This past Saturday I had a 15-20 miler on the training schedule, however, it never happened. Since I had the car trouble in Atlanta, that TOTALLY messed up my running for that week. I had missed Monday’s lunchtime run, plus Tuesday’s Lunchtime run, so I needed to have that Thursday run. Well, Thursday never amounted to anything and Friday was busy coming home and such. So Saturday morning I was going out for a long run, or so I thought.

Not only had it been a long span of time since I had ran, the humidity and heat for that matter were pretty significant. Since Hurricane Ike was pushing up humid hot air our way, we had a mini-heat wave. The heat, coupled with the gap in running, made Saturday’s run pretty miserable. So miserable, that I threw in the towel before mile 3 and ended up doing quite a bit of walking for my 8 and change excursion.

I was able to reason with myself on why I should not try for the 18 miler that I had planned.

1. Experience - I have quite a bit of experience to know that moving this run is not the end of the world in terms of training.
2. Lack of Preparation – since I the car trouble, I was not nutritionally ready for this long run. I hadn’t carbo-loaded enough on Friday to really be prepared for this run
3. Psychology - I knew that #2 would make the run much more difficult and I did not want to set my run up to ended up poorly. Sure, I could have suffered through the mileage, but since I have done that mileage before, the psychological gain of completing that mileage would have been totally negated by the physical wear and tear of the body. Since you get (typically) a psychological boost from Race Day, it’s generally better to be under trained on race day than over trained.

However, just because I decided to bag this run and could justify it, didn’t mean that things were all peachy for my training. I did have a slight set back and do need to figure out How to get this mileage back. it’s just that I got this race up coming and there’s not a lot of time to get it done at this point. It’s not like I can add alot more shorter distances (6-8 milers), I need that LONG distance milage.