Hump day

Wednesday was certainly hump day. It was my first “test” session and it didn’t go completely to plan. It’s always hard when you set yourself goals and fail to meet them, even if they are a little extreme.

I’ve had a day or so to sulk, reflect and analyse what and why things went wrong as well as what went right.

The plan was to run three lots of five hours, or in my mind three lots of 44 km.

The first run went well, I felt good, a few aches but nothing major. The refueling and hydration went better than ever and I felt pretty strong throughout.

The second run is where the wheels fell off and never came back, at 5k I was sore and miserable. Normally I would just fight through but I really couldn’t find the motivation. My stubborn streak had ran away and any enthusiasm had vanished. I managed to struggle on to 21k thanks to my coach and a little motivation. Looking back, it’s here I should have slowed, walked for longer and pushed on for the 5 hrs and not worry about distance. Allowing myself to berate myself for failure just added insult to injury. I decided to call it a day and have a longer break, a good stretch and refuel.

Feeling slightly more motivated and knowing that if I hit just 36k it would be the furthest I’d have ran on a treadmill, I set off for run 3. This was a case of battling those inner demons that always want to quit and alas I allowed them to win. I could have happily stopped at 15k as it was a nice round number overall but I managed to force out another half before quitting.

The only failure is failing to learn

As you can imagine I was feeling a little deflated, in fairness I was gutted with my under achievement. Cat did what all good coaches do though and found my “trigger”. Discussing this attempt and comparing it to my last ultra on a treadmill she used a perfect gem of wisdom

“But we do have to get to a place where you can run 3 marathons in a day on very, very tired legs!”. 

This really couldn’t be truer, to break the world record my legs are going to be more than tired and I just have to crack on and get it done.

It’s odd but perhaps something to consider, being at home and doing these runs seems to me to need a bit more discipline, it’s so easy to stop at home, it’s not like you can argue with yourself that you have to reach the next check point or finish line.

I’m not going to let this failure break me, or beat myself over it, instead I’ll use it as a learning curve. It’s a good bench mark to work from and I know there is still plenty of time to train.

Remember, no matter how far or how fast you can go we all have down days or bad runs, accept them, learn from them if you need to and carry on.