At 43kms, my long run is officially ultra-distance. It’s the first time I’ve run that far in training. But it won’t be the last.
I really wanted to get a long, hard run in this weekend, and I had a plan to get it done. All I needed was a break in the weather. Saturday was supposed to be fine with light winds, so I booked the day for running and made my preparations.
Wellington is a fickly place when it comes to weather, and the fine day with light winds turned out to be a not-raining day with strong northerly winds. And that’s about the best that could be said about it.
Still since I was heading to the south coast and I’d be running behind the shelter of some really high cliffs, I wasn’t too worried about it. Again Wellington played its trump card. The wind here is multi-directional, and sapient. It knows which way you are running and decided to blow towards you so you always have a head wind. Even if you are running southward and a northerly is blowing, you’ll still be running into a head wind.
And that was the case on Saturday. Oh, and it was a cold wind as well.
I ran the 9.5 kms to the road end at Owhiro Bay no problem and was feeling quite good by the time I got there. There is a short, sharp climb up to the Brooklyn shops, but from there is it all downhill to the coast. A nice and easy start to the day.
I then hit the beach and plodded along, not trying to push hard (which is unusual for me). Today was all about time-on-feet. I wanted to run for a long time to build up my endurance and get my body used to moving for an extended period of time. I also had a nasty trick to play on my poor tired legs later on.
The surface of the trail along the beach is, as you might imagine, quite soft in places. It is mostly sand and small rocks. Some of it packed a bit harder where the 4 wheel drive vehicles have compacted things a bit, but most of it is loose, and quite taxing to run on.
The shelter from the wind pretty much didn’t happen. I was hammered by it almost constantly. There were a couple of bays that seemed to escape the worst of it, but I was still running into a headwind on the way out and on the way back.
I went out further than I had originally planned, liking the running and wanting to push the distance higher. In all I ran for about 15kms on the beach, out and back.
Then it was time to punish the legs. As if they weren’t tired enough, they now had to carry me up the Tip Track. Again I didn’t push for a fast time. I just wanted to try and run the full distance (and I pretty much did) without going painfully slow. I also had another motivation to keep the running honest – I was freezing cold.
If I sopped running the wind just tore through me and whipped away any body heat I had. My top was wind proofed on the front, but vented on the sleeves and the back. My hand were cold, as was my nose and ears.
The Tip Track is nice and sheltered from a southerly wind, but very exposed to a northerly. So I was battered going up and coming back down again. I was very happy to see the top gate, and then the bottom gate.
The trip up and back took me 1:10 – 40 minutes up and 30 minutes down. So not a bad effort considering I had quite a bit of hard running on my legs at the time.
There were now a few small issues that cropped up.
1 – I was not getting any warmer
2 – it looked like the rain was about to return and I didn’t think I’d like being cold and wet
3 – the battery on my watch was just about out of juice.
So I decided to head for home and try to get there before the watch died. I didn’t want the battery to fail and my run not get recorded, and I didn’t want hypothermia either.
So I ran up over Tawatawa Reserve and down across the golf course. The plan was to get to Adelaide Road, turn left, and head for home. But when I got there the battery indicator on my watch hadn’t shifted, so I thought, “Ok” let’s see if we can get some more in.
And that’s how I ended up running up Mt. Albert, dusking my head sideways to prevent it being blown off as I got towards the top. But then I was on the downhill leg, in the shelter of the trees and pushing a bit harder to try and get home before the watch failed. Each kilometre clocked up was another step closer to my ultimate goal for the day – an ultra distance training run.
I hit the 42 km mark and the low battery warning popped up. I had no idea how much longer the battery would last. I just needed one more kilometre!
So I pinned my ears back as I got to Crawford Road and sprinted down the hill on legs that were not entirely happy about the concepts, but were willing to play along, for a little while, As long as we got beer at the finish.
I was nearly at the bottom of the hill when my watch beeped – 43kms! I stumbled to a halt and clicked the stop button, then the save button, and waited. It seemed to take forever for it to save the run. I was dreading some sort of error message, or the watch just going blank. But it worked and displayed the results of the run, 43kms in 6 hours and 6 minutes.
Happy with that!
All that was left was to run / walk the remaining 500-800 metres to my house and collapse into a nice hot bath, which I duly did.
And now…
It’s taper time!!
No more long, hard runs until 1st July – The Wellington Marathon.
I’ll still be doing some speed work, but all the hard training is done. I’ve come through it mostly not injured, which is good.
I still have some planter fasciitis to deal with and at the start of my loin run the bones in my left foot didn’t sit quite right (it’s an old injury) so that foot is a bit worse for wear. I think I managed to re-seat the bones today, so it should recover in a few days.
Apart from that, I came through the run fine. a short 5km on the treadmill today as a recovery run pushed me past another milestone – my first 100km week.
I ran a total of 102 kms this week. Not bad for a little old man huh?
You can check out a video of my run below.
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