20.25 miles and Week 4 Summary

Saturday 20.25 miles/3:05:31/9:10 average pace

I continued my tradition of running my 20 miler on the Los Gatos Creek Trail in the south bay- from San Jose to the Lexington Reservoir south of Los Gatos. I've run this 20 mile out-and-back course every time I've trained for a marathon, making this my fourth time. It wasn't my fastest 20 miler ever, but I felt great and ran a strong negative split. I started off a little slow, and I was feeling kind of sluggish, but I figured that would go away after a few miles as usual. It did. The run generally felt really easy. I was never too hot, too thirsty, or felt like I was working too hard. I enjoyed myself and took it easy and got through it no problem. I slightly miscalculated my distance and was still a ways from my car when I hit the 20 mile mark, so I just kept running, an additional quarter mile, to get there (I was meeting my brother and sister in law for lunch anyway, and was running a little late). I have NEVER felt good enough to tack extra distance onto a 20 miler just for the hell of it. It's especially cool because I ran that last mile (mile 20) in 8:16, then ran the last quarter mile in 2:00 even (8:00 pace). :)



Ok, I got curious and looked back to my previous 20 milers, and am pretty impressed with my consistency! Here's my 20 mile training run history. I've adjusted any runs longer than 20 (like this week) so we're looking at the 20 mile times for all runs:

Boston Training:

March 24 2007: 3:03:31 (9:11 pace)


CIM Training:

November 11 2006 3:02:41 (9:08 pace)

October 28 2006 3:05:54 (9:16 pace)


Ave Training:

April 15 2006 3:03:55 (9:12 pace)

April 1 2006 3:03:29 (9:11 pace)


(no data on hand for Nike Training, but it was much slower as it was the first time I'd ever run the distance!)

Anyway, that's pretty interesting stuff. The time is almost identical, but the effort is dramatically different. This weekend I felt fine throughout the run, then recovered super quick and feel great today.

The weather was beautiful and there were tons of people on the trail keeping me company. It was fun. :) I won't post my splits but here's a summary:

First 10 miles: 1:34:19 (9:26 average pace)

Last 10.25 miles: 1:31:03 (8:53 average pace)

I finished super strong:

(after running about 9:00 for several miles...)

mile 18 8:48
mile 19 8:38
mile 20 8:16
.25 2:00 (8:00 pace)

I did not go swimming yesterday (Sunday) but we did walk to the library and back for a total of about 3 miles, and played frisbee in the park for an hour.


TOTAL miles for week 4: 45.25

PLUS: 2x swimming for a total of 1500 m
2x weights (upper body and core)