when I just started to run based on feel.

Sean cheered me on at the end, convincing me to sprint the last 200m. Hope I don't look too goofy in the pics.

I think Monday is going to be a rest day.

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