A long 30 km (and a grand for the year)

The alarm went off at 6 am, well my mobile phone went off at 6 am and all I could hear was teeming rain, it was pouring, belting down. My plan was to get up early have some brekky two hours before running and hit the road at 8 am. It nearly didn't happen. With the belting rain I decided to stay in bed hitting the snooze function numerous times. At 7 am the rain had eased somewhat and I started feeling guilty and so I got up, had brekky and I was out the door at 8.17 am. It was a cold, wet and all round miserable morning. I donned my Puma tights and long sleaved shirt and wished I'd worn my gloves. It rained hard and drizzled and towards the end of the run the sun broke through. I don't recall the wind easing one bit. I didn't have a pre-planned course to run just a general idea and knew it would be around the 30 km mark. Ultimately though I was relying on the Garmin for overall distance. From home I ran south down Derrimut Rd to Princess Hwy and then left (east) crossing the railway line and continued to Skeleton Creek. Along the creek to Sayers Rd back to close to home. At this point it was 17 or so km on the Garmin so I just continued on running my usual Werribee River 12 km run. The run itself was a lot slower than last week's long run by a long shot. Towards the end it really was an effort and I was starting to doubt my ability to run 42 km which is only three weeks away. As last weeks 30 km was evenly divided into three sets of 10 today's run was just one long 30 km. Overall I ran 30.63 km in a time of 2:52:09 at a pace of 5:37 /km. My maximum and average heart rates were 145 and 132 respectively. Today's run was an effort and I would have thought the heart rate figures would have been higher, it felt like it. YTD Milestone 1000 km At the completion of today's run I've clocked up 1021.2 km for the year. This is more k's than in some previous years as a whole.

Stats as of 7 May 2006 Today : 30.6 Prev 7 Days : 93.4 Prev 28 Days : 262.5 MTD : 93.4 YTD : 1021.2 Month Avg : 204.2 Week Avg : 53.7 Total (2001) : 8762.3