I’m 13 days out from the Cloudsplitter 100 and finished my last long run earlier today. OK, it was my only long run. And it was only 10 miles. I had planned on doing a 2 hour hike immediately afterwards, but ended up substituting a 2.5 mile dog walk instead due to time constraints.
The focus on the past 5 weeks has been on recovering from Eastern States and I’m happy with the progress I’ve made. I ended up doing more running over the past 3 days that I had originally planned. I did my normal 5 miler on Friday at my best pace (8:24) since July. This was followed up with a good 4 mile progression run on the beach yesterday (8:40, 8:20, 8:05, 7:30). The last mile was only about 30 seconds slower than my 5K pace and while I was huffing a bit, there was no puffing. Today’s 10 miler was my Cheslen Hills workout. The pace at 12:05 was a little slower than I normally start these runs, however I wasn’t too focused on pace today. You see, today was the first time I had the opportunity to try out my new trekking poles. And I wanted to practice my hiking with them so walked a bit more than I would normally. Though in all fairness, my legs were a little on he tired side so it wasn’t all about the trekking poles. And it was about 80 degrees and humid. But I started to get comfortable with them and think they’ll be a big benefit with the 25k of climbing I have coming at me down in Kentucky.
The combination of all 3 runs gives me some confidence in my physical conditioning. Granted, the total distance of all three runs of 19 miles is less than what many of my single long runs were this summer. And my paces were nothing blazing fast. But they were comfortable runs and my legs are starting to feel fresher and fresher. I would hate to jinx myself, but I’m probably about as healthy as I’m ever going to get.
So one leg of my 100 mile tripod is taken care of. Now I need to spend the next 2 weeks working on my mental and intellectual legs. Those are the more important parts and they’ve been neglected over the past month or so. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get those firmed up.
How do you know when you’re back to 100%?