WOTW: 3+ Hour Long Trail Run

OK.  I know that the label “Workout of the Week” is a blatant farce since publicly traded companies post their quarterly results more frequently than I’ve posted “weekly” workouts, but I don’t feel like changing the tag.   Anyway, here’s a new one.   To slightly make up for the missed time, I’ll talk a little bit about how this workout fits into the series.

As most of you are aware, I’m training for my first ultra.  Perhaps stupidly, I’ve picked the Uwharrie 40 miler, which isn’t exactly known as an easy one.  If ultras could ever be called easy.  Which they shouldn’t, but that’s beside the point.  I should know better, since I’ve done the 20 miler twice, which has been memorable for the extreme pain in my legs and poignant desire I had to stop (more like lie prostrate and immodilized) at 20 and NOT turn around and head back like I’ll need to do next February.  I suppose I’ll need to pace myself differently.

So the gist of it is that I’m doing a super long trail run that will take me close to 8 hours if everything goes well.  As you can imagine, a key aspect of my specific preparation will be to run increasingly longer on trails.   Up to a point where recovery from the training event far too greatly impacts my run consistency. 

In my head, I deemed this to be 4 hours with a single 50k trail training event about a month out from the real deal event.  Since, last winter, I did surprisingly well increasing my long run distances so long as I kept them slow-paced and on single track, I’m supposing I can pull this off by tacking on about 15 minutes to my previous week’s long run. 

I started at 2 hours and am now up to 3:15, which actually was only 3:06 because I’d sped up the second half.  Even though I added another half mile short loop at the end.  That’s the thing with running for time.  Sometimes (usually) you don’t hit the exact time target, particularly when it’s not a solely out and back route. 

I’m cool with the run being a little short from the original plan because my legs were tired before I even started.  Most weeks, I’ve been getting a day or two easy to recover from my secondary long runs on Sundays (~1:45-2:00 hours usually), but that didn’t happen this week.  Partly because I moved my longest long run up to Tuesday (from it’s usual spot on Wednesday-Friday). 

So now my legs are pretty tired, my achilles are a little sticky and my arches a little achey.  I’ll take it really easy the remainder of the week so I don’t kill myself at Saturday’s Run at the Rock 14 miler.  For what it’s worth, I’m not expecting much from that race.  In particular, I expect to run it slower than I did a few years ago when I took off on the first loop like a bat out of hell trying (unsuccessfully) to keep up with ex-Division I collegiate runners.  I’m thinking that a negative split would be a fine goal on the 2x 7 mile loop course.

For the locals wondering about my route:

• Umstead Park, starting from Harrison parking lot
• Loblolly to gate and back
• Company Mill spur
• Short side of Company Mill loop
• Sycamore loop, long side first
• Sycamore spur to water fountain in horse parking lot
• Sycamore loop short side
• Company Mill loop long side
• Company Mill spur to parking lot
• short loop to first road crossing of Loblolly
• back to parking lot via Loblolly

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