joy, elation

These are my feelings about having my last long run before Ridge to Bridge over and in the books. I ran a little over 20 miles this morning (jk, not going to lie because I know it was 20.12 in 3:20) and boy howdy, is it good to know I don’t need to wake up early as hell to run for a couple of weeks. The last two weekends have been a lot cooler and so I’ve had the luxury of waking up between 5:30 and 6am, which are both vastly superior to your alarm going off at 4am only to step outside and it’s already 70 degrees out.

It was pretty uneventful as running for several hours generally is…motorists are scary, why does the guy in the beer truck have to honk at me while I am going uphill, my butt hurts, where am I, what does my bank think about me spending .92 on my debit card several times this morning, etc etc. Around 11 miles, I saw my friend walking near the EPA, where she works. She was walking from her house which is about as “across town” as you can get in Athens (five miles away). You know you might be a weirdo (in a good way) when someone halfway through running 20 miles is like, “You are walking to work from WHERE? The same house I have been to? Are you nuts?” Then I kind of laughed about five miles later when I ran by her house.

finish the drill

I had a sweet 20 mile run this morning with Katie and Denise. I woke up a little after 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep, so after playing with the puppy for a while (he didn’t mind waking up) and eating breakfast, I was more than on time to meet them on campus at 5am. Since I was early, I trotted across the parking lot to my building to use the bathroom there, armed with my banana-covered pepper spray. Our building is full of too many freaky noises at night.

We headed out a little after five and cruised out College Station to a gas station on Lexington Road where we bought some water at 6.33 miles. The guy running the gas station was like, “walking, huh?” Sir, if you think I sweat this much from walking…I chowed my Shot Bloks and was glad to not have to carry them anymore. We followed the same route back, which is a little more forgiving since you are running more down than up on College Station, and Denise peeled off around mile 11 so she would get back to Dawson Hall at 12 miles. KP was going to run 12 as well, but is either a good friend or just plain nutty because she continued with me for the remaining eight miles. They’re both running a marathon in California in two or three weeks, but I am not sure…I listen, but usually half of what I think about while running blanks out afterward. I know it has something to do with wine (the marathon, not my memory). It’ll be Katie’s second and Denise’s third. We hit my fave Golden Pantry at 12.66 miles for water and the bathroom. I took a Hammer gel here and drank Gatorade.

We continued with a pretty uneventful loop past Bishop Park and returned down Milledge. I felt good today; there were many times I thought I was about to be feeling it pretty hard, but it more or less held off until mile 17 and by that point, there just wasn’t that far to go anyway. The second ten miles was a bit faster than the first. I would say most talking had ceased around 16 miles and it was just time to get it done. I was glad to have Katie as a little rabbit to keep up with. I thought a lot about how hard it is in races to keep going when I am tired and just want a little walk break or whatever which will invariably turn into many slowdown breaks or walk breaks if you let it and it’s better to just keep moving and shut up about it. My two longest runs this time around have been with them, so it is going to be difficult to do another 20 by myself.

Since my thesis defense date was set for the week following Ridge to Bridge, most of my concerns for the race have taken a back seat to how I am going to finish my data analysis and write my thesis and defend in essentially the same time period. I have put the work in to finish the marathon well, even if not as well as I’d like, but I still have a lot to do on my thesis and it’s not as simple as taking a few hours a week to do something I enjoy doing. I think it will mostly come down to my “mental toughness” on race day, anyway. Like I said, the hardest part for me is pushing to do more than I feel like I can do comfortably, especially in the last hour or so on the course. It’s a couple of hours you just have to deal with being uncomfortable and being uncomfortable is okay, so.

To me, finishing a marathon is fine, but it is the culmination of all the hard work you’ve put in over 6+ months to get there that is the real accomplishment. If you didn’t do the work, well, congrats on spending a few hours running on one day, but I’m so impressed with people who put in the time to do it right and I feel like I’ve put a lot of time into this one, even if I don’t end up finishing as fast as I might’ve thought a few months ago. I hope to run Ridge to Bridge as stress-free as possible and then hopefully run Thunder Road again with a little more ambition when the weight is off my back.

weekly recap

This week I hit a little bit of a snag with my ankle hurting, but I took off almost three days and felt good on my long run Saturday. Everything else hurt, but not so much ankle pain. This week was different in that I met up with my buddy Katie and her friend (new-to-me friend) Denise at 5am (!!!) on Saturday to run with them. I usually start around 6:30am so it’s still cool, but not pitch black outside since I am alone, so this run was pretty awesome to have about two hours of running in the dark before the sun came up. That and having other people around made the time fly by and it was nice to arrive home around 9am and have the day in front of me. I chose to spend it falling back asleep for 45 minutes, waking up to gnarly cramped up legs from curling up on the couch, and then detangling my hair so I could go see my friend Artee for a hair cut. She took pretty much all of my hair off and straightened it. Here is the picture I took in the car to show Brian:

Then I skated with Lisa for an hour and got all sweaty and ruined it. Typical. I am feeling a little tightness in my calves from yesterday, but ran a few miles tonight and have a light week in front of me running-wise, which is great because I have a ton of things to do for school. I’m running the Locomotive Half Marathon in Kennesaw next Sunday. I had something come up that I need to be in upstate South Carolina that afternoon, so that is going to be a challenge. Maybe it’ll motivate me to run a little faster, you know. I would like to get a long run in midweek, but I am not sure if I will make that happen or not. I turn 28 on Thursday…crazy because I still feel like I am about 12.

9/5 sunday – off
9/6 monday – 6.58 miles, 63:54
9/7 tuesday – AM 5.04, 48:13
9/8 wednesday – off
9/9 thursday – AM 3.10, 27:46
9/10 friday – off
9/11 saturday – AM 19.32, 3:19:18 (avg pace 10:19/mile), PM skated 8.43 miles, 56:46

total miles run: 34:04
total run time: 5:39:11
total cardio time: 6:35:37

three day weekend, buddy

We are sleepily finishing up a busy and excellent three day weekend over here. On Saturday, I got up super early to go skate with my pal Lisa. Unfortunately, it was too early and the park we usually skate at wasn’t even open yet, so we went to another football-and-baseball-field type of park. The pavement was really uneven and gravelly, so it got deemed a failure pretty quickly. I went home and ran a boring few miles alone and grabbed Spikey for my last mile. Mostly I was bored of running alone, although I’d love to claim it was for his sheer joy of running. I stopped and gave him the what-for after about half a mile because he was acting like a nut.

After my guilty running time, I joined Brian in painting our front porch. If I haven’t mentioned this a million times before, our house is very old – it was built in 1907. This provides for an endless array of chores to be done to keep it from toppling over. The paint on our porch was peeling, so we power washed the peeling paint off to prep for re-painting it…about a year ago. Yeah, our house has been looking pretty derelict for a while and I formally apologize to the three people in our town who actually bother to keep their houses looking nice. No, your trailer does not count. We followed painting up with a nap and a shower, then drove to our friends’ house in the north Georgia mountains about two hours away. We brought the puppy with us and he was a huge drama queen in the car. He wasn’t bad, just kind of silly and I think his squishy face/loud breathing lends itself to seeming dramatic. It was super chilly up there, I think it was in the 50s/60s in the evening.

Sunday morning came early with Ollie ready to get out of his crate and party in the mountains. He was playing with our friends’ kids and having the best time running all over the house and conquering the stairs. We went to the mountain Walmart where I fulfilled my dream of buying a pair of sweatpants and then wished I had leggings to put under them too. We took a scary mountain drive over to another friend’s house and then all went tubing down the Toccoa for a few hours. The water was freezing, but the weather ended up being perfect.

We came home Sunday night…it is always good to be home, even if you are only gone for a day. I went to school for a few hours today (five, but who is counting?) to catch up on some schoolwork and work on the program for my data. Boring, but I feel ready to start the week without these things looming overhead. I went for a short run that felt harder than it should have been, maybe because it was the hottest part of the day and I was expecting it to be cool again…finished up with a couple of minutes in the pool. I am beat.

Nothing major of note on the running front this week. Our average temperatures are starting to dip, but I’m not sure if it’s a fake-out or not. It should still be pretty hot out for another month or so, but the mornings are really pleasant. I ran 16 last Friday and felt decent the entire time, other than the first few miles, so that was encouraging. My average pace was still slow, but I’m noting that it’s a little faster than my last 55 mile (or 54.93 mile) week several weeks ago. I am hoping to run about 50 this week with a 20 mile long run. I’m trying not to dread the long run. It seems like waking up and getting the first few miles is the worst part and after that, it’s mostly autopilot, but I get stressed about whether I will get it done or not every week anyway. Nothing to it but to do it.

8/29 sunday – 4.0, 35:31 (8:52 avg)
8/30 monday – 8.12, 78:14 (9:38 avg)
8/31 tuesday – AM 4.45, 43:56 (9:52 avg – no idea why, but this run was SO hard) + biked 15:00
9/1 wednesday – AM 10.05, 1:37:50 (9:44 avg)
9/2 thursday – 7.18, 65:54 (9:11 avg)
9/3 friday – AM 16.05, 2:39:10 (9:55 avg)
9/4 saturday – AM skated less than a mile (10:00?) + 4.03, 38:22 (9:31 avg) + with spikey 1.28, 12:52 (10:01 avg)

total miles run: 55.16
total run time: 8:51:49 (avg 9:38)
total cardio time: 9:24:49

August miles run: 192.57
Total run time: 31:30:36 (avg 9:34)
YTD miles: 1301.48

run softly and carry a big stick

It was a quiet week, kept pretty busy with school/work stuff and managed to overshoot my goal miles by about five. That is what happens when you’re practicing work avoidance, I guess. I felt pretty good after my long run on Monday and was going to take Tuesday off, but I have this class Tuesday night that starts less than fifteen minutes after my afternoon class ends. It’s right at 5pm, so traffic is horrendous and makes taking the bus difficult. There are three of us who are in both classes and we split up, one by bicycle, one by bus, and me by sneakers. I am proud to say that I won the race to class with about five minutes to spare, with bicycle coming in second and bus a distant third. We weren’t actually racing, but it kind of felt like it as I sprinted from south campus through north campus and downtown carrying my notebook. I felt like a huge nerd, but luckily did not see anyone I was too worried about impressing on my short trek. I wasn’t wearing my Garmin since it was not planned (but I do keep extra clothes/shoes in my car to limit excuse-making), so I used Google Maps and good old fashioned wall clocks to estimate my speed/distance.

Everything else has been more or less standard. The weather is improving and I’m feeling good about having stuck it out in the heat all summer. Almost got eaten by a Newfoundland with about 20-30 pounds on me, but what else is new. This week coming up is another peak week (55) so we’ll see how that goes.

sunday 8/22 – PM 4.01 miles, 35:51 (avg 8:57) + 2.09 miles w/ dog 20:23 (avg 9:46)
monday 8/23 – AM 17.01 miles, 2:50:04 (avg 9:59)
tuesday 8/24 – PM 1.2 to class/1.2 back, ~19:00 total (guesstimate)
wednesday 8/25 – 7.12 miles, 1:06:11 (9:18 avg)
thursday 8/26 – AM 3.10 miles, 28:20 (9:09 avg), PM 4.30 miles, 39:15 (9:08 avg)
friday 8/27 – PM 9.12 miles, 1:26:33 (9:30 avg)
saturday 8/28 – no run. skated 10.22 miles at SE clarke, 1:10:38

total miles run: 49.15
total run time: 7:45:37
total cardio time: 8:56:15

long run down

I got my long run out of the way yesterday and have to say that it’s the best feeling to not have that hanging over me for the rest of the week. Getting it done early in the week also somewhat mitigated having no weekend long run. The weather was cooperative and I had a few hours of clouds, 60% humidity, and temperatures in the high 70s/low 80s, which is pretty amazing after weeks starting in the upper 80s and 90% humidity. I was like, what is this cool air blowing around me as I move? Why am I not blinded by the sun right now?

It was still a sweat-er, but took until about mile 11 or so that I was full on soaked. Conveniently, that’s when I finished the last 6 miles through campus and classes were letting out, so I got to run through hoards of people while completely covered in sweat. It wasn’t too much of a death march until the last mile. I took one walk break around mile 14 to go up the hill on Ag Drive next to the vet school and one at 15 just because I was feeling supremely lazy by then. I have finally gotten into the E-A-S-Y pace of long runs. It was difficult at first, but now I usually start out telling myself to run as slow as possible and constantly think about slowing down before I am actually tired. I coast the downhills and chug uphill with some mental evaluation. a) If I were in a race and there were people around me, would I be the person who walked? If that would be embarrassing, time to keep running unless b) Am I dying and/or going to shoot the author of my internal monologue if I don’t get a break? Once I hit 17 miles, I stopped my Garmin and walked the quarter mile or so back to my parking lot.

My legs were pretty sore yesterday afternoon (probably from plopping down to work on the computer immediately after I took a shower) and I spent a really long time rolling them out. I use the Grid made by Trigger Point and it’s seriously the bomb. It’s a lot firmer than a typical foam roller, more like the firmness of a gym mat on top of a plastic cylinder so there’s less give. I hemmed and hawed about spending $40 on a foam roller, but I bought it maybe 6 months ago when my back was hurting and I think it’s worth the money. I use it a lot on my IT band. So far, I’ve yet to have any problems with my IT band, but for whatever reason it feels really good (bad) to roll it out for a while, especially up near my hip. I woke up this morning and my legs feel normal again.

Glad to be more or less free for the rest of the week for work and staring at data.

don’t let the backdoor hit you

I am up in North Carolina visiting my mom and dad. On Tuesday I was able to finish the last bit of data collection for my thesis, leaving me with a week of freedom before fall semester begins. The last few things I needed to do were like pulling teeth and I am so relieved to no longer wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it. I’ve moved onto waking up in the middle of the night thinking about data analysis instead. Really, if I could quit waking up in the middle of the night, that would solve the problem. However, last night I ran into my mom while I was midnight snacking (another favorite past time…stress eating while not fully awake) and she was looking for a snack and said she might take a shower…at 1AM. So, I might be stuck with erratic sleeping habits for life.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to attempt a long run. I’m feeling kind of defeatist about it already. What else is new this summer? Usually I run a few loops around the lake here (about 7.2 miles per loop) and they are hilly and brutal. The roads are tight so no one gives you any breathing room, which adds to the experience. I should run at least two and I ran one yesterday night and was crazy spent. The nice thing about running at night is the longer you run, the better the weather gets as opposed to morning runs where the longer you run, the worse it feels outside. We’re signed up to run a 5k tomorrow night so I am going to play it by ear in the morning. I don’t want to feel completely destroyed at night, but I’m not attempting to break any records at the 5k, either, so I should probably commit to doing a decent job at one or the other. On my way up here, I stopped by the Vac and Dash ,the legendary (to me, anyway) vacuum store/running store/shipping store/screen printer. It was pretty much all I expected it to be, which is to say totally weird and awesome. For once in my life, I didn’t find anything to buy, but it did convince me to sign my parents and myself up for their Tour de Elvis 5k.

My parents are having their kitchen/family room painted so I’ve been relegated to hanging out in the guest bedroom most of today and have been watching TV while I did some work and also completed two of my DI applications, which went in the mail this afternoon and I’ll probably discover that I had a major error in something tomorrow, but whatever. I have one more application to go, but I am so on top of things that the program doesn’t even have their application online yet. Boom. Hurry up, y’all, I have some fire burning over here. Anyway, TV is depressing and I was watching an Oprah about people who’ve lost insane amounts of weight, which made me think about how I want to exercise and then I was like, wait a minute. Crap. I already do. No losing 400 pounds for me, but a few sit ups probably wouldn’t kill me. I should clarify and say that I don’t find people losing massive weight depressing, but it is sad to see people who are clearly so unhappy and alienated and having a very low quality of life. It’s a burden I feel lucky to have not experienced. I hope they’re successful in keeping the weight off.

three pound hoop

I followed up a pretty decent week with a ladies-only trip to the mountains this past weekend, which was not horribly conductive to running but fun as hell just the same. No cross training this week unless you count the hours of quality time I spent hula hooping on Friday night – which I do, because my abs were screaming when I woke up on Saturday. I need to own a hula hoop, then be a hula hoop marathon runner…the ridiculous thing is someone out there is probably already doing that. Yep, the world is almost completely crazy because these women walked a half marathon while hooping. That can’t be much different than when you’re running next to the jerk wearing bells on their shoes in a winter marathon; funny at mile two, makes you want to kill someone around mile 19. Namely the person with the bells on who is probably having an awesome time. Anyway, I don’t find much funny by that point and probably not hula hoops, either.

We went tubing on the Toccoa River on Saturday through a crazy thunderstorm, and I ran my last two miles of the week that afternoon while most of the house slept for a while. It sucked. I only ran to the end of the road and back, but I was dying. It’s hilly here, but that was nuts…my mileage goal for the week was 49.5 and I wasn’t about to sit around a house full of sleeping people instead of getting it done and then feeling guilty.

I am stoked to have crossed the 1000 mile mark for the year so far and also stoked that another month of summer is over. I got my parking permit for fall semester and it’s way closer to my building so it’ll be much easier to stink up my office after runs soon without having to lug all my stuff to my car afterward…bathing in the sink, I’ve missed you.

7/25 sunday – 3.5 miles, 32:50 (? my Garmin is cussing summer by not working right and deleted this without uploading, but I remember my avg pace was 9:23 con perro)
7/26 monday – AM 7.0 miles, 64:37 + PM 3.16 miles, 26:53
7/27 tuesday – PM 4.11, 38:45
7/28 wednesday – AM 7.01, 66:20
7/29 thursday – AM Q2 – 16.01 miles, 2:36:36
7/30 friday – 7.0 miles, 65:29
7/31 saturday – 2.03 miles, 20:34 (I ran down a hill and up a mountain…or something)

total miles run: 49.82
total run time: 7:51:04 (avg pace 9:27, courtesy of dog, long run, and mountains)

total miles for July: 208.61
total run time for July: 32:39:55 (avg 9:23)
total YTD miles: 1108.91

up and at it

Last night I bumped back the ol’ alarm clock from the sixes to the fives. I hit snooze twice and managed to get out of bed at 5:30am, fumble around, and drive over to the park to start running a little after 6:30am just after the sun came up. Getting started 30 or 45 minutes earlier made a huge difference in my run compared to last week. It was still really hot – just shy of 80 when I began – but the sun wasn’t fully up and burning off the cloud cover until I had gotten through about 11 miles. I ran a stem and loop starting at Bishop Park, going about two miles over to Milledge Ave, down Milledge to East Campus, and back up Prince. I repeated the Milledge to Prince loop twice at about six miles each, which is a good distance to repeat since you don’t have to do it enough for it to bore you and it’s not long enough to be daunting. The 2.5 or so on East Campus is the hilly part and once that’s over, you can autopilot. When I finished the second loop, I ran the 2+ miles back to Bishop Park for a total of 16 miles (16.01…I was a little shy of 16 so I added a trip around the parking lot) in 2:36:36.

This run was so much better than last week when I did a little under 13 miles in about 2:11, I think. I walked four times during the run, twice because of a short spot where there was no sidewalk/bike lane and I didn’t want to run on the side of a hill that was muddy…of course, the second time there was a lady in front of me running up it and I felt like a pansy. The other two were just because I was lazy in the last mile and walked about .05 mile each time (I planned to do 15 so I didn’t feel that bad about slacking after that), but I felt pretty decent the whole time whereas last week I was just hot as hell and really tired.

I drank water+Gatorade at 8.3 miles and Gatorade at 13.3 miles. Usually I wouldn’t think to drink two Gatorades, but I think I am lacking in the sodium during these really hot runs. I have been drinking some Heed, but I hate the taste and it doesn’t have nearly the amount of sodium that Gatorade Perform (basically the one they now mostly sell at gas stations) does. A single pack of Heed, which they recommend mixing with 16 to 24 ounces of water, has 100 calories and 39.3 mg of sodium whereas a full 20 ounce (the smallest one they sell) bottle of Gatorade has 130 calories and 270 mg of sodium. I’m not pointing out the calories for weight loss purposes, just what you’re getting for carbs/energy in each (25g and 34g, respectively), but even as a pretty small person who is not burning tons of calories per mile, this is pretty economical and not an excessive energy intake (two sports drinks, two gels) for a couple of hours worth of exercise. I prefer drinking water, but I feel I can drink it endlessly without some kind of sodium added and it’s not safe to run for a really long time without replacing the sodium you are sweating out (and I got really sick after the last half I ran because I did not re-up afterward – it was horrible and I do not recommend it). With Heed and water, I was still getting thirsty, feeling super sloshy and full, but then I can’t pee because I haven’t replaced the salt I’ve sweated out. I think switching it up helped a lot, as well as just plain getting it done earlier in the morning.

I feel good to have a 16 mile run out of the way after doing tons of 12-13 mile runs on this training go-round. It feels like the first real long run; long runs are relative to what you are doing, but with marathon training anything less than 15 is kind of eh (and even 15 pales next to 18, 20, 22). Plus, it’s encouraging to feel pretty peppy after 16 miles after feeling like crap after 13s. I felt like I could have gone longer today, not that I wanted to, but I wasn’t completely spent by the time I finished. I was, however, completely soaked. Pretty sure I was drenching any people I passed on the sidewalk. Highlight of the run, by far, was coming through downtown on my first loop and deciding to run by Brian’s work to see if I could catch him going in (it was a little before 8am). My impeccable timing brought me to the top of the hill just as he was walking up. I’m sure he was very happy to see his girlfriend sweating profusely like a crazy person in front of his building.

You might be pretty sweaty if your lame camera phone actually picks up the droplets of sweat all over you.

Not my car, not my license plate, not a Gamecock or “Roll Tide” or whatever alumni they are.

My purple shorts are my favorites – a little kickier than black ones and lots of pockets.

are you excelling today?

I had a pretty decent week, or as decent as it can be trying to hit your goals with heat indexes/indices well over 100F all week. I stuck with doing doubles for about half the week, with an early run of about an hour or so and then a short run in the evening before dinner, usually around 7:30 or 8:00. Most all my runs were pretty slow, but considering the temperatures I’m just happy to be getting it done. The shorter night runs felt 100X more awesome than the morning runs.

My little Staffordshire Terrier, Spikey (he came complete with a name, we didn’t name him that), has been my run buddy a couple of times this week. He’s a shorty and is usually good for about a mile and a half before really lagging behind, so I pick him up when running back by my house, take him down a big hill to the reservoir, and back up to the house. He spends a fair amount of energy moving laterally instead of forward, but he loves getting to go with me and gets very hopeful when he sees me put my sneakers on. He also likes protecting me from the dogs running around down there. He’s pretty manly like that. It’s fun for him so I like it too and he’s good company.

I did my long run on Friday because I was going down to Atlanta to see my BFF Friday night and wouldn’t get home until late. I started around 7:15am from the greenway and kind of lollygagged around Athens on a not so predetermined route. With long runs taking more than two hours and no parking permit on campus for the summer, my parking options are limited until August. It was really brutal. I felt so hot and tired even after a few miles and just dejected. I decided I was going to walk a half mile as slow as I wanted and not start running again until the half mile was up. During that time, I reorganized my brain a little bit and tried to get my PMA back, especially that what would make me happy would be to feel less tired and in order to feel less tired, I needed to run slower, period. When the half mile of walking/mental health evaluating was over, I felt much better and continued on. The route I picked was shorter than I thought it would be, but by the time I was getting closer to my car, it was so hot that I just figured it would be best to call it a day. My clothes were soaked and I had sweat and grime running down me. About a mile from my car, I ran into my friend Big John who was out walking and also soaked. We shot the sh-t for a moment and I regrouped again. He was talking about some friend of his parents who would always ask him, “are you excelling today?” I told him I was lucky to excel once a week at anything, let alone daily. Well, at this point I was definitely not excelling, but I am pretty into the phrase and it got me through the last leg of the run when all I wanted to do was throw myself into the river. Not a nice flowing river, either, a dirty, polluted, crusty looking river. I ran for about 2:11 and I was aiming for about 2:15 – 2:30 (14 miles, so a little short there), but in the immortal words of Kenny, “the dishes [were] done, man.”

Next week is the same mileage goal so I hope to follow a similar schedule. Doing AM/PM runs makes my legs feel really good. It surprised me how relaxed they felt, even versus running once a day for less overall miles. I think taking my rest day the day before my longest run is bunk. I always feel like crap the day after a rest day. RIP rest day, long live rest day! I am going to the mountains on Friday afternoon so it would behoove me to get a long run in before that, but I’m thinking I need to start more like 6:15 or 6:30am. My problem with that is that I would (ahem) have to start more like 6:15 or 6:30am and also that it’s still kind of dark and unpopulated at that time of morning, which is creepy.

7/18 sunday – off
7/19 monday – AM greenway 7.9 miles, 1:18:24 + PM 3.11 miles, 26:52
7/20 tuesday – AM 7.17 miles, 66:42 + PM 3.48 miles, 32:15
7/21 wednesday – AM 7.03 miles, 64:17 + PM 3.43 miles, 33:22
7/22 thursday – off
7/23 friday – AM 12.75 miles, 2:11:20 (ow)
7/24 saturday – PM 5.04 miles, 47:03

total miles run: 49.91
total run time: 7:50:15 (avg pace 9:25)