My Bad Memory Rewards Me Again

I ran 11 miles on Wednesday and it’s always interesting to rediscover HOW FAR 11+ miles is to run. You might think, “How can you forget a thing like that?” And fortunately, very easily or I’d probably never do another race. I forget how far it is and how much it hurts.

It’s funny, but once you start training that distance, even 1, 2, 3, and 4 miles feels really far, because you realize you haven’t even gone halfway yet. Once I hit halfway, I feel like I’m good as done and I try to run negative splits (increase speed each mile after halfway) to make it interesting/aka feel like the second half won’t take as long as the first half-which is true, but not significantly so, unfortunately.

Since I do all my running on the treadmill, I increase .1 each mile in speed until I hit 4 or 5 miles to go. At that point, I increase .1 in speed for every .1 mile I go and keep that up until I feel like I’m going to lose it, at which point I slow down .1 for every .2 miles I go-slowing down more slowly than when I’m speeding up. It turns it into kind of a game, so it’s actually pretty fun.

Should be a good training weekend. I have the Lake Run, a 12K run, then I plan on a leisurely hour or two on the bike and then on Sunday I'll ride out to Multnomah Falls, which is a fairly challenging 50 miles-which will take about 3 hours including the latte and rasberry danish I'll have at the Falls themselves.