Adelaide Marathon Campaign - Week 3 of 16

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Well another cracking run today, but this one wasn't an angry, belligerent one, in fact quite the opposite. Today's schedule called for a long slowie of at least 18km, so I headed out to Seven Mile Beach (which is actually six miles long, so um, er, oh never mind) for an out and back trot.

Seven Mile Beach is a fantastic place for running - long, wide, flat and firm sand all the way: it's immensely popular with walkers, runners, cyclists and horse riders, although I was a bit surprised this morning to see only one other runner. Perhaps they'd all done the noble thing and gone running at the crack of dawn, whereas I'd taken the rare opportunity to sleep in this morning.

There were heaps of walkers and their dogs today, but they tend to go no further than 4-5km from the western car park end, and so I had the last half of the beach entirely to myself, apart from the wildlife of course, consisting mainly of pacific gulls and cute but shy pied oyster catchers.

Bliss!

It's a crescent shaped beach which is both good and bad - good that you can always see your goal but bad in that the observed goal is so bloody far away!

As a bit of an experiment after EG's comments on ipods, I took no music this time and tried instead to meditate on the sound of the surf. I think it must have worked, because I settled into a good rhythm very quickly and maintained it for the whole distance, going up the beach in 61 minutes and and back in exactly the same time.

The distance and pace didn't really tax me too much at all and I felt really good at the end. Clearly the training is paying off! However, I went home, had a spot of lunch and promptly fell asleep in the middle of writing up this post, so obviously it did require a bit of effort. But it's a great feeling to not be intimidated by this distance any more. The main problem today was boredom. Deserted sandy beaches are great, but maintaining the "wow" feeling for two hours is a little tricky. Next time I might take some music.

20.5 km, 2h 02m. (5:58/km pace)

Week 3 Totals:

32.5 km run
30 mins bike
90 mins walk.