This is the week it could all come crashing down. On 8/10, my beloved Eastern States was cancelled so I decided to take my current level of fitness and add in a block of training that goes to 11:
- Week of 8/11 – 66 miles running, 25 walking
- Week of 8/18 – 63 miles running, 13 walking
- Week of 8/25 – 74 miles running, 30 walking
- Week of 9/1 – 85 miles running, 20 walking
For comparison, I’ve only had a streak of 4 weeks above 60 miles once before and each of those were at 60.5 miles. I’ve had a bunch of random weeks in the sixties over the years along with one 77 mile week (7×11) and a single 100 mile week (7×15) that I did on vacation down at the shore just because. I’m not a super high mileage runner.
These last couple weeks have been quite the experiment for me. Instead of adding mileage to my daily morning runs, I’ve added doubles into my schedule which I’ve never done before. I’ve kept the second run pretty short (1-4 miles), however I’ve been doing them just about every day. The trade offs are that I’m adding mileage, but not all in my morning runs which should be a little lower risk however I’m doing a little bit of running every 12-15 hours so there’s less time to rest between activities. I can’t decide if I’m doing this intelligently or just adding a bunch of junk miles with no benefit.
I’m three days into my super-peak week and . . . my legs don’t feel too bad. Actually, quite a bit better than that. I’m honestly a little paranoid about saying how good they really are as I don’t want to jinx myself. I’m eating a ton and trying to get as much sleep as is possible so hopefully that’s helping. I’ve got a couple more ten mile days planned before taking Friday mostly off ahead of my last 20 miler on Saturday. After that, I’ll be cutting way back to 40 and 20 mile weeks heading into Wild Goose. Fingers crossed I can keep things together for a couple more days.