New Mileage Heights

The first official marathon training week is done! I had a good week of training, which included six training runs spread over four days and five weight training sessions. I already wrote about my run in with the birds, and haven't had any other issues on my other runs because they were not done in the trails.

On Wednesday I ran 6km to work and another 9.25km after work picking Owen up from school. I did the same thing on Friday, although the afternoon run was an even nine kilometres. This put me at 41km leading into my weekend long run.

That long run happened today and I had a really tough time dragging my ass out the door. It is my intention to try and be out running by 7:30am on Sundays because that is when the marathon for which I am training starts. Today I failed miserably and was not out until a little past 8:30.

The weather was great for running; overcast and not very warm (around +18C) with periods of very light drizzle and almost no wind to speak of. I was really sluggish starting off and ran very slowly. I had little motivation for this run and decided to do something different as far as running routes go. Instead of my usual loops I tried an out-and-back along Bloor Street, just seeing how far out twelve kilometres was. It's farther than I thought as the run took me past High Park.

After I turned around my pace picked up a bit and having averaged 6:00/km for the first 12km I managed to run at an average of 5:23/km for the second half and to bring my total average down to 5:41/km for the entire 24km run. Coincidentally, that's the pace required to run a 4-hour marathon.

Anyway, clearly the way back was faster. It wasn't any easier physically, but mentally it was so much better running towards home rather than running away from home.

This run brought my weekly total to a new high of 65km, which is a bit more than 40 miles! I am now just a shade over 60km away from passing my mileage total from all of 2009.

And lastly, I had a funny thing happen to me early in my run that made me smile. As I ran along the Danforth just about one kilometre into my run I ran past a couple of teens sitting on some steps. As I ran past one of them asked me if I had any extra cigarettes! I'm sure he was joking, but he did it with a completely straight face. Like I said, it made me laugh a bit.