Yay, what an awesome day. Not only is it my second last day of lectures for the semester, but I also ran 17km this morning, and after having three rounds of eggs on toast, I entered my first off road/trail running event!
The Rimutaka Railway run is held on the site of the old Rimutaka Railway incline. At 17km it will be the longest official event that I have entered, but shouldn't be too hard at all, as the gradient is shallow. The course apparently takes us over the hill (only about 100m altitude gain) and through a couple of tunnels. Its good to have entered an event, a step in the right direction, you could say.
I also ran 17km this morning, with barely any extra effort for the extra 5km above my usual 12km. The secret, I believe, lay in the bottle of powerade that I stashed at the end of the 12km mark. I could only manage a few mouthfulls (filling my stomach during exercise is really uncomfortable), but it woke my brain up, and added a refreshing level of springyness to my legs. Its really satisfying to add a bit of distance. I felt as though I could have easily kept going - its exciting to think that I could actually complete a half marathon with a few extra ks. Also, 17km is about half of the 32km of the Routeburn Classic! Awesome!
I think that Oscar was a bit gutted when I turned around to do the last 5km (at the junction where we would normally head for home). He started jumping up on my legs as if trying to tell me that I was going the wrong way, and that he was tired and wanted to go home. Then he ran dejectedly behind me for a couple of k's, until he forgot and went back to being a mad terrior again. There have been times in the past, when the weather has been pretty foul and he has come out for a run, made it a couple of hundred meters through the squally rain and galeforce winds before turning tail and heading for home.
I have started keeping an active log of the distances and times that I am running, and the other training that I am doing. This is something that I have never done before, and its amazing, I have run about 56km in the last 10 days. When I take into account that I have been running 12km, two or three (and sometimes more) days a week, for months and months, I have clocked up way more kilometers than I have ever thought about. I was getting some advice about trail shoes the other day, and I was told, that (all) running shoes need replacing every 800-1000km, and I thought to myself "yeah right, like I would ever cover that sort distance"...but as it turns out, the distances add up pretty quickly. Might be time to get some new shoes sooner than I thought.
The other reason for keeping a log of my training, is so that I can upload a log on this blog. I am not offereing any sort of training program or advice. But when I decided that I wanted to run the Routeburn Classic, I was hoping to find the blogs, or advice of other athletes who had completed the event. It turns out there isn't much out there (or my Googleing skills are very sad), but I wanted to provide some insite into how I have prepared. I will let you know how that worked out for me afterwards.
(I am sure that you are all far too clever to require a disclaimer about being sensible in your training, and to keep in mind that I am an ametur, and am not offering advice, but then I take solace in the fact that blogger tells me that I have had only 7 readers of my blog....and they are all probably laughing.)
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