Lots of stuff since my last entry! And the Rotto Marathon has come and gone.
Ten days ago, I started with an entry like this:
"A couple of times I nearly dropped the bundle as there were days when I just couldn't get the motivation together to tie the shoes and head off.
The long runs were not such a problem, plenty of motivation to get up early and get out there for a number of hours.
The best one was the round the bridges run. I thought it would be just marathon distance, but it turned out to be 48ks. All went well apart from the rain on the way back and the resulting wet shoes that just went squish, squish.
I even had enough energy left to do a burst up Mount Street.
The distance is no problem, but the speed might be. I'm not going to set myself a target of 3:30, rather something around 3:45. I will need to make the assessment once I see what the weather is like and I really should take a ride around the big lap to assess the hills.
At this point the forecast is fine and humid between 15 and 25C. That might just be a bit warm....
I left out some of the speed sessions, but I figure that they are less of a priority than the long runs. The hill training suffered a bit, too, but still feel I am reasonably prepared.
Last weekend I did a run of 24ks and that was crap. The main problem was however that I just could not focus."
So, ten days later and I am feeling much better about myself.
Apart from leaving all the printed out pace charts at home (d'oh), the preparation was excellent. I had figured out where I wanted my drinks and set myself a target of 3:45 or a 5:20k/min average.
Trouble is of course that with all the hills and the wind at Rotto, you just can't run on a kilometre average alone.
I tried nonetheless and found that in the first ks I was going too fast, so had to concentrate to go slower. I managed that somehow, but I still went through the half some six minutes faster than I wanted, ie. 1:48 instead of 1:54. Now that split presupposed that I would manage a negative split, but you can forget about that one. However, the second half I did in 1:52, so that is not too far off and certainly not as bad as the Perth Marathon where I did a 1:45/2:14 split. So this time I did it in 3:40 and boy, was I chuffed. Next one 3:30! That is however probably going to be the Perth Marathon, so that should be quite flat and fast.
I now know that I stuffed up badly at Perth with taking far too little carbs on the way through. This time I took Hornet Juice in Gatorade as recommended, before and placed them at stations 5, 1 and 2 and also took a GU at 16k, 26, and 36k. That worked really well. GU tastes like cr.p like all the other stuff, but at least they're very small sachets, so you can gulp them down quickly. Then a gulp of water at the stations, a bit into the hat and off we went.
The weather was quite good, mid-tens, overcast, a bit humid, but otherwise very pleasant. I really liked Rotto and so did the others. They did the 5k and we have already booked for next year. Then they'll do the 10k so they can take in the scenery of the entire lap.
Recovery has been good, too. Put the skins on after the race and did not really take them off until yesterday evening, except for a couple of hours on Monday, when I went on a 24k bike ride to loosen up the muscles. That really worked.
The next project is the 6-inch on 17 December between North Dandalup and Dwellingup. As I am going camping this weekend at Lane Pool, I'll check out the Munda Biddi track, certainly south of Dwellingup. I'll also look at the intersections of the track with Del Park Road, to see where support could be located.
