Breaking the Wall

I forgot to mention in my earlier entries that my wife Sarah has started her blog. She is 7-months pregnant, and has been running consistently 2 miles a day througout her pregnancy. She can still go at 11 minute mile pace on a good day. I had a couple of dreams that Sarah would call boring because they are so real. In the first I was running a steeplechase and got lapped by Henry Marsh right when he was finishing. I've never run steeplechase, but if I had tried it against Henry Marsh in his best shape, this is about where I would expect to finish after some steeplechase training. In another dream, I was running a marathon in a tactical race. I still had three tired runners with me on the last mile. The marathon was rather peculiar - you had to run up a few flights of stairs at the end and touch the door of an appartment to mark your finish. That is where I made my move and broke away from them. My time was 2:33. Well, a month and a half go I did win a marathon in 2:35, and I ended up getting lost on the last 400 meters and crawling under a barbed wire to get to the finish. About the same level of weirdness as the dream. Also, in a marathon, I would definitely have quite a bit of a competitive advantage on the stairs - I may run out of fuel, but my legs usually are not sore, often so fresh I would not be able to tell you I had run a marathon if I had not had the memory of passing 26 mile markers. The morning started with a diarrhea. No wonder I kept feeling thirsty last night. Apparently the water was not being absorbed properly. To make things worse, Eric and George were not around. So I jogged making a couple of urgent stops for about 4.7 miles, then put on ankle weights and ran for a mile 45 seconds slow, 15 seconds as fast as the ankle weights would let me. 7:04 for the mile. Then a marathon pace tempo run to get the misery over with quicker. Two Slate Canyon Loops (4.22) in 24:54. It felt like a start of a marathon knowing that I was going to have some serious problems later on no matter how conservative I started, so might just as well push it so I'll be further along when the trouble comes. However, I did not feel puky toxic, only sluggish. The hills did not feel right, and it took way too much mental effort for this slow of a pace. I could shift gears without feeling too miserable, though, when I caught myself off-pace. Later in the morning ran with Benjamin and Jennifer. In the afternoon, ran with Joseph in the stroller and the ankle weights. Wore the ankle weights all day. In the evening after dinner and scripture study, I felt lazy, did not feel like running at all. Brigham Young says when you do not feel like praying is when you need to pray the most. With some adjustments for true overtraining syndromes, this can be applied to running - when you do not feel like running, you need to run the most. So I went, with ankle weights and Joseph in the stroller. Sure enough, I felt a lot more like running towards the end of my always on the run mile. 14 miles for the day. Speedwork tomorrow.