A lot of running

I certainly ran a lot this year and I covered a lot of distance. More so than other years I am sure. In recent years I have gone into marathons without ever running more than 10 miles at a time, in the months beforehand, although I did do speed workouts every time. While I do think omitting long runs affects performance, the speed work does make up for some of it.

This year, I did not do much speed work at all so it will be interesting to see how I will do in the upcoming Boston marathon. Although I did not run any really long distance -I have never done so before a marathon in any case, I did run quite a few 14 and 15 milers in the hills.

I will say that running 14-15 miles in the Oakland hills is probably equivalent to running 18 or 19 on the flats. All these runs include at least 1,000 ft of climbing and some of it is steep to boot. In any case, it does take me more than 2 hours to run that distance in the hills, and I am not running slow. Some of these runs would definitely qualify as tempo runs or, at the very least, they did contain serious stretches of tempo running.

On Friday I ran 15 miles, through Montclair, over Joaquin Miller and back on Skyline. This loop includes a famous steep 1.2 mile climb to Skyline and a further one mile climb to the top of Skyline for a total of 765 feet. On Saturday I rode 35 miles on the road and on Sunday, I once again ran the Joaquin Miller loop. Today I rested.

Sunday was also the first running of the Oakland marathon. The new marathon that is, because 25 or so years ago there used to be an Oakland marathon. I think I may run that race next year if it is still around. Cheaper than going to Boston and better for the environment too!