Tuesday: No more Lake Miramar sessions. It gets dark too soon so goodbye to my favorite training session of the week. No walking today. Stayed home and watched the baseball playoffs.
Wednesday: 3 mile walk during lunch break.
Thursday: Laziness. I was supposed to go to the gym. Feeling so-so so I just stayed home to watch Cubs/Diamondbacks game.
Friday: Rest day.
Saturday: This is it, the longest mileage we'll do in preparation for the marathon. 20 miles of hard road. This week was a repeat of of last week's 18 miler with a couple tacked on for good measure. There were some fundamental differences, primarily that there were only 4 of us Dublin-bound folks that were doing the full mileage. The rest of the team did their 20 miler last week in prep for the Nike Woman's marathon the week before our Dublin marathon. It made for a lonely road towards the end. The Nike walkers were doing 11-miles. The run team was also out there but they were all training for Nike so they had short mileage too.
Tried experiment number 38 on trying to get my feet in order. I used moleskin again on the pads of both feet for some extra cushioning and blister protection.
Started out slowly to get warmed up and after about 2 miles started turning it up. I met up with Joanne who was one of the four doing the 20 miles. She was walking at a brisk pace so we chugged along eating up the miles. Somewhere around mile 4 or so, that now familiar pain in the pad of my left foot started returning. I ignored it until around mile 7 where I had to stop and make an adjustment. It felt like the location of the moleskin was putting pressure on that spot so I took my shoe off and removed it. Joanne kept going and asked me to try and catch up with her so she wouldn't have to walk alone on the long course. After making my adjustments, I took off trying to catch her. Joanne is pretty fast and strong having completed over 1/2 dozen marathons so I had to really move to catch her. Which leads me too an embarrassing situation. I'm keeping a brisk pace between 13 and 13-1/2 minute miles and manage to blow right past a key left turn in the course. I'm so focused on making up ground that I go a full 2 miles before I figure it out! Damn! Grudgingly take out the map and turn around. Find the San Rafael turn-off and get back on course. Now of course, I'm the last one out there as the other three walkers are well in front of me. I run into a TnT coach for the bike team and he advises me to just turn around now since I was just over 10 miles in at that point. I didn't want to retrace my steps when I went off course so I decided to keep going until I met someone on their way back and then just hook up with them. I got a little nervous that this would make me do too much mileage so I made a few calls to the coaches to figure out where everyone was at mileagewise. After some quick math, I figured I had to turn around at 11.5 miles which would give me the full 20 miles if I stayed on course this time.
Luckily I'm just getting to turning around and here come Joanne. I managed to "catch" her after only about 5 miles :) Get a call from the coaches to make sure I'm not lost again and that Coach Marcy was done training with her group and would be meeting up with us to do the last 8 miles. Everything is going great and then the pain in the pad of my foot starts returning. I ignore it and keep going hoping to finish. I'm going strong, and get ahead of Marcy and Joanne for a while. The pain starts getting pretty bad and I'm getting pain shooting up and down my index toe. I start to have doubts as to whether I'm going to be able to finish this thing. I find a nice bench and take off the shoe to inspect the area and see if I can figure out something. Coach Marcy to the rescue! She and Joanne catch up and I explain my symptoms. Marcy hems and haws and strongly considers calling for the aid truck to drive me back to home base. I don't want that. I explain my symptoms and how it feels like I don't have enough padding. If you remember I took off the moleskin around Mile 7. She has an idea to apply two strips of moleskin running on either side of the painful area running in the same direction as my foot. GENIUS. I start up again a little cautiously and the pain has greatly subsided. I think this application, raises the affect area off the road so it isn't making direct contact. I feel much better and can finish the mileage. The last 4 miles my time had slowed down quite a bit. I was doing 13.5 minute miles for the majority of the course but the last 4 miles were more like 14.5 to 15 minute miles. Very respectable.
Got back to home base and got a lot of ribbing from the rest of the team for my poor navigational skills. I then soak my obviously swollen foot in a ziplock bag full of ice. I happy I did the mileage! I think I could have gone the extra 6.2 that day but it's probably better for my foot that I didn't.
Sunday: Sweet nothingness. Sore!
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