Mon-Wed-Fri-Sun Clockwise, Tues-Thurs-Sat Counter-clockwise

Just sneaking in a quick update here. There’s lots to tell but there hasn’t been time enough to tell it. Work has been insane these past six weeks, including a trip to Dublin and lots of after-hours work…so there just hasn’t been much time to post.

I ended up doing two hikes indoors at the Y, per my last post. The first one was somewhere around 20 miles, but I’m not sure because there was absolutely no way that I was going to count laps for 8 hours. Especially when it takes 13 of those laps to equal one mile. The only real downside was that walking in circles for 8 hours tends to be a bit tough (for me) on the outside of whichever foot is on the “inside” of the track. I ended up with blisters from the heel til about halfway up my right foot. Deep ones, too. Two days later I did it again, but only managed about 6 and a half hours because I started getting blisters on my blisters, as the travel direction around the track was the same direction that I had done two days before. I could have planned that a little better had I paid attention to the signs clearly posted: “Mon-Wed-Fri-Sun Clockwise, Tues-Thurs-Sat Counterclockwise”. Done with that, I was very happy that I went through the effort because we’d just not gotten enough mileage in to be comfortable with the looming deadline.

This past Sunday, Jeff and I struck out on the trail for an all day “how much can we hurt ourselves” session. We did 24 miles in around 9 hours, which told us much about what’s to come. First and most importantly, if we can do 24 miles without the morale benefits and the logistical support of a big event, then we can do 26 miles with it all other things being equal. Granted, all other things won’t be equal, but we’ll just let that one go for now.

We also learned that we’re going to be a bit slower than we’d been thinking we’d be. In our minds, it was easy to think that if we average three miles an hour for 20 miles, then we’d also average three miles an hour for 26. Oh, how untrue that is for our current conditioning. It took us a full hour to get from mile 22 to the finish at 24. Somewhere in the low 20s, things just got extremely painful. Breaks got a bit longer, which was good and bad because the longer they are, the stiffer the muscles get…and once they’re stiff it compromises your stride pretty significantly. On the other hand, at that point our feet were in significant pain and we felt that we just really needed to give them a break. It was one of those catch-22 situations.

Finishing the 24 miler felt very good. It was both an accomplishment and a concern settler. We now know that we’re ready for this thing.

Over the next two weeks, I plan to do nothing but pool work, with about 4 or 5 one hour sessions planned just doing laps. The idea is to keep myself lose and the muscles working without any risk of injury.