The Week that was – ending 10.4.09

With two more tough weeks of marathon training to go and having just finished perhaps my toughest week of the year, I wanted to share how I am doing.

Most of you are familiar with my days leading up to last week which were filled with racing a 10k and 22 mile long run.

Monday of last week started off with a trail run, 70 miles on the bike and then some more running that evening. Tuesday morning would see me over at Bradley Middle school track early for a 6x1 mile workout and then another 30 mile bike ride that evening. Wednesday morning was a trail run and then off that evening to the Carolina Cycling 10 mile time where I rode PR of 24:52 and more miles of running– all told I did 30+ miles of riding that evening. This was followed by 14 miles with the Charlotte Running Club on Thursday morning and another 20 mile ride that evening. Friday was pretty much a vacation day with only a 7 mile trail run and 20 mile bike ride.

But this was just the launching point for the weekend. Saturday morning, several of us met over at PDS for a 10 tempo run plus a few miles warm up and down. While I was pretty tired, I pushed through it with a 61 minute 10 tempo. Not bad considering we took a couple of wrong turns which kind of took the wind out of my sails. Sunday, we were back at PDS for 22 miles and then later that evening another 30 miles on the bike. I have to admit that I bonked during the 22 mile run. Pretty much, I just have not been taking in enough calories and with about 5 miles left in my long run, I just ran out of gas. The struggle home was really hard but then I usually bonk on a few of these long runs.

If you are interested in the raw numbers, they were 91 miles of running and 211 miles of biking which consumed 21.36 hours of the week. This is on top of my existing day job.

Both mentally and physically, things are definitely challenging. Once you reach a certain level of fatigue, it seems there is just one speed for everything that you do. With two more, weeks my body is getting very close to reaching that point.

 

Tails from single speed running