15 miles completed

I set myself a target to complete 15 miles yesterday, and I did do that.  However, in the end it was more of an exercise on just seeing the mile reading on the Garmin tick over to 15 miles as it was a truly awful run.

I'm not sure what happened really, but before the run I was feeling fine and up for it (although I was very tired from work), but after about only 8 miles I was feeling pretty dreadful.  I carried on though as sometimes I 'run out' of these issues, but not yesterday unfortunately.

It wasn't a great run because:

• I somehow didn't have the energy after about 8 miles.  I've done several runs at this distance, and over, but this was the worse I've felt.  The annoying thing is that I'm not totally sure why.  I've eaten sensibly in the run up to the long run, drank plenty of water, stretched a fair bit etc.  I think it must be fuel related in some way though.  I've heard of the phrase 'hitting the wall', and I think what I had yesterday must have been approaching that feeling.
• When I ran back to the car, I knew there was a banana in my bag, which I usually eat after the run.  This time though I just felt the need to devour it, which I did, and then started to feel a bit better.
• I ran out of water.  There are drinking water taps at several points along the route that I run, but they were all turned off.  I'm guessing they are only turned on in the summer, which wasn't much use to me yesterday.  I had to run/jog back to the car where I had another bottle of water with me which did keep me going.
• It was actually pretty warm out and I think I overdressed a bit, which didn't help.

Trying to take some positives from the run:

• I did actually get to see 15 miles on the Garmin, which was my aim.  The time never has been (and still isn't) important.
• My knees, although a little tender after the run, were fine on the run itself.  They weren't the reason for the poor performance yesterday which is actually a real positive.

So in summary, it's one to put down to experience and learn and move on from.  If it hadn't been my weekend target, I'd have just stopped at around 8 and tried again today.  However, one of the issues with this training stuff is that it kind of takes over your whole life.  Certainly the 'long run' on the weekend has to be scheduled in so that we can make plans for the weekend. 

I have been sleeping very well, but I still feel very tired.  What with the India trip (which took me several days to get over) and a long week at work this week, I wasn't ideally prepared for this run unfortunately.

I've spent some time looking at race fuelling techniques, and I've made my decision on that and have ordered some gels.  I do not want to be feeling like I did yesterday on race day itself.  I've ordered some SiS GO Gels which get very good reviews.  I've just oredered six from eBay for now, to see how I get on with them.  I'm hoping they'll arrive before next weekend so I can try them out on my next long run.  I've also ordered a "gel belt" off of eBay to carry the gels, plus it has space for a mobile, keys, credit card etc on race day itself.

Back in October  I set myself a rough training schedule, which I am slightly behind on.  I was hoping to be doing 18 miles at the end of February, which hasn't happened.  My aim now is to get to 18-20 miles by the end of March/beginning of April and if I can get to that, I'll be very happy.  This is the important phase of training now and even though yesterday was a slight setback, I'm still happy with my progress and looking forward to getting the miles covered.