30 km

30 km yesterday for my long run. Over the winter I only ran about 20 km on my long runs and that's short enough for me to do every week. But I usually don't go much further than that more than every other week. This week was my longer week.

I find if I run the same distance too regularly I get accustomed to it and then if I go farther it seems harder. After so many 20 km runs over the winter, it now feels "hard" to go further. Of course, it is harder to go further, but this feels different. I think it's probably a combination of psychological and physical. A few more longer ones will hopefully break me out of my rut.

It was going to be 25c, so I started my run at 8am when it was 15c. That's just about the perfect temperature for running, but by the end of my run it was 22c which is warm for running. According to one of the calculators, that temperature costs you 25 seconds per kilometer in speed. I wore my running vest and carried two 1/2 liter water bottles which I rationed out for the whole run. But my watch tells me I probably sweated 2 liters. I definitely felt dehydrated by the end. I sweated enough to leave salt stains on my clothes and vest. I used to be able to use the water fountains, but those have been shut down since Covid started. I'm not sure that's rational, but most people won't use them anyway. It doesn't help that I'm not really acclimatized to warmer temperatures yet.

I have a goal in mind for running a marathon distance (42 km). It's purely to give me something to aim for. I'm not really hung up on it. (Any more than I'm always hung up on things like numbers.) The big question is whether I can make that goal. It's a good goal in that respect, since it's on the edge of possibility. Some days I think I can do it, and some days I don't. Trying to extrapolate from shorter distances is questionable, but I plug my best half-marathon time into various race calculators and see what they say. Mostly they say I'm too slow. Today I averaged 6 seconds per km faster than my marathon goal pace for 30 km. So I plug that into the race calculators and this time they tell me, yes, you should be able to make your goal. That's promising. The problem is, at the end of my 30 km today, it didn't feel like I could have run another 12 km. I was 3 minutes ahead of pace, so I could have run 18 secs per kilometer slower for that 12 km. But it still seems improbable. I was pretty tired. But maybe it was a cooler day, and I tapered (took it easy for a week or so before), and if I kept a steadier pace. So I'm left still wondering, which is part of the fun.

PS. And yes, only a true geek would turn something as wonderfully physical as running into a series of math problems :-)