Hi!!!!!
I hope everyone is doing well and nowhere near as tired or sore as I have been recently. LOL. Last Wednesday for me was the run from hell.
pre-run sporting my hydration belt 🙂
Our GPS wouldn’t lock on for more than about a quarter of a mile so we couldn’t track exactly where we were at distance wise; which means our refueling gel breaks were WAY off and we even ended up skipping one. Not good on an 11 mile run that lasted 3 hours, you need all your fuel. We were using Brandy’s watch instead of her timer app so our water breaks were also way off. Normally we have used up all our water by about 8-8.5 miles, we over rationed and ended up still having a few sips of water left when we got all the way back to the car 11.2 miles later. Gee, no wonder we both cramped up.
I rolled my ankle on an unevenly paved back road before we even hit mile 2, had to walk it off a bit before we started running again. I had to pee by the time we hit about mile 3 (REALLY?!) finally found a park bathroom (SPIDERS!!!!) around mile 4.5.
Though mile 4 was really nice, we were on this forest-y section in a pretty park that was like a mulch trail, surrounded by lots of oxygen releasing trees which revitalized us.
We took a few wrong turns along the way due to our lack of GPS which was all good……in the beginning.
By mile 6 I was dying! I had a few 2nd wind moments and pulled through but I was on the verge of tears by about mile 8-9 when we got slightly lost in a beautiful development, thankfully we had pretty things to look at. I think by the end of mile 9 we were both on the verge of mild delirium between laughing and crying. I had to take a 1 minute break and sit on a bench for a minute to rest. Our average went down almost 2 minutes but we did it, supported each other and pushed through.
My ankle was pretty sore the day after, ice was on the menu that night and I stuffed my face with food and water the next day to replenish.
Let’s take a few seconds to talk about why I think last night was so hard.
1) We fell off the workout wagon for about 2 weeks then came back to do our longest run ever.
2) We were not properly hydrated before or during the run. I probably only hit about 30oz during the day, and we drank less than 20 ounces on a 3 hour run….bad!
3) I did not hit my daily needed calories even before I started the 3 hour run and we missed one gel pack…..also bad! The body can’t perform without proper nutrition.
4) We felt off because we didn’t have our GPS or timer to track our water and distance, on a fun run day this would have been a ball and made it so much more fun, on a training day, it killed us.
5) Because we couldn’t track our mile to mile pace, our pace was all over the place, we were pushing ourselves too fast some miles and walking way to slow for way to long on other miles.
I am sure there were other contributing factors but those are some of the major ones that come to my mind. Just confirms to me how much preparation can make or break your running experience. You can bet that from now on I will pay better attention before a long run and for about 5 days before any major race I’ll be carb and protein loading (with the correct kinds of carbs and proteins…well mostly lol) and making sure I hit my water goal every day.
What is your worst run to date?
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