Yesterday I had my second long run of the week, I ran from Steyning to Worthing Sailing Club, a total distance of 11.43 miles in a total time of 2:00:08.
The other good thing was that overall I came in dead on my 70% heart rate target. This has given me confidence that I may be able to break the 2hr half marathon target in November. Even if I don’t break the 2hrs I should be able to get pretty close to it.
The last time I ran this route I had a really bad run. I seriously considered giving up at 4 miles….. And hated it for most of the route. Yesterday was a really good run, I have started using some of the mental training techniques from the book I’m reading and kept repeating positive phrases over and over in my head, interspersed with lines of songs that I could remember ( and the odd hymn from my childhood ! )
The last 6 miles of the run yesterday was in to a force 5/6 head wind. I just kept telling myself that this was a Good Thing because it was keeping me cool rather than a Bad Thing because it made the running harder.
I also tried having fixed water breaks, the first at 3 miles, to get used to drinking more water in one go and simulating the water stops on next years marathon. The only difference was that I had to carry all my water with me rather than having someone hand it to me ! It will take a bit of getting used to drinking more in one go and it doesn’t necessarily make running the first half mile pleasant with water sloshing inside you but it wasnt as much of a problem as I thought it might be.
So, in total last week I ran 32.47 miles split over 4 runs 🙂