Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Training tales for my 85 miles. On my 85 birthday

October 17, 2017.    Running for 85
My training for the past 5 weeks for my 85 mile run.
  36.95    48.85,        34.89,   34.85,    31.99  miles for the past four weeks and 2 days.
Monday, Oct. 16 was a 30 mile training run. My time for the run was 8 hours and 50 minutes. started  at 5:36 am. I got up at 5:00 am ate breakfast  and my finishing time was 2:20 pm.
8 hours and 50 minutes. Much better than I expected! The day was cloudy and about 45 degrees when I started. I wore the tights that Dick gave me 5 years ago when I ran my 80 miles on my 80th birthday.  Thanks Dick your a good son-in-law.
I was running the same route that I am going to run on the 14-15 of Nov.
each loop will have a couple of short ones which I will do twice, one loop on Wilcox and  serpentine and the next one on Sequim Dungeness and Taylor farm road. The total mileage for these loops is 5.4 miles. That means I will run 16 loops to total 85 miles. I may vary this sometimes by adding several loops on each run.
My 30 mile run Monday started out with my usual thoughts, " Why am I doing this?"
Ego?, proving something to myself, seeing the challenge to see if my body can hold out at 85 yrs old?, or doing just because I can! I did not see an out for myself except for two choices. Stop running or just continue on. By this time I was about 7 miles into the run and forgot the arguments with myself  and just began to injoy the beautiful sunrise. The Maple leaves turning gold especially in the sunrise were very intense in their color. My first stop at my aid station, home was at 8:30 am. Shirley fried me an pancake-egg sandwich which was excellent! And a cup of hot chocolate. I stopped one more time to change shirts and eat. This was at 20 miles and the time was 12: 30. The rest of the training went very well.
My training for the past month has been a couple of trail workouts plus my running. One a jogging trail from Deer park , Blue Mt., on Grand Ridge about 8 miles. Good day on that run. Tough steep trail!
But I made it.
And then another trail hike later  in Oct. was the Royal Basin out and back hike, 14.5 miles. 7.25 up and then 7.25 back down to the car.
On all of my training hikes and runs I use a camelback for my hydration and food. It works our very well. It keeps sloughing and full of vittles necessary for the journey. Thanks to my good grandson  Jason Henrie for that good gift he gave me a few years ago.
My training for the past 2 weeks has had the usual interruptions. But I have managed to keep up my training to over 35 miles a week. I know, that is just the very minimum for my 85 mile run but I will make I through the to the end. The mental aspect will be the one I will conquer!
It is amazing that I have had just a couple of rainy days so far. But I looks like that will change this week. Rain for the rest of the week!

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