Awful Long Run Today...

Well, it had to happen. Training has been going so well that I really was due for a bad day.

I went out this morning to do a little 16 mile (25.6k) 'long run' -- much shorter than I had done almost since I started training. The first couple of miles were typical -- my left ankle was bothering me, but that subsided. I was feeling pretty good.

But as time went on and I got prepared to ramp up the speed to marathon pace, I found that the legs didn't have the energy -- particularly the quads. Here are my splits (aiming for a 5:11/k long run pace and then 4:52 marathon pace):

5:39
5:10
5:07
5:08
5:10
5:11
5:13
5:06
5:04
5:08
5:05
5:07
5:08
5:09
5:15
5:14
5:14
5:12
5:07
5:14
5:15
5:20
5:32
5:37
5:39 (459 m.)

Near the end, I had to walk a couple of times. My quads were screaming at me and there was simply no energy with which I could push back with my legs while running.

I'm quite sure that the cause of my horrible run was that I did the tempo run on Friday, played hockey on Saturday morning after not enough sleep, stayed up until 3:00 am on Saturday night, and then played hockey on Sunday at noon. Hockey tends to work my quads more than anything else and clearly they hadn't recovered.

I'm going to have to take my hockey schedule into account, now, when figuring out future runs.