8 wks to go SCKLIM Easy 19km

Where : Kota Kemuning
Time : 0619
Weather : Great, even when the sun came out, it was pretty cloudy.
Hydration: 500ml mineral water only.

I wasn't very confident if I could do 19k today, what with the calf cramp I suffered after trying to drive without properly warming down on Friday.

I started off cautiously, thinking it would be better to be safe than sorry. After the first km, I felt no pain at all in the left calf, which was great. Still, I opted to keep it steady at about 6:15 min/km pace until the 10k mark.

The weather was wonderful, as it rained until up to about 4.30am in the morning. It was a cool 26 deg (I think!) and did not get past 28 deg when I finished the run.

After the 10k mark, I picked up the pace to about a 5:50 pace, and with no problems cropping up, I maintained a 5:40 pace until the last km, where I finished it off with a 4:48 pace.

I felt great after the run, and it was really out of my expectations. The hours of training on the longer distance seemed to be really paying off. A massage on the calves by my better half was icing on the cake!

My thoughts fell back to 9 months ago, when I was literally crawling back after a 15km training run....

All in all, I logged in almost 66k for this week, 3k more than the highest logged 2 weeks ago.

However, I'm still a long way from finishing a 42km strongly, but I might be able to eke out a sub 5 hour marathon under the current circumstances.

With another 4 long runs in the pipeline, I hope to steadily increase my endurance over the next 6 weeks.

Food for thought

- Longer distance running does help in the shorter distance events - as what I've seen in the 10k Orange run (5 min pace) and the Bidor half marathon (11.4km/hr pace). I will hope to maintain 30k runs after the SCKLIM.
- I haven't done much sprints or tempos - I need to incorporate these workouts if I would really like to speed up to a 13km/hr for the 10k by end of year. Don't think I need it for the marathon though.

Anyway, I've scheduled 72k over 4 runs next week, with the LSD at 32km. As I will be traveling to JB and Sg over the week, I will need to get up pretty early on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday to get the mileage in.

God willing, I'll get this done....