18 miles is my mental threshold for when the marathon training actually becomes serious. Today was my 18 miler. I was a little torn as to a route and decided the safest plan would be an out-and-back. You know, run 9 miles - turn around - run the same route back. Pretty hard to mess that up.
So, with this in mind, I headed out along a well worn route picking up the Interurban trail at around mile 2. The Interurban is a paved trail that disappears amongst the streets and mysteriously reappears now and then as a trail. For some dumb reason I kind of like the stretch from the Alderwood Mall to Lake Ballinger. It's not flat but the hills are all pretty easy and the grades are minimal. The trail ends on the north end of Lake Ballinger.... I think it continues south but I certainly don't have any clue where the route goes once I get to the Lake.
I know this trail very well because most of my lunch runs follow this route and today's run was very familiar. It was easy to control my speed and I was holding a slow 9:30ish pace and I'm feeling pretty good. My ankles are sore and I'm still having trouble with a fairly painful forefoot on my left foot. Seems that crashing a motorcycle, breaking your leg, damaging ligaments in both ankles, and fracturing 2 vertabrae may not be good for training plans. I don't have a clue what the pain in the forefoot is but it doesn't seem to get worse on my long runs so I'm just going to go with that as a sign that I'm not making it worse.
I reached the end of the trail at the lake at around mile 6.5 and had to make a decision where to go from there and chose to tie into Meridian and continue south towards Shoreline. I'm still holding a 9:30ish pace with a few faster ones thrown in now and then on the declines and feeling pretty good. Well I got to Ballinger Way at the King County line and was still only at around 7.5 miles in. Damn! I didn't think I would still have 1.5 miles to go once I reached this point so I need to make another decision. I decided at that point to wing it and head down Ballinger Way for Lake Washington and the Burke-Gilman Trail.
The run down Ballinger Way was a nice break since it is a long downhill grade to the lake and I just kept holding the pace somewhere just shy of 9:30. I was thinking that I would get to the B-G Trail at around mile 12 but, once again, I missed the estimated distance and was only just past mile 11. (Hey, just because I'm supposed to be a professional at this stuff doesn't mean that I don't get a little overly optimistic just like everyone else when estimating distances in running!) I decided that if I stayed on the trail beyond Log Boom Park to 68th I should be able to make up the shortage. At 68th I thought about just heading north on 68th to Locust and then home from there but I knew this would put me short of my 18 mile goal so I headed back west on 181st to pick up 61st and deal with the hill. Damn, I didn't realize how big of a climb you do on 181st before you drop back down to 61st! This is now just short of mile 13 and that little hill caused my heart rate to shoot way up but I was still feeling fairly good and the HR dropped right back down on the downhill section to 61st.
The Lake is at around 30 feet elevation and you do a pretty good climb up 61st, not steep but steady and I just took a little off the effort to keep the HR manageable. While running up 61st I was trying to do some more estimating and I was pretty sure that if I just stayed on 61st I was still going to be short of my goal distance. Hmmmm. Options..... Well, I could do the big hill, 30th through Brier, that seemed most certain that it would put me at my 18 mile goal. I was feeling fairly good still and felt like I was still up to the sustained effort of a big hill climb so at the Y I headed west once again to tackle the hill.
Damn! That hill is amazingly sustained. The grade just keeps taking you up and up with very minimal short flat breaks. By mile 15, after 2 full miles of continuous uphill running I was beginning to think that this may have been a really stupid decision. I could see the summit of the hill though and just kept a steady 10:00ish pace up the steeper part and finally made it over the top of that damn hill. The downhill was a nice break but it was still steep and wasn't feeling real good on the quads. When I'm fatigued I really don't care for running down hill, I should probably work on that.
After 30th turns into Poplar I picked up Larch way for the final 1 mile stretch home. I picked up the pace a bit and finished the last mile feeling that I had done a pretty good job of hydrating and fueling because I didn't do my usual bonk in the last couple of miles. Even though I was excited to see that I had just busted the 18 mile mark according to my watch when I got home I noticed that I was actually short by .08 miles on the download. Oh well, close enough.
I decided to call the route my "5 City Tour" since the route went through the cities of Lynnwood, Mountlake Terrace, Lake Forrest Park, Kenmore, and Brier. I am always amazed at how far these long runs are on the ground. Before I started this run I would have never guessed that this particular route would only be 18 miles. But, then again, 18 miles is a friggin' long ways!
Here is a map of today's little run. Isn't technology amazing?
As always, until next time....
Cheers all!
