Saturday, December 20, 2008

Hitting the Wall

I wasn't planning on writing today, but after today's run went bad I just wanted to gripe about it some.

Today was a planned 12 mile run with both The Woodlands Fit and Kingwood Fit. I didn't have any great plans for today's run, just to take it easy and enjoy it. Before I got to the 2 mile point I was needing an unplanned rest/walk break, and after that I never really got it together and was walking as I needed. I ended up shortening the run to around 7.5 miles in 105 minutes, which is better than I thought it was at the time, given I probably walked at least 1.5 miles of the 7.5 and maybe a fair bit more. This may not have been "hitting the wall" in the traditional running sense, but it felt the same to me as that "wall" I once hit around mile 21/22 at SunMart last year, only without the blisters this time.

I figure that my problems were the result of 2 mistakes. First, I may have expected too much of myself coming off of last weekend's 30K--even if I did take the 2 days after as rest days. Second, I ran without my Garmin, in favor of a Polar heart rate monitor with larger numbers. I think this allowed me start out faster than expected on the run, which led to an overall bad run.

Whateve the answer, I suppose I did fine for one of those really bad days everyone will get sometime--and, in the end, I did get a decent distance covered for the day.

Later today, I will go grab some lunch with my wife, do a little shopping, and work on doing some pre-Christmas house cleaning.

2 comments:

Heather and Jeff said...

Sorry your run wasn't great. At least it's now and not at the Houston Marathon. Starting out too fast always gets me. You did better than me this weekend. It's a recovery week for me, so only 5 or 6 miles planned, but I feel like I'm getting a cold and the weather is awful here today, so I'm being lazy.

Richard said...

I probably should have just aimed at 5 - 6 miles and enjoyed a light recovery run, especially since I had some hard workouts last week.

Live and learn. Of course, if I really learned something I wouldn't have biked and swam today, both were fairly intense, but not long.

You're right that it was a good day for a bad run.

Take it easy over there and be well.