Below par training week including the long run

My plan is to do one training run of 25Km or more between two marathons. If the gap between the 2 marathons is 4 weeks then I will limit the long run to 25Km or so. In case of 5 weeks gap the long run will be around 30Km. So the plan was to do about 30K on 7th September.

The week leading upto the Sunday was not been great in terms of running and cycling. After a reasonably good 20K in Cubbon Park on 30th August I did 10K of cycling on 1st September at a below average pace. I took Tuesday 2nd of September off hoping to run on 3rd(Wednesday) and 5th(Friday) and cycle on 4rth(Thursday). However, I woke up on 3rd with a slight sore throat and also it was raining quite a bit around 6am. So I ditched the idea of a run. I continued to feel tired with a bit of a cold on Thursday as well. On Friday I somehow pushed my self to do a reasonably fast 10K despite the roads being wet with overnight rains. I took rest on Saturday but continued to feel a bit tired and very apprehensive about the long run on Sunday. Was planning to join the RFL run at EGL. Though convenient to get too EGL is not a great running route compared to Bellandur and GKVK. Specially if it rains the route gets slushy and even has huge poodles.

The turnout for the Sunday RFL run was moderate - probably about 35 or so runners. The first 2 loops (turned out to be a 9.4Km loop instead of the 10Km that A2 announced) were very average for me -somehow did not get the right rhythm. Also the niggle in the left calf that I get on and off bothered me a bit. Somehow, the third loop was much better albeit a bit slower than the first two. I ran 1.2Kms beyond the RFL turnaround point in order to get to 30Km. Towards the end my hamstring also started hurting a bit. Am quite worried about this as this is still very early days as far as my mission to do '12 in 12' is concerned. While I completed 30.2Km in just under 3 Hours I did not feel great at the end of the run. Maybe for some reason I did not hit the 'Runners High' today? Need to do more research on this later.

The weather was ideal for running - mostly cloudy , temperatures in low 20s as is quite common this time of the year in bangalore. Inf act, training in Bangalore makes it challenging to run in other cities in India where the weather conditions are not as runner friendly.

Dur to this long run I missed my volunteering session for the Dream A Dream Computer 202 session for Ananya children. This got moved from Saturday(6th) afternoon to Sunday(7th) mornign at the last moment.