Great end to a great week!

It's been a great week of training!  I did my third highest mileage ever, 205K, which was extra exciting with Monday only a 10K (day after outdoor nats and we had to get to the airport) and Friday being only 5K of cross training.  I was just wiped out on Friday.  I did a 40K walk on Thursday and today we did our longest ever workout, 53K!  We traveled up to Montour Falls and walked on the Catherine Valley Trail, a nice multi-use path that's hard gravel on an old rail road bed, basically a rails to trails project.  Our plan was to do it as a Centurion walk practice, go out easy and just get miles in.   Here's a picture of the falls very close to where we started.

 

 

The morning was beautiful, about 60 degrees and a lot of the path looked like this, nice and shaded.  About 15K of it went gradually uphill, which was awfully nice when we turned around!

 

 

There were lots of great things to see along the way, only got pictures of a few of them.




I learned a ton during this workout.  We planned to eat something every 45 minutes.  In total I had about 9 sports products, between GU, Honey Stinger, Glukose, and a few others.  I had my Amino Vital and High 5 to drink and we found a water fountain along the way.  And at about 42K we stopped at a gas station and bought stuff to try to see if it would settle well.  Before we got there we started thinking, what sounds good?  Because especially with me my stomach will only tolerate certain things.  For some reason I really wanted a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  I haven't had a PB&J in probably a year, but man I wanted one then.  Luckily the gas station had a deli and they made me one!  And it was fantastic!  I was able to eat that, some salty chips, and drink some strawberry milk.  And it all agreed with me!  I'm super happy learning that.  Also think next time I'll try having some black olives there, and maybe watermelon.  And some bullion, that sounded good too.   But I did learn that I don't think how much I ate was enough.  I was starting to get pretty darned hungry, and as that's only 33% of my race distance I don't want to be hungry for another 15 hours.  Next time I'll try eating every 30-35 minutes. 

When Dave and I tried the 100 miler before I had to stop because I got to the point where I couldn't flex my right foot.  Just a little I started to get that feeling today.  On a whim I decided to loosen my shoelaces.  As soon as I did my foot felt so much better!  So I think my foot got to that point last time because my feet swelled and my shoes just got tighter.  So I will really pay attention to shoe tightness from now on.

Everything else felt good except my left heel, it started to hurt.  A few weeks ago I got a little bit of a blister.  I thought it was basically gone but ends up it was not!  About 45K it started to really hurt and it was causing my technique to change drastically.  We decided to finish it up about 53ish K.  I was planning/hoping to go about 60K, but this workout wasn't important enough to do damage, so I felt good about how I did do.  Some of those miles ended up being hiking as it was easier on my heel, but overall it was a really solid pace!
(Time on the watch also includes a few stops where I forgot to stop my watch)


We ended up being really hungry, but our eyes were a little bit bigger than our stomachs!




Not sure how well you can see it, but turns out the blister on my heel got HUGE!  Guess today will have to be a rest day :( 

So that concludes a great week!  Tomorrow we break ground on our new building!  Soon walkers will be able to come and stay and train!  I hope people are getting an idea in mind of when they want to come!  

Happy training!