Stomp of Approval!!!

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Long run - Sunday 11-13-2011

I woke up Sunday morning with a number in mind. 32. I wanted to run 32 miles. Not sure why I was insistant upon running a 50K that morning, but thats the goal I had set in my mind.

My longest run prior to then had been 26.23 that I ran on the exact same kind of whim on a previous Sunday a few weeks back, so this kind of thing might be somewhat normal for me to do, who knows! I had planned on a long run all week, so I had purchased a 6oz bag of Walmart branded Trail Mix amd seperated it out evenly (or at least close enough) into 2 little sandwich baggies that I had then wrapped up tight and taped shut, effectively making a pair of 3oz trail mix pouches. One went into each pocket. Then I grabbed my lunch box and threw a few bottles of water in with some ice packs, grabbed 2 boiled eggs, my Garmin 305, Garmin HRM, SPI belt, car keys and I was out the door before the sun came up.

I downed a nice crisp refreshing 500ml bottle of Ozarka (man, I should be their spokesperson!) With the 2 boiled eggs on the way to the Exxon gas station on my side of FM 421, which as Ive mentioned before is one of my favorite roads to run on, and then grabbed 2 more bottles of water and took off running.

I enjoy running in the wee hours of the morning before the sun is up. Its motivating to know that while 99% of the world is still sleeping in their cozy beds, oblivious to the world around them, Im out there on the roads training / preparing for my next race / zombie apocalypse. Unfortunatley today was a little different. See this is one of the most important weekends in Southeast Texas. The day before was the official opening day of hunting season, so every man worth his weight in shit was sitting in a deer stand waiting for the big one to show up in his cross hairs. Oddly enough, this is the first time Ive been running down 421 that I havent seen a deer. Actually, I guess thats not entirely true. I did get passed by a truck that had its tailgate down with a huge White Tail Buck in the bed with a massive rack. Wish I could have gotten a pic of it as it was pretty impressive!

Anyway. My nutritional "plan' today was to test out eating while running. So I had planned on eating 3oz of the trail mix and washing it down with a bottle of the amazing liquid of the gods known to man as Ozarka (see, look at this publicity!) at miles 10 and 20.

I was feeling good, although the weather had done a 360 on me in the past week. Last weekend it was on the upper 50's / lower 60's with relativley low humidity. Today it was in the 80's when I started with pretty high humidity and very little wind. Gotta love Southeast Texas weather! So come mile 10 Im very thirsty. It takes me almost a full mile to eat the 3oz of trail mix, which I chase down with the Ozarka.

I keep chugging along feeling very good, but also very thirsty. At this point I should have thought about it and turned around and headed back to the car where I had more water sitting on ice. But that would have been the smarter thing to do, and theres no way in hell Im going to take the smarter path, right? By the time I reach mile 15 Im feeling quite dehydrated, but I push on to fhe turn around point. 16 miles away from my car I turn around and start heading back. I still have my other bottle of H2O excelence, along with the remaining 3 oz of trail mix. I know I still have 16 miles to go, so I hold off on consuming them for a little longer in order to attempt to ration them out as intelligently as I can.

Come mile 18 I realize that I havent pissed since mile 5, so Im pretty sure that with that fact coupled with the way my body was feeling I must be pretty dehydrated. So I call my amazing wife and she says she will drive me out some water. At this point Im fighting to keep my heart rate under 150 so Im almost positive that Im dehydrated. I go ahead and down the remaining 500ml of Ozarka and its like heaven found its way into mouth. I felt great! For about 5 minutes. Then I felt like a paper sack of ran over dog poop again. Finally, at mile 21, I see my wife pull off the road onto the sholder and I slowly make my way up to her. I drink one bottle of ice cold Ozarka and realize just how dehydrated I am. My legs and back start to get stiff as I stand beside the truck and I feel as if my kidneys have been punched by Chuck Liddell. I decide to call it quits at this point and my wife gives me the ride of shame back to the parked car.

I ended my run short for the second Sunday in a row.... Its driving me crazy!!!

So, since the purpose of training is to learn what works and what doesnt work, heres the brekdown of it...

What worked.
-The boiled eggs before the run didnt seem to have any negative side effects as far as GI issues are concerned.
-My ingenious packaging of the trail mix surprised me. Maybe Ill make a write up post of a "how to" Below is a pic of what all I had with me (food wise) on this run and you can see the trail mix packets.

-My choice of running barefoot didnt let me down either! Go figure, lol!
-Compression shorts, normal basketball style shorts, and cotton T shirt from the only sprint triathlon Ive competed in all held up great, as usual.

What did not work.
-Hydration. I need to find a way to have more water avaliable on these longer training runs. I either need to find a good 4~8 mile loop and start running it, or drop frozen bottles along the sholder of the road and hope their still there when I get to them.
-The trail mix might have been a little too salty, causing me to become more thirsty (I dont think 'thirstier' is a real word) which wouldnt be an issue if I could resolve the hydration issue.

So I did actually learn something from this run! Hells yeah!

posted from Bloggeroid

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