Thursday, March 21, 2013

The First Go at 13.1: Long Runs

This past Sunday marked a year since my first half marathon! Maybe I should have celebrated with a recap from what I remember from that race... oh well, that will come next in my little "The First Go at 13.1" posts that I am writing for memory's sake. I've already talked about my training plan in general and how hot yoga played a key role in carrying my through the halfs.

As I already mentioned I started skipping a lot of my runs once I started hot yoga. But I tried to keep up with long runs. I am not about to break down each long run I did and when it was since I honestly don't remember, but I remember snippets from different ones so I'm just going to share those thoughts.

 I think I considered my first "long" run 7 miles. It was new distance territory for me and just seemed, well, long. I tried to do this run on the TART trail at home in Traverse City when it was still my winter break. It was not a good idea, the trail was covered in ice and snow. I made it to the next road and decided to run back along the road to my car. That was probably only about 4-5 miles. So I proceeded to drive into town and finish the run on the side walks there. Not the most successful attempt at the new PDR... but I got the distance in somehow.

I also remember when I hit 8 miles down state in East Lansing at school. There wasn't the snow and ice issue and I ran the entire thing listening to Les Mis. Not most people's running music choice, but I love musicals.

Then I hit 9 miles and did it on the treadmill. I decided to stop and get off the treadmill every three miles just for sanity. The idea of running 9 miles in general seemed insane to me at the time and on a treadmill no less. But then I went on to do it at least one more time and did 10 miles on there once as well.

Then the running thing sort of disappeared. My planned long runs went up to 12 miles (I know some plans stop at 10, but I wanted that extra distance for mental 'I can do this' purposes). I never did an 11 mile run, then I went to Arizona and did 12 miles and there was this whole thing with my peroneal tendon which I just decided to do a whole post on. And then I ran DC (March 17, 2013) and did pretty dang well (spoiler for the peroneal tendon post).

Then I had more long runs planned after a week or so of light running after the race in preparation for the Bayshore at the end of May. I probably had at least 4 double digit runs in those 9 weeks in between races. I did 12 miles, once. Two weeks before the Bayshore.

I was semi proud that that even happened. I was only going to make it 10 miles but part way through I decided why not just go for 12 like last time... never mind that it was almost twice the distance as my longest run since DC.

And those were pretty much all the notable long runs... no where near as many as there should have been.

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