With the cancellation of my beloved Eastern States, it’s time to pivot to the next thing. Most normal people would immediately look for a replacement race. Gotta get my race fix. Chatting with another runner at the non-start line, he mentioned The Ring over Labor Day weekend which has been on my bucket list for a while. I toyed with this on the drive home, but it’s a hard, hilly 70 miler only 3 weeks from my next hundred. Doable, but not ideal.
What would be ideal is dropping in a decent training block. The downside of my summer gauntlet of hundreds is that I wasn’t really able to do any sustained training. After recovering from one race, I barely got my weekly mileage up into the 40s before it was time to taper for the next race. Which is fine. I don’t really need to crush a bunch of miles to perform at the level I want to.
But I’ve been offered an opportunity to dial up the mileage and I’m motivated to make it happen. The week after ES100 when I would typically do 7-10 recovery miles, I knocked out 66 which is more than I’ve done in over a year. I’m a comfortable 40-60 mpw runner, however I rarely go above mid-60s and I can count on one hand the number of 70+ mile training weeks I’ve done.
Double Double, Toil And Trouble
The issue for me like most comes down to time. I’m a morning runner so in order to get my daily 7-8 miler in I need to get up at 5am. I’ve been doing this for a long time now and while back in the day that was called “the middle of the night”, now it’s no big deal. Getting up earlier though? Big deal. I can get up 30 minutes earlier for an extra 3 miles every now and again, but that starts to wear on me mentally so I try not to do it too often. This puts a cap on my weekly mileage since I don’t do long back-to-backs any longer on the weekends.
I’ve never been a fan of doing doubles or running twice in one day. Mostly because I think it’s better to do one 10 miler than two 5 milers. I kinda stumbled upon running twice in a day leading into the Eastern States that never happened. I woke up one morning desperately needing an extra hour of sleep so only did one mile instead of the 8 on my calendar. It was bothering me enough that I ended up running the 8 in the evening. This was the first time since. . . heck, I don’t know. And I don’t feel like spending 30 minutes scrolling through four thousand lines of my spreadsheet to find out. Quite possibly never. This is just something that I don’t do. Ever.
But guess what? It wasn’t completely awful. So for the next two days I decided to swap out 2 miles of my evening five mile walks for runs instead. Basically, baby steps into the world of doing doubles. By this point, I was starting to taper for ES100 so didn’t continue them as I was looking to deload not ramp up mileage.
I’ve decided to use doubles to really jack up my mileage heading into Wild Goose. I’m going to try to be a little intelligent with how I add them. I’m starting with an extra 1 or 2 miles each day at a very easy/chill pace. I’m not sure how much I’ll add over the four weeks I have available, but I doubt I’ll get to five evening miles and definitely not that much every night. I’m planning to see how my body handles things and adapt. If my legs start feeling really dead, I’ll dial things back and/or take some days off.
It’s time for a little experimentation, which is definitely something I should do more often with my training. I’ll let you know in six weeks how this turns out.