One of the benefits of having a running coach is not having to think about what I’m doing or even why I’m doing it. Gone are the days of obsessing for hours/days/weeks over which training programme has the best chance of getting me to the start line uninjured. Now I have Coach Ben, who sends me two weeks of training every two weeks and who is available by phone, email, and text to answer any questions, discuss strategy, and basically calm me down when I panic that I’m injured (‘It’s just your body getting used to the new training volume’) or that I can’t do whatever run he has set me (‘It’s supposed to be tough, now get out there and do it!’). I focus on one run at a time and don’t really pay attention to how it all fits together or to my progress. That’s Ben’s job, and I trust him.
Because I just get on with it and don’t look at the big picture lest I freak myself out, I’ve pretty much felt over the past 6 weeks like I’m doing marathon training which is fine because that is familiar to me. I’m vaguely aware that I’m now running 4 days/week and that a lot of my runs are now on consecutive days and that the volume has been creeping up, but I don’t think about it a lot. A run is just a run.
Today, though, I couldn’t ignore any longer that I am doing Ultra Training. Yesterday, I ran for an hour. Today, I ran for four hours. When I saw this in my training schedule, I sent Ben an ‘OMG, I can’t do that, it’s too hard, you’re trying to kill me’ text. He replied that he had expected that reaction from me (yep, my first reaction is always an overreaction) and that it didn’t matter how much I whinged, I still had to do it. He did reassure me that the four hour run was just about time on feet and that I was expected to do a run-walk and that if I managed 13 miles, that would be fine. 13 miles??? I could walk that in four hours...
We negotiated a run-walk strategy for the first three hours, and he left it up to me what I did with the fourth hour. I could even walk the whole hour if I wanted to. And so I set out with absolutely no idea what to expect. I was supposed to run sloooow, and if I had gone any slower I’d have been walking. I did 15 miles in the first three hours and my legs were feeling fine, if a bit tired, but then I had a panic that possibly doing 20 miles in total would be Entirely Too Much so increased my walking breaks and finished up with 18.75 miles. And this after doing 6 miles yesterday.
I’m in completely new territory with this. I’m taking a bit of time to feel pleased that I ran for 4 hours and that my legs are already starting to recover, and I’m taking some time to acknowledge how far I’ve come from the days when 3 days/week and never more than 15 miles/ week were all that my legs could manage. But tomorrow I’ll be back to head in the sand and one run at a time, with no acknowledgement that I’m actually running towards an ultra at the end of March.
Complete and utter denial works well for me.
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