27 miles this week, and preparing for the long run!

As in, THE long run. The Cleveland Marathon is now 183 days away. Took a couple steps in preparing today. I'll get to those in a minute. But first...

This week marks a new record in weekly miles, 27! Old record was 25. I actually did two long runs this week -- did 11 Monday to make up for a miserable day Saturday, and 10 today. Of course, my short runs were very short, I did 2 miles of hill repeats on Tuesday, normally I do three, and Thursday was an easy four miles on the treadmill.

The old record was 25. Here's the graph:

Today's run was wonderful. I ran the bike trail but took a different route. I started at the Y and ran five miles out, all the way to the cow pasture. I was off today and I have a feeling this was one of the last times I'll be running in the sunlight for awhile. It went well, nothing hurt and I'm not really sore now. Just tired.

Then I went to Columbus. Fleet Feet put a note up on Facebook that there was a new model of my shoe out, the Asics Kayano, so they were closing the one I have out for wicked cheap. Of course when I got there they were already out of my size! But I'll poke around online and try to order a couple pairs, I'm sure it's out there.

10 miles!

So I just collapsed on my couch with a couple of ice packs and decided not to move for a few hours. Feeling pretty good... did my second 10 mile run. That makes 25 for the week, my highest yet.

Toward the end I kinda felt like I could have kept going... maybe I should have. I just read an article about overtraining, I was out of gatorade and my ankle has been hurting on and off, so it was probably best that I didn't, though of course now I have that nagging "how far could I have gone" mentality. Next time.

Ran with a runners club out of Granville. Very good group of people. Some were way too fast but I fell in nicely at a 10-minute pace with the slower group. We did 6 miles through the Denison Bioreserve, which I never knew existed until today. Definitely going back, beautiful area and good practice for upcoming trail runs, which I hands down prefer to the road.

Most of the group did the marathon a few weeks ago, and they stopped after 6 so I cut down to the bike trail on my own. I don't like running without my iPod, the silence was eery, but I got it done.

Got breakfast and then went right to the gym to do my strength training. Was definitely a little slower on that but now I'm done done done done done for the weekend.