….and My Story Runs On….

Another reason for my success was sticking to my training plan.  There were a few times that I was not able to stick to the plan but they were few and far between.  This was by far, the hardest part of the entire process.

It was not the training that was hard but the amount of time it took. I knew it was going to be a big commitment but when you add the mileage, and add driving back and forth to trail heads, it was a part time job.  In addition to the time, it was hard to focus on anything mentally after a few long days of running.  My business suffered a bit from it and I spent less time with my boyfriend as well. Thankfully he is very supportive and that will be another blog post 😉  You have no idea how tempted I am right now to sign up for another 50 miler this year while my body/mind are trained!  But I know I need to get refocused on my business and I truly need to be patient with the process.  I see too  many people get too excited and then things start  falling apart. I want to keep running for the rest of my life and don’t want to burn my body or mind out!

I followed a training plan from Ultraladies. It’s a cool schedule generator so you plug in the date of your event and it spits out a training plan. I started training for my 2nd 50K and then switched over to the 50 Mile training. Here is my spreadsheet (50K on one sheet and 50 miles on another).  My goal was to follow the plan as closely as I could but life gets in the way sometimes. If I couldn’t follow on the specific days, my goal was to try and meet the weekly miles and make sure that I was able to get my back to back long runs in. If you talk to any ultra runner, most of them will tell you that back to back long runs are crucial as it’s the way that you train to run on tired legs.

The other thing to do is make sure to find out the elevation profile of your run and what conditions you will be running in.  Everything I read about Antelope Canyon was that it was 40 miles of sand. So I did quite a bit of training in the sand although the sand was coarser in our park washes than the fine sand in Page. I also made it a point to focus on ChiWalking and hiking. The idea was to get as much time on my feet so these helped quite a bit as well.

I was worried that 31 miles was my longest run and I didn’t know what it would feel like to run 20 more on the same day….but it really did come together on race day.  My legs were tired but no where near as bad as I thought it would be.

I always tell my runners, you can go out and complete a race with little training, but how do you want to feel during and after?  Training is an important part of any race, both mentally and physically.

I found this awhile ago and it cracked me up…if you are an ultra runner, you know you can relate 😉

50 Miles of Gratitude: 50 Posts about my first 50 Miler

From My Running Story to Yours….
(if you feel inspired to share your comments, do so below…I want to hear your story too!)