Hitting The Wall On A Long Run
With my half marathon fast approaching, I'm starting to taper off my training a bit. Before really backing off of my mileage though, I wanted to get in another good long run, so I scheduled a nice 12 miler for this past Saturday. It was very nice, those of you who have kept up a little with this blog will know I always love getting out for a good long run to start off my weekend.
That is, it was nice until about mile 9 when I slammed into the wall.
I have read about hitting walls on long runs before, but it had never happened to me until then. Everything felt good until it pretty suddenly did not feel good. It's a bizarre situation if you've never experienced it. My body wasn't in pain or anything, I was just completely out of gas. I tried to walk a little ways and then pick back up running, but I was pretty much done once I hit the wall around 9 miles in.
The rest of the mile and a half or so that I had left once I resigned to walking home I spent wondering what went wrong and how I can avoid this in the future. Initially, I wondered if changing when I take my mid-run fuel had much effect, but I only switched it from mile 5 to mile 6 so I'm more inclined to believe that it had more to do with not getting enough good sleep, not hydrating enough the day before, and having a hard run earlier in the week. I'm mainly glad that this happened in a training run so that I can be more proactive about avoiding this for my half marathon in April rather than have to figure out what went wrong at mile 9 or 10 in a race environment and miss hitting my goal.