As July Ends...

I find myself with a pretty good block of training, overall. I have increased my monthly mileage in moderate steps, which has allowed me to run progressively further without a high risk of injury. I can honestly say that this is, so far, the best block of training I have ever done.

I have increased my hill work by running more hilly routes, and this morning I did a nice hour long hill repeat workout that I will continue to do at least once per week from here until the race in November.

The real highlight of the last two weeks was a 5 hour outing I had last weekend. The rain last week really messed up my plans, along with changing schedules associated with life in general. But I knew I had to get out for a 5 hour run because my long runs have not been where I wanted them to be for the last two weekends leading up to the end of the month.

We set out at about 5 AM and headed to the river. A creek that feeds into the river was swollen from recent rains to the point that we thought it best to avoid crossing. So, we rearranged our route and struck out to the property next door and worked our way down a gravel road. I was going pretty fast and feeling great, but I didn't want to leave my brother behind. I would do a circle and wait for him to catch up, or I would just find something of interest along the way to stop and look at. We headed back up toward the house after about an hour and hit the road to go to another section of trail and ran for another hour there.

Eventually, we ended up back at the house and caught a ride with my dad up to another gravel road. We jumped out and ran about 2 miles down the road before cutting through the woods and eventually onto a pipeline right of way. We ran through knee high grass where there was no trail until we hit some logging roads. We eventually made our way home after about 3 hours.

I estimated it to be about 25 miles in 4 hours and 50 minutes. The distance isn't important; the time is what was needed today. I never had a problem, plenty of water, plenty of food, and plenty of energy was left at the end of the run. I spent the rest of the day working in the yard and just hanging around the house. It is a good feeling to be able to run for 5 hours and still do things for the rest of the day with no soreness or feeling rundown.