Training for the White River 50 miler: Diary Week 3

To start off this training diary entry, I’ll just say that I’m feeling pretty good today physically. I’m tired after our 31 mile mixed-terrain run yesterday, but compared to how I’ve normally felt after most marathons and my last 31 mile race (when I took at least a week off to recover), I’d say I’m doing remarkably well. My legs feel good and I’ve been eating pretty much all day, but I’m not sore or tight at all.

This training cycle has been all about ramping up toward long distance by running lots of slower miles, and the strategy appears to be working. The biggest problem that I’m having is keeping myself at the slower paces I should be running, especially on the shorter runs. I keep feeling the desire to pick it up and on yesterday’s long run I had the over-whelming feeling of wanting to “get it over with” at the end of the run. At mile 27, I caught some old friends on the trail and really wanted to run with them for their company, but they were simply not running fast enough and so I pulled ahead of them. I should have hung with them to slow down and talk, but the desire to be done with the run won out.

Mentally, I’m somewhat worried about next weekend. As I told Karl and Andy after the run yesterday, I wished I had felt better at mile 26. Considering that we’re attempting to run two marathons next weekend, I would have liked to have been “cruising” at 26 to pick back up and run another one today. But after more reflection and reviewing my 8 day mileage total (80 miles), I realize that I should be tired. The thought did cross my mind that I will have run four marathons in four weeks and three marathons in eight days by next Sunday if I pull this off.

We need to run two long runs next weekend for our training, but we’ve also set the bar pretty high for ourselves. I’m going to focus on relaxing and doing a mini-taper this week to get ready - so I’m still hopeful that we can do it. It’s definitely going to be tougher than I thought when I originally wrote down the idea in our training schedules. We know that we will run the marathon Sunday, the question is whether we should cut back the length of our Saturday run to something more manageable - like 20 miles - but then what’s six miles in the grand scheme of things?

Here’s how the mileage shook out this week:
Sunday: 13 miles road (1:45:00)
Monday: 2 miles easy on track
Tuesday: 6 miles up-tempo on road
Wednesday: 6 miles easy on road
Thursday: 11 miles (1:11:46)
Friday: Rest
Saturday: 31 miles mixed unpaved road and single-track train (5:16:00)
Week three total: 69 miles

[8 day total: 80 miles as previous Saturday included a run]

Just remember my disclaimer from the start of the program: this is not a beginner training schedule. We all have really deep mileage bases - so please consult me or another coach if you are interested in training for an ultra-marathon.

Lots of great stuff coming this week on the Running Wild blog. I have some great training topics that I’ve received from readers that I’m writing about and I’ll have more thoughts as the Rock N Roll Marathon weekend approaches.

Happy running all!

Coach Joe

Running Wild with Coach Joe – a blog focused on marathon racing, training and motivation. Bookmark us at http://coachjoeenglish.wordpress.com or use your favorite RSS feed reader to get the latest news and articles. Running Wild is also available on Yahoo! 360 and MySpace.