Malaise

I managed to run 32 km on Saturday, despite my current overwhelming fatigue and growing impatience with long runs. I would love to be energetic and excited about every run, but at the moment it’s simply not happening.

Only three long training runs to go. Maybe one or two of those runs will be 30+ kms, then begins the taper. I’ve been reading blogs and forums, looking up tips and tricks and motivation and reassurances for first time marathoners, and for everything I read that convinces me I’m not ready, there’s something else that fills me with a hopeful (if temporary) confidence. My main worry is that I’m too slow, but even if I am there’s a six and a half hour cutoff.

I bought some gels to try out for fuelling on the weekend, even though my last experiment with gels wasn’t all that successful. Up until now, I’ve brought snacks along for the really long runs, but they’ve been a varied grab bag of stuff, whatever I could grab on the way out the door. Lollies, like those forest berry jelly gummy things with sugar on, also on one memorable occasion a crappy compound chocolate coin (which tasted like the sweetest thing in the world after fifteen or twenty kilometres). Grapes, on my first 30 km run. This last weekend, it was a new low - a little plastic container filled with about a tablespoon and a half of peanut butter. That didn’t really work. So I’ll try gels.

In other news, I ran home really fast tonight. It was awesome, once I got into it. One of those ‘I’m invincible and the world is awesome’ sort of runs. Despite how tired I was before I started running.