Journey to a Barefoot 50-mile Endurance Run: Week 4 of 18

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2012!!! I hope everyone had a happy and safe New Year's celebration.

This past week was a challenge for training. My brother and his family came up to celebrate a belated Christmas with my parents. We also worked on a 2 day (turned into 3 day) remodeling project of our parent's home office. The good part about that running while tired is that my body is forced to learn how to deal with it. One of the reasons for back to back runs both midweek and on the weekends is to run with no rest between runs to simulate running long distances without having to run individual long mileage runs. Well, after a long day of construction, paint, and other remodeling activities my body was tired. Additionally, I tended to not go out for my runs this week until at least 8:30 p.m. followed by a relatively early rising to get back to the remodeling.

So, for the mid-week runs I ran 4-miles each on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. I skipped Thursday's run because I was too exhausted from a very long day of construction. The first night was interesting because I ran on a stomach that had feasted on a fabulous bourbon beef tenderloin prepared by my sister-in-law. It was a little tough going, but I ran 4 miles (in Sockwas) instead of the planned 2-miles to try and make up for lost mileage last weekend and give me a leg up on the week. Good thing I did this since I lost mileage on Thursday. Wednesday's run went quick and nothing really interesting to report. I did manage to run barefoot that night. My feet were telling me that they needed to be let out of shoes and feel the ground again. So, I obliged and didn't have any issues with the cold.

After not running on Christmas weekend I was looking forward to keeping to my run schedule for New Year's weekend. Yeeaaah, wellllll.... not so much. I spent most of New Year's Eve running some errands, fixing up details in my parents new office, and lounging around with the family (we really hadn't had much time for that during the vacation). Then, staying up til midnight with the family proved very challenging possibly due to feeling slightly ill (or perhaps age is getting to me). That meant sleeping in for the first time in ages on Sunday morning. Spent the afternoon/evening eating too much food again at my in-laws and hanging out fairly late.

In a last ditch effort to end the weekend and my vacation (I'm a teacher) with some decent mileage I went out last night (Monday) for a nice, long 14-mile run in the dark and barefoot. It was fantastic! The first 2-miles were a bit challenging as usual as my mind tried to tell me that I was too tired. Once again, as I reached 4-miles I found my stride and pace. Unfortunately, likely due to the New Year's weekend, there was LOTS of glass on the sidewalks and streets along my route likely deposited there thanks to all of the under-age and other drunk "glass-holes". "Glass-holes" is my new term for people who smash bottles along public walkways instead of throwing them in the trash. Lucky for me, I have become quite adept at spotting glass while running in the dark (even if it's at the last possible second). By the end of my run, I was feeling quite tired. At about the 11.5-mile mark I was feeling pretty fatigued. I almost took the shortcut home, but convinced myself to turn down the planned route away from the house to add in the final 2+ miles.

My hope is that with the holiday season behind me that I will be able to focus more on training and not miss these weekend long-runs. Not the greatest start to the training schedule, but what are ya gonna do about it?

Mileage total for the past week (including the Monday run): 22 miles

Plan for this week: T/W/TH = 4/4/6 and S/Sun 16/10

Have a great week everyone! Watch out for those "glass-holes" out there!

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