After sleeping in this morning, I sucked it up and went on my third of three long-slow runs before the Salt Lake Marathon. I basically followed the same course that I ran on my previous two long runs. A recap of this course is as follows:
Started at Big Cottonwood Park ran to 45th South and 5th East to Liberty Park to The Gateway (i.e., the last 8.3 miles of the Salt Lake Marathon Course) then up to the State Capital building (1 lap around it) to the mouth of City Creek Canyon to the University of Utah by way of 11th Avenue, up to Fort Douglas by way of the Olympic Legacy Bridge, to Sugar House Park then back to Big Cottonwood Park.
Compared to the last long run that I completed on January 31st, I added 1.7 miles to this course by going up to Fort Douglas. As a result, the total distance was 28.3 miles in a time of 4:32:00 (i.e., 9:36 minutes per mile). Since it was Saturday, there was some traffic to deal with; however, I’m disappointed in my overall time. My legs felt especially heavy, for the first seven miles of the run. In addition, running the 0.3-mile steep incline up 300 North to the State Capital really drained my energy level. After the run, my upper body felt really beat up. Overall, I was happy to have finally completed a training run longer the 26-mile distance and I know that I have a lot of work to do to improve my conditioning.
In regards to my non-running workout, it was short and sweet in that I only completed 200 sit-ups; that is, my body was so trashed after the run, it took all the remaining energy I could summon just to complete these sit-ups. | 