Mark Sundstrom

Six weeks to go to the Columbus Marathon. The Jeff Galloway workout plan for this week was a 26 mile easy run for Sunday. Since the weather forecast for Sunday was still for fairly warm temperatures and thunderstorms, I pushed it back to Monday, which had a forecast for temperatures in the low 60s. This turned out well, and I went to a nearby park, Three Creeks, to run the trails, some of them multiple times, in order to cover the 26 mile distance. (Of course, I had to make it exactly 26.22 miles...).

This is the longest training run I've ever done; before I'd only covered this distance in the 5 marathons that I've walked. I settled into a run/walk average pace of about 11:55/mi, a bit faster than I'm supposed to do, but it feels like a natural long distance slow pace for me. (I did 11:48/mi in my 23 mile training run 3 weeks ago).

After 2-3 miles, the pace felt like something I could do "forever". By 12-13 miles, I knew I had done a decent workout, but was only halfway done. I crossed the half marathon point in 2:35:36, which is 11:56/mi pace. The next 6 miles went pretty well, but by the 20 mile point, I was starting to be ready for this to be done. I alternated run and walk mostly at random throughout the run, rather than sticking to my usual plan of run 3 minutes, walk for 1. By 23 miles, I'm really ready to be done, still close to the 11:56/mile pace, but I ended up walking most of the last 2 miles, finishing in 5h17m for an overall average of 12:07/mile.

My knees are a bit sore, (icing helps!) but not as sore as what I remember from each of the 5 walking marathons that I've done. So I'm happy with the results – there is nothing quite like covering the actual distance you're doing to need to do in the race.

Here is the GPS track for the entire run, at Garmin Connect

I really enjoy this park; it's flat and reasonably scenic for Ohio -- farmland, next to a river, and trees. I was parked about midway, so I could swing by the truck and get extra water or food if I needed it. I bought brand new running shoes yesterday and used them – they were perfect – but just in case, I had an old pair stashed in the truck that I could substitute.

And an audiobook helped the time go by faster, too.