My Sweet 16!

Today was the long run day, conveniently coming just after the massive snowfall that we had over the weekend. The run was 16 long miles, and I managed a 7:31 average, which is well short of where I'd like to be, but as you'll read below, not too bad. Some thoughts:

Road Conditions
The road conditions were horrible! We got about 18" of snow over the weekend, which then packed down to about a foot of slush when it briefly rained yesterday. It has also been lightly snowing for the past 36 hours. While streets and sidewalks have largely been "cleared," most are still covered in slush and many have this thick layer of icy, slushy, slippery mess on them. The run involved much more lateral movement than usual trying to stay upright, and I think that's why my knees and hips are a bit more sore than I would expect. I would guess that the conditions easily added 10 - 15 seconds to every mile.

The slush had another "benefit": very wet feet. By mile 5 my shoes were completely soaked - they might has well have been dipped in Lake Mendota. This caused some issues with blistering, although not as bad as I feared, but also slowed me down a lot with the extra weight! Now I know you are thinking "Is he kidding? That can't be much weight...." Well, I weighed my shoes, and they more than doubled in weight with each one picking up a pound. Given that I took about 10,000 steps during the run, that's a lot more weight for my already sore hip flexors to be swinging forward on every step! A bit more time lost....

Leg Pains
My left calf just doesn't like long runs: two weeks ago it was hurting pretty good during my 14 miler, and today it and my left hamstring began hurting around mile 9. I considered stopping and busing it home, but pushed through instead. We'll see if that was a good idea or not in the next day or two I suppose. I have abnormally tight calves and Achilles tendons, so they are always a bit sore, but this was serious pain and in a different place than last time. I stretched it out when I got home and will again before bed and hopefully all will be well!

Nutrition
I did a better job today with the nutrition! I made it through both bottles of the Gatorade Endurance, and one and a half of water. Still, that's only about 90 calories, and I'm expecting a deficit of around 900 during the race, so I need to keep working on getting more calories in. Not bad though.

I thought of all sorts of other things to write about during the run, but they all escape me now, so I guess that will be all for tonight!