Mental Toughness

The latest edition of UltraRunning  has a great one page article on how to survive your first 100 miler.  It includes sage advice on mental strategies like not using family members as pacers (they might not "understand" the torturous nature of ultra running and not push you hard enough when you might want to quit).  Another wise suggestion is to always pick the hardest option when faced with decisions in planning your route in training.  Never settle on tried and true, since that won't give you the mental fortitude necessary to get it done on race day.

I decided to employ this tactic on Sunday's long run.  I had already run almost 15 miles the day before, so was not quite amped up to go out again, especially since the weather, which started out pretty benign, was going to degrade all day with increasing wind and cold.  Getting 20+ miles in without cutting the run short would take all the will power I could muster, so I had to come up with a plan...
I had my daughter sacrifice 40 miles worth of gas and dump me off in a parking lot some 20 miles from home!

Wait, wait, I may need to rethink this!

Since so many of the back roads are still pretty much single lane from the massive piles of snow, I thought that a main road would be a better option. The good news was that the shoulders were partially plowed - the bad news was that the cars were driving well over the 50-55 mile speed limit.  As my daughter pulled away from the designated "dumping spot", I looked at her wistfully...SIGH.

And then I was on my way.  This was actually one of the same routes I had done in the summer as part of the Elementary School Challenge, except back then it was over 95 degrees when we started and it was less than half the distance I had to cover today.  It is a much different run with slush, black ice and piles and piles of plowed snow.  And it was loud!  I decided to not even bring my music, since I knew it would temp me worse than peanut m&m's or oatmeal cookies with white chocolate chips and craisins.  Just put one foot in front of the other for the 3 hours it took for me to get to the back roads that would lead me home.  I employed every trick I could think of to make the time pass, like counting down the miles until I could catch a very small glimpse of the mountains from the highest point in the road, or imagining where the heck all these people were headed in such a hurry.  I mean come on, we were in Mt. Airy!!  Anyway, I did stop a few times and regroup - once when I realized my water hose from my pack was twisted and stuck in some crazed way that prevented the water from coming out.

camel back fail

To add to the pure joy of this long run, it started snowing the last three miles.  Not the big, wet, pretty flakes, but the teeny, tiny, cold, windy, in your eyes, and face kind of snow.  I was getting so cold, and I knew that running faster would warm me up, so that is what I did (okay, tried to do).  It did work pretty well until the last half mile, when I was just way over this run.  My house was right in front of me...with all the doors locked and no one home.  WHAT!   We do have spare key in a pad lock, but too bad for me, my fingers were frozen and I couldn't turn the numbers to unlock the box.

Wilmaaaa!!!

After about 10 minutes, I finally made it inside.  Yup, I sure made this one hard on myself.  But I got it done, and it only took 4 hours before I finally warmed up enough to  look at the schedule for the next day.