Today my plan was to stay out on my feet on trails for three hours with at least two big hills. This would be a good way to become acquainted with the upcoming trail marathon. This morning I was not alone, Daniele, came with me. We started at 8:15am going straight uphill for about 4k, the first 1.5k were still not that bad then the really steep part began. We managed to keep a "running pace" without walking, once on top we turned around we went downhill, not very fast because the terrain was rock and roots infested but we reached the bottom safe and sound, after 400m of flat terrain we climbed our second peak. This one was longer and a little bit higher but overall was more runnable, once on top we were just 10k from the start, but it took us about 1:20minutes. At that point we went downhill on a asphalt road for 2k and then we jumped on another trail to dive for another 2k straight downhill to teach our muscles to survive the downhill damage. At this point we had 4k on a flat sandy section where we struggled to keep 6:00/km the sun was high in the sky and it was hot because there was no shade. At the end of this section our car were just 2k away, but we were not totally trashed yet and we had 140 minutes only in our legs, we decided to climb again the first hill, but this time halfway from the top we were forced to power walking first and then pushing our hands on our knees to keep moving. The last few downhill km to the end were really hard, our legs were heavy but overall we were really satisfied. We did almost 15 miles in 3:05, next week will try to replicate this effort to achieve a decent conditioning for the race.
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