Last big week of this training cycle!

Monday: 10.5 mi, road
Tuesday: 7.6 mi, road
Wednesday: 7 mi, treadmill
Thursday: rest
Friday: 6.1 mi, trail (Hartley)
Saturday: 11.8 mi, trail + pavement (various Jay Cooke trails, Munger trail)
Sunday: 8.4 mi, road
Total: 51.4 mi

I’m very glad this is the last big week I’ll be running for awhile. Maybe. I haven’t decided if I’m going to full-on taper or what, since I am no longer running the ultra and I have WD50K coming up. I hadn’t even thought about it until I started writing this post, so I guess I’ll have to consider it some more. It depends on how much running I’m able to do during vacation, and how I feel physically and mentally.

This week really sucked though. Pretty much every run was horribly slow. Obviously my “cutback” week didn’t really change much. It was kind of interesting to get to 50+ miles without a true “long” run. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be to fit that in. While I might not have thought of whether or not I’m going to taper fully, I am absolutely certain I’m not going to do any long runs from now til the race. This is solely because I don’t want to have to run with my hydration pack on. The pack + the clasp of my sports bra (Moving Comfort – it’s a great bra but the hooks dig into my skin, even through the fabric) are a bad combination and the middle of my back is all torn up. It happens even without the pack so it’s not a complete fix, but the pressure/friction of the pack (even with various anti-chafing unguents) makes it worse.

None of my runs were really that interesting or fun. That’s probably a bad sign. The trails have been so muddy that I’ve been avoiding them for the most part (Hartley and Jay Cooke had plenty of sloppy spots), so I’m running the same old boring road routes. I suppose I’m also avoiding trails so that I can get running over with sooner, and also because the few times I ventured out on the usual Duluth sections of the Superior Hiking Trail, I kind of hated them. Maybe I ran a few sections too many times last summer.

I am excited to have some time off from running, or at least some new spots to run. I’m going to take vacation as it comes and see what I have time for, but beyond that, the 2 weeks are going to be unstructured and I’m not going to feel bad about it for even a second.