Longest Run Ever!

Sometimes it feels easy. Sometimes it's a battle. I don't always know why the training is easier some days than others, but the fact remains that we have good days and bad.

While last week's run was challenging, we pushed through our 2:20 with pretty solid strength. Neither of us complained too much and we weren't watching the clock the whole time. It left me feeling confident and strong moving into our final piece of building for the marathon. Then yesterday came. We had 2:40 on the schedule, which figured to be both the longest and farthest either of us had ever run, but I felt good and thought it should go well. We hadn't left ourselves too drained from training during the week and we planned a route that was almost as hilly as last week, but not quite. So off we went, down the hill from the pool, towards the water, and across the beach. We climbed back up Spanish Banks hill and reached the top of it within 1 minute of our time from last week. We skipped the repeat of Spanish Banks so that we could run down SW Marine and see our friends racing the UBC Duathlon while they were on the bike. As it turned out, we timed it perfectly! We got to see Teresa, Joanne, Bronwyn, and Clayton all riding back towards transition on their second laps - great racing you guys!

After we ran all the way down SW Marine to Camosun, we attacked our second big climb up Camosun to West 29th. We crested that nasty hill a shade after 1:40 on the clock, so we just had to put one more solid hour together in the trails through the Endowment Lands. Unfortunately, we were suffering at this stage. Neither of us had as much gas in the tank as last week and that final hour turned into a slog. We went down the hill one more time to the base of Salish and proceeded to climb our way back up to 16th where we emerged with 20 minutes to go. Thankfully, we knew it was going to take us almost that long to get back to the pool and wrap things up, so we didn't have to loop around or do anything extra at the end. We finally ran (jogged? crawled?) back into the parking lot just after 2:38 and called it a day. We had a little more than 24 km under our belts which was a hair slower than we hoped for, but on a day when we were both suffering, we still managed to gut out the entire run and we didn't even wimp out on adding that last hill. Three big climbs and our time within 1% of the target - I call that a success! Next week, we target the 3-hour barrier.