Long Run Friday...

Saturday is long run day.  Friday is the day off before the long run.  That's the plan and that's what I've been following!  But this weekend I am away on Saturday/Sunday, so I needed to adapt...  I did Monday to Wednesday as normal, but I skipped the Thursday run, to have a day off before the long run today.  This means I am free this weekend - yay 😁.  Today was the same plan as last Saturday but with an extra five minutes.  So 175m rather than 170m - not exactly a big change.  But I found last Saturday very hard and, surprise, I found today very hard too!!  The last long run was 30.95km, and 20 miles is about 32.18km, so my plan today was to up the pace a tiny bit from last week, and with the extra 5 minutes running I could try and hit 32.18km!  Much easier said than done!!  I did it by mainly running at 11.7kmh on the treadmill and then 35m or so at 12kmh.  My total distance was 32.21km, but that included an extra 9 seconds for me to stop the watch.  So the 175m stretch was 32.18km, but maybe a few metres over or under...  And obviously that is the distance according to Stryd, because the treadmill was, as usual, overestimating the distance a tad - every 10km as said by the treadmill was really about 9.6km.  I don't mind if I was a tad over or under, I'm calling it 20 miles!!! 😁  Doing absolutely all my marathon training on a treadmill is very unusual to say the least, but I'm sticking with it!!  The plan started on the 5th of December and every single run in the plan has been on a treadmill in the gym!  Looking forward to some outside running after the marathon!  Oh, and of course it'll be outside while running the marathon!  The marathon will be my first outdoor run since a parkrun on December the 3rd last year!!  The run today was good.  I took a couple of Wiggle gels for fuel (as is my current habit for the very long runs), and stopped and started the treadmill after each hour as necessary for these particular machines.  I never normally look at the distance when doing training runs, I just look at power, but today I was very focussed on distance as I absolutely wanted to hit 20 miles!!  To run 20 miles on a treadmill is almost an achievement in itself!  Or perhaps just stupid!! 😁.  Only one more long training run (next Saturday) before starting to taper for the marathon!  Oh man, I honestly don't know if I am excited about the actual marathon or just terrified!!

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