I’m a few days late with this update but didn’t want to leave anybody hanging from my earlier post. I’m going to blame daylight savings for my tardiness. The short story – same run, nearly same result (with a few exceptions).

I had a ton of confidence going into my 2nd 20-miler. No injuries, felt great and had a really good tempo run a couple days before. My goal was to settle down, relax and take the first half slow. I wanted to negative split my long run to see if I had the wheels at the end. Good game plan…poorly executed!!! I ran my first 10 miles at 9:40 min/mile. If you know anything about me, that’s pretty fast for a long run (my long tempo runs are 9 min/miles). So right off the bat, my game plan is shot. At the time though, I thought I was going to kill this run on the way back.

To give you a little background on my route, it’s along Nevada State Route 159 and weaves thru the Spring Mountains on the western valley of Las Vegas. You wouldn’t really know it by driving it but there’s quite an elevation change. While the elevation change from the lowest to highest point is only about 700 ft., the total elevation change of this run is nearly 2,000 ft. So, by busting out the hills early in my run, I had nothing left for them on the way back.

Confidence is still high knowing that not only am I putting in quality miles, but I’m doing it on some serious inclines. In a perfect world, all our long runs would be gradual downhills the whole way but nothing about this world is really perfect now is it.

With the Rock-n-Roll Las Vegas Marathon now only 33 days away and 2 more 20-milers on my schedule, I’m feeling very confident. It’s been a great running year and nothing’s going to slow this freight train. That and the fact that the marathon course only has 1,000 ft. elevation change and the last six are pretty much downhill.

Tags: Nevada State Route 159, Rock-n-Roll Las Vegas Marathon, Spring Mountains

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Runs, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.