Theres nothing like a reality check to bring you back down to earth!
After peaking at my longest run of 23 Miles last week I’m now in to tapering. Which means Im reducing the mileage I running to avoid injury and over training. This week should have been 18 miles, I managed 5. Ive only done one training run since the 23 miler and that was a 4 miler with Rolo which are usually slower and plenty of pee stops (for Rolo not me) so although my legs felt tired I thought nothing of it. It turns out that I need more than a week to recover from running 23 miles. I set off for the 18 miler on my normal route exactly 7 days after the 23 miler and from the off my legs were heavy and reluctant but I thought give it a mile or 2 and they’ll wake up and be more willing to run. However, this was not the case and I felt like I was running backwards through mud. I kept pushing on, taking my energy gel earlier than normal to see if that help but to no avail, I had nothing to give. Normally I would have been gutted that I couldn’t run and would have been panicking that the marathon is getting closer but I turned it on its head. Instead of beating myself up about my poor performance and my lack of ability to run, I treated it as a final 5th of the marathon run. By this I mean, I told myself that at the end of the marathon my legs will feel just like they do now and its going to be hell, so use this training run to experience that and get through it. So, that is exactly what I did, I said to myself “you’re 5 miles from the finish line, visualise it and do what you need to do on race day and keep going to the line, your legs hate you now but you will love yourself when you cross the line”. This visualisation encouraged me to do the 5 miles even though my legs didn’t want to, I hope this will help me on race day. NO training run is ever a waste, sometimes you just need to change the focus and work with what you’ve got. Be adaptable. Now is time to rest and recover and next week is only 16 miles.Not