Hitting the Wall (Long Run)

I’ve heard about runners “hitting the wall” on long runs before but until this weekend I had never experienced it myself. It’s not fun. This week I did my long run on Monday instead of my usual Sunday, this was because on Saturday night I had volunteered at a Girl Guide sleepover (for almost 8,000 people!) and I knew that I would be WAY too tired on Sunday to attempt a long distance run.

So Sunday I came home from the sleepover, tired but feeling ok. Because I was feeling ok and the weather was good I decided it was a great time to head out on a bike ride. Off I went for approximately 3 hours. Great ride, beautiful weather, so much fun!! I came home, had dinner and went to bed at my usual time. Monday morning I got up, had breakfast and got ready for my run (lately I’ve been experimenting on different fueling options for my long run but more on that in a seperate post). Off I went feeling pretty good about the day. The weather was sunny and I was mentally prepared to extend my distance.

All went well (with the exception of some discoveries around fueling but more on that later) until I got to the halfway point – which I had pushed about 1km past my previous weeks halfway point. At that time I decided to check in on my run chip and see how I was doing. The chip informed me I was setting an average pace of 17 minutes per km. Now clearly the chip was not functioning properly but even still, hearing that brought me crashing down. For the next few minutes I did random checks to find that my pace was being recorded all over the place – 4.53 per km one minute over 9 minutes the next. Ridiculous considering my pace wasn’t changing. Even knowing that the chip was off every time I heard a slow pace I got frustrated and less inclined to keep going.

Shortly after all of this – when I had about 8km to go (I was doing a total of 35km that day) I was done. Mentally I had thrown in the towel. If I had bus fare on me I would have hopped on a bus and been done with it! I didn’t so I had no choice but to push through and walk/run the rest of the distance until I was done. In the end it took over 3 hours to complete, not my best time!

There are a few factors that could have contributed to this: I had only 3-4 hours of sleep on Saturday night which MAY have caught up to me on Monday. After my less than ideal sleep Saturday I went for a 3 hour bike ride most likely taking any remaining energy I had left. The food at the sleepover wasn’t the greatest (in a healthy way) so I didn’t eat as much as I normally would. That combined with the bike ride Saturday may have used up most of the stored energy I had for the run. It could be any one of these or a combination of all of them!

I know that some days are like that and not every run can be brilliant but I have to say that this one was probably my worst. I can only hope that this week will be better!