I had my peak weekend for the DC Rock'N'Roll Marathon last weekend, and had 20 miles to run. Thankfully Team Z makes the big runs a special event, complete with a contest, so there's some excitement added to the dread. For the Red Nose Run event, you predict how long it will take you to run your distance, and then go running without a watch, or in my data-seeky case, without a watch displaying pace or time.
I set up Garmin to show me only heart rate, which helps me not go out to hard, and told the timer that I'd be doing 20 miles in 3:30. That was a stupid math error. I'd calculated the time I wanted the day before:
11 min/mile * 20 miles = 220 minutes = 3:40
but then forgot and just pulled a number out of space.
I actually wanted to run around a 10:30 pace, which would have been a 3:30 finish, but I knew I'd be refilling bottles after each loop and wanted to have that time as a buffer. Oh well.
The route was hilly, and looked like an elephant, and was strangely confusing. Like, I ran the same loop 4 times and still needed the cue sheet for the 4th loop.
Also, by the fourth loop, there was noteworthy snow buildup, which doesn't help much when it comes to pacing.
I finished in an overall time of 3:40:49 -- too bad I gave the wrong estimate, which is an amazing pace for such a hilly route, with stops to refuel and with such snow.
The hills had a couple of unexpected side effects:
- They gave me confidence for my marathon pace goals. If I can run that quickly with hills, then I should be able to run just a little faster without so many hills
- They helped me practice engaging my glutes, so I don't have a terribly sore hip like I did after the 16 and 18 miler. This is awesome because it makes it more likely that the hip pain is a technique issue and less likely that it's an "-itis" of some kind.
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