Saturday I crossed the 10-mile milestone with my long run. One of the cool things about the training is that every week I set a new personal distance record. I found the discussion about associative and disassociative mental techniques which were initiated after my last update to be very interesting. I think I have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to the mental part of my training and being able to focus better on my running, so I decided to run without headphones for the first long run of my training.
I ran three 3.3 mile loops. The first in 29 minutes and the second in 33 minutes. The last two miles of the third loop were pretty tough, so I was surprised when I got to the end and it took just 33 minutes, same as the second loop. So, 10 miles in 96 minutes, which compares to last week’s 9.4 miles in 94 minutes. I’m pretty happy with that.
Even without music I found it very difficult to really focus on the run for long periods of time. My mind just naturally wandered to different thing. There was a great sunrise. I saw a red-shouldered hawk sitting on a street light. Even when I was thinking about the running, it was often in the context of what am I going to blog about.
After the run I continued experimenting with recovery methods. After stretching, I sat in a cold bath for about 10 minutes and drank a glass of chocolate milk. Then I stretched a little more and went swimming with my two oldest children. Then we had pancakes and eggs for breakfast.
Kind of busy, so no questions or issues today.