I’ve just finished a 31 km run. It’s my first run above 10 km in 15 days – since I ran that 40 km in 3:30 (equivalent to a 3:41 marathon) on Oct 12. Since then I’ve done mostly very short runs, sometimes as short as 2 km. Getting up for an early start to the Tour de Bois cycling after a 2 am finish to the evening didn’t leave me much time for running.

You’d think, therefore (and I used to think this), I’d now be fresh and my legs would be raring to go. Not so. As I found when I had a break during my run around the world, a long run would leave me sore. Covering 50 km consecutively every day resulted in no soreness, but doing 50 km after a week long break left me quite sore for a few days. And I had no soreness after the recent fast 40 km, yet I’m now quite sore after just a slow 31 km.

I’ve now come to the conclusion that freshening up for fast shorter races is a good thing. But freshening up does not seem to work if you want your leg muscles to be in the best shape for ultra distances. Consistency is the key, so long as you don’t overdo the pace. I certainly found that a single good night of sleep was enough for me to recover from 50 or 60 km of running per day, so long as I wasn’t running too fast. Resting for a couple of weeks, however, simply resulted in a loss of leg muscle conditioning, along with subsequent soreness after a long run. Today’s experience has confirmed this.

It’s back to world run photos today. I took this one the day I ran along the rim of the Grand Canyon. A truly spectacular day of running.

On This Day

Oct 27, 2012

Distance today = 49.70 km; Total distance = 13,760.71 km; Location = Warwick, Rhode Island – 41 45.158′ N, 71 26.081′ W; Start time = 0946, Finish time = 1749

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/237646252

We had a great night in Newport. I met up with Gregor MacFarlane from the Australian Maritime College in Launceston, Tasmania. Gregor and his team have done a lot of work for us (Oceanlinx), testing wave energy devices in their wave tank and basin over the past decade. He and I, along with Carmel, Don, and Roger, headed into town for a night of celebrations (just for the sake of it). It was great to catch up with Gregor in a very different environment.

Roger ran the first 16 km with me today. He has now run over 68 km in the past four days. He’s having a day off tomorrow, but will reach 100 km for the week, prior to me finishing the US leg in Boston on Tuesday.

The first half of today’s run was very pleasant, though the second half was a bit too busy. Chook and Don have headed up to New Hampshire for the night to meet up with a client. They’ll be back tomorrow night. In the meantime, I am hoping I don’t get too wet when Hurricane Sandy starts to impinge on the area tomorrow.