Sunday, September 2, 2012

An Unbelievable 18 miles

this 18 miles was unbelievable for sure. but not because it was so fast or anything like that. it was unbelievable to me because i did it on a treadmill. yes, this is more than double in distance than any previous run on a treadmill for me. it is also my longest completed training run ever. i know running on a treadmill isn't nearly as tough as running on the road, especially with the hills around here. however, i did the entire run at no less than a 2% incline. my walk breaks were scheduled at 5, 10, and 15 miles. the half mile before all of those breaks i raised the incline to 3% along with the 1/2 mile before the finish. so i basically ran 2 miles at a 3% incline and 16 miles at a 2% incline. i kept the pace at 5.9 mph except for the walk breaks and the last mile and a half. the first 2 walk breaks were at 4mph and the last one was at 3mph. however, i was feeling so good, the last mile and a half i ran at 6.5mph. i did have some trouble with the timing since after 1 hour my treadmill only keeps record of the minutes. also, at an hour and a half my treadmill stops and i had to restart it, which i did rather quickly, especially since i wasn't expecting it to quit. i had started the chrono on my watch to time me after the hour mark but i stopped it around mile 10 when i had to switch dvds and i forgot to restart it when i began running again. so, i finished the run somewhere around 3 hours and 9 minutes, maybe a little faster. that is a 10:30 pace. i was pretty excited about that, even though i was on a treadmill. 2 weeks ago i ran 14 at a 10:15 pace and think i could have done a little better, a week before that i ran 15 miles at a 10:31 pace and was pretty surprised. so not too bad. i think i could have ran this one a little faster since i was able to speed up considerably for the last mile and a half, even with a 1% increase in elevation for the last 1/2 mile. oh, the reason i ran this on a treadmill is because we had an 80 chance of rain/thunderstorms all afternoon. it did clear up around 4pm, giving me plenty of time to run during daylight, but i already had in my mind i was running it on a treadmill and i couldn't change my mind. i watched a dvd of some bowhunting shows for the first 10 miles and then a movie called "Unstopable" for the rest. they kept me occupied enough. thought of the day: most of the time things don't go the way i think they should. good thing...i am not that smart.