103km in One Week. A New Record
Towards the end of last week, I thought to myself: "I wonder if I can do 100km of running in a week and at what point I'd actually start to feel it". Now I've finished today's long run, I now know. YES I can, and not until the end of the week.
In order to get to 100km I worked out I'd have to average just over 12km a day for Monday to Saturday and then run somewhere between 22 and 25km for my long run. As I didn't have a long run on Sunday last week, I decided on a slightly longer run on Monday (just over 16km) and then stuck to just over 12km a day for the rest of the week. I was expecting to start to feel tired and slow as the week progressed, but I found this didn't happen. I didn't feel tired and I actually started running my 12 or so kilometers quicker as the week progressed, whilst still keeping my heart rate in the desired range (148-153 BPM).
Yesterday and today have been the days when I've finally felt I've had a heavy week of training. Yesterday I ran about 3.7km to the Reading parkrun as a warmup, ran and won the Reading parkrun 😀 and then ran home again as a cooldown. Today I ran just over 25km for my long run. It was during the final 400m of the parkrun - my legs burnt when trying to break into a sprint into a very strong head wind - and the last 5km of today's long run that I actually felt a bit tired, but otherwise I felt great all week.
For those who like details, here's a screenshot of this week's training from Garmin Connect...
Almost 104km in a week!! I don't think I've ever run this far in a single week. This week also takes me to 211km for the month so far. I think my previous monthly best of 259km may just topple this month.
So will I do another 100km week again? Almost certainly, but I think next time I'll split things down into a few more runs, maybe a double run on a Tuesday and Thursday. When? I'm not sure, maybe the week after next. We'll see how I feel, but now I know I can do it, I think it might become a regular event.