18 mile "wave" workout on a treadmill. Total time of 1:52:57, alternating between 6:00 pace and a recovery pace which ever so slightly fluctuated, averaging 6:33. Started with "easy" for 1 mile, then hard for 1 mile, etc, alternating ad nauseum. Lost about 10 seconds after 10 miles when I had to restart the treadmill (it only goes up to 65 minutes, and I hit 10 in 62:46, so I restarted it here). I kept the treadmill at 0% based on the fact that I will be racing my next marathon at an average grade of -.75% at an average elevation of 1500'. The rule of thumb is that a treadmill should be at 1% to replicate flat running, so I would assume that running at 0% on a treadmill would be the same as dropping 1% per mile on actual ground, ie dropping a little less than 1000 feet over 18 miles. When entering the altitude of nearly 5000' at my gym, the nearly 1000' of drop that I had in equivalency by running at 0%, a run of this exact effort would still be roughly 2 minutes faster on an "average" 18 mile section of a course like Phoenix. Therefore, as I train for Phoenix, I am keeping my treadmill workouts at 0% rather than replicating flat at 5000'. Long explanation, but I may want to come back to re-read that later. In any case, the last 3 6:00 pace miles (14, 16, and 18) were pretty tough. I'm not sure why, but 16 seemed slightly easier than 14, while 18 seemed considerably worse than either of those. By mile 17 (recovery), I had a really hard time getting my body to feel OK, even though most of that recovery mile was done slightly slower than average (6:35 pace). I finally started to feel smooth again by about 16.8, but a little over a minute later, I had to ramp it back up to 6:00 pace. I think I could've probably survived 2 more miles of 6:33 and 6:00 if I absolutely had to, but it would've probably felt about as hard as running the finishing miles of a marathon itself, which is a level of pain and pushing myself that should probably be reserved for race day itself. With that in mind, my goal was 18 miles (although I had figured I'd be happy with 16, if necessary to cut it off there, since I'm only in week 3 of this marathon cycle), so I was extremely pleased to get through the whole thing. I count my weeks starting on Monday, so everything is shifted off by one day, just so my weeks line up.
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