Syzdekistan

I ran 18 miles today. In my case, running is actually a slow jog, punctuated by occasional walking and limping. I’m at the crux of my marathon training. The San Francisco Marathon is only four weeks away and I have been officially training since the beginning of April (my training actually begun well before April but that’s a story for a different post).

My training guide is The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer by David Whitsett (see below to order). One of the keys to the training program outlined in the book is that if you can run 18 miles, you can run the 26.2 miles of a complete marathon. The training program has two 18 mile runs and I completed the first one this morning. It was a tough start. I got up at 4:00 a.m. to beat the heat and it was still 85 degrees out. I started running about 4:30 a.m. and by the time I finished 3 hours 42 minutes and 55 seconds later it was 95 degrees. The only thing weather wise that I had going for me is that the humidity was less than 5% which made it feel several degrees cooler less hot. According to my Nike+iPod I ran 18.01 miles at an average pace of 12:22 minutes per mile and I burned 3013 calories. Here is a graph of my run from the Nike website.

Each dot is one mile and the height of the graph represents the pace at that moment. The three dips indicate times I was moving slowly. I went from a pace of 11:39/mi to 12:48/mi between mile 4 and 5 and had a similar drop at about mile 10. The long decline shows how I slowed down throughout the run due to fatigue and the increasing temperature.

The final dip on the last mile was psychological. What happened, I got home with one mile left. I swigged some sports drink from a cooler stashed in my yard and forced myself to do a big loop through my neighborhood. It was very tough not to quit. I doggedly kept moving but my heart and mind were at home and my pace slowed to a crawl.

I picked the San Francisco Marathon because it was one of the few nearby summer marathons held in a cool climate but not at high altitude. I know I won’t have problems with heat on the big day. Getting through today was a big confidence booster. My goal is to finish and it seems within reach. Next weekend I’ll do my final 18 miler, and then the runs get shorter up until the race.