Saturday, August 18, 2007

Training Day 15: The Almost Half

79 Days until the Marathon
Today's weather: 68º
Today's humidity: 46%

What an incredibly beautiful day to have a long run! After this week's hot and muggy weather, this crisp, breezy day is a welcomed reprieve. GP drove over today and we met up at 8am to run from my house to Coney Island. (It was supposed to be 7am but we both slept in a bit.)

The great thing about this run is that it's very visual. It has a good amount of visual goals to reach. The first leg is Ocean Parkway, which is a nice level tree path that runs perpendicular to Coney Island. The second leg was the entire leg of the boardwalk. One side all ocean and beach, and one side, luxury condos, old-school amusement parks, the Cyclone, the Wonder Wheel, Keyspan Park, the aquarium, and Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs.

We were supposed to just hang a right and run to one end of the boardwalk and backtrack, giving us a total of 8.5, but it's hard to contain GP's enthusiasm sometimes. Once we got to the boardwalk, we hung a left and ran to the end, then trekked the entire span before returning three quarters of the way back to Ocean Parkway.

The good thing is that, at this point I can tell what 10 miles feel like, and as I (and my nagging knees) suspected, we surpassed it. Including the cool down walk around the block, we did a total of 11.25! Haha, like Susan, I'm going to start naming my runs. I'll call this the Almost Half!

After running from the span of the boardwalk, we took a little bit of a stretch in search of a water fountain and refilled our bottles. Then walked it for a couple minutes before continuing on the rest of the journey. Somewhere inside I was a bit surprised that I didn't stop more. But I think it was because I was conscious of being fatigued so I did make sure I sip water constantly, and took a gel even before I was tired. During the stretch I drank my glucose water (this Gatorade equivalent that I found in powder form) so I was good for the rest of the duration.

Not bad! And to think we finished before 11am and we have the entire weekend to relax! Woo hoo!




2 comments:

Tom@RunnersLounge said...

Way to go surpassing your planned distance! An accomplishment run like that deserves a name.

Fatigue, yes, but look at what you achieved today!


Your description of the course made it sound fun

Susan said...

Sounds excellent! I envy the scenery.