Marathon Madness Monday - Week 10

Woo hoo!  I did my first 20 miler this weekend.  It was HARD.  Everyone else was doing 16 as it was a step back week for them, so I started early and did 4 miles before the group started at 7.  This was not a great week to extend the run as the route was HARD.  It's called "Potpourri of Hills."  We did 6 sets of hills, and did a double loop of the last hill - which I hit at mile 17.  You know that children's song, "This is the song that never end"?  Well I sang that to myself in my head and changed the word song to hill.

These are the hills that never end.  They just go on and on, my friend. Some people started running them not know what they were and they'll continue running them forever just because...

But I survived and was impressed that my overall pace was 9:51.  I definitely struggled at the end, which is to be expected - you can see those 2 hill loops I did at the end on the far right of this elevation profile.

So running 20 miles means I burned approximately 2000 calories.  Add on the 1,200-1,600 calories a person needs, and well, you need to eat a lot on the days when you do long runs.  I think some people think that you lose weight when training for a marathon - but that is really not the case.  Many actually GAIN weight.  That hasn't been the case for me - my weight has stayed the same.  But it does seem to change the way a person thinks about eating.  I eat for performance and recovery and really think about what I put in my body.  Now I am far from perfect, so I definitely eat some things that are not healthy (hello, m&m's), but in general, I eat pretty cleanly when I am running.

I'm always curious about what others eating when they are training, so here is a selection of most of the things I ate on the day of my long run last Saturday!

coffee w/ French Vanilla creamer + PB on GF toast = my standard pre-run breakfast

Post-run breakfast of 3 scrambled eggs w/ salsa

Left over brown rice spaghetti with ground turkey marinara sauce for lunch!

An hour after lunch, I was hungry, so I had some vanilla yogurt (I'll re-introduced yogurt into my diet) + GF granola

A couple hours later, I was STILL hungry, so I boiled 2 ears of corn.  I know it's a lot for a snack, but I was insatiable at this point

Dinner was foil packets of baby red potatoes and zucchini with a small serving of steak, all grilled on my charcoal grill!

That is pretty much everything I ate.  The only things I left out were the 3 gu's I ate during the run and the chocolate milk I drank after the run (can't stand the dairy-free versions so I still drink this once a week).  So all in all, not a CRAZY amount of food, but I definitely consumed a lot of calories.  Obviously there was no dessert or sweets consumed yesterday, unless you count the chocolate milk and yogurt which are both on the sweet side.  This isn't out of the norm for me as I am just not a sweets person, and the one item I would want - frozen yogurt - would have been too much on top of the yogurt I had (my body can not handle much dairy in a day, especially since I cut back my dairy consumption last year).

Here is how the training broke out for the week!

Monday:  8 mile recovery run at 9:30 pace.  We took it easy on this run as most had ran 20 on Saturday.

Tuesday:  30 minutes on a stationary bike - 8.5 miles

Wednesday:  Yassos!  For those not familiar w/ Yassos, they are 1/2 mile repeats.  If your goal is a 4 hour marathon, you run the 1/2 mile in 4 minutes.  4 hours is my goal, so my goal was 4 minutes.  I ran my 4 yassos in 3:54, 3:49, 4:00, and 4:03.  Pace deteriorated, but I am still happy with how they went.  We will work our way up to doing 10 of them!  Eeks!

Thursday:  4 mile recovery run at 9:22 pace.

Friday:  Rest

Saturday:  20 miles of hellacious hills, pace of 9:51.  First ice bath of the training season.

Sunday:  Rest

****
 Training Tally:

Week 10:  39 miles
Training-to-Date:  308

Are you a sweets person?  If so, what is your favorite sweet indulgence?  I am not a huge sweets person as I prefer salty/savory foods, but I do like m&m's, starburst and frozen yogurt!