daynemay

Firstly, no, I’m not planning to only write about running here, but I’m doing a fair bit of it at the moment, so you in turn get to hear a fair bit about it. Feel free to ignore every word.
As I’ve mentioned, I signed up for the terrifying (to me, at least) Tan Ultra. A common component to the ultra training programmes that I’ve seen is the “long run sandwich” – weekends with a long run on both days. Up until this weekend, the biggest sandwich I’d done was 90 minutes on Saturday and 3 hours on Sunday. That’s pretty big (again: to me, anyway), but this weekend stepped things up to 4 hours on Saturday and 3 on Sunday.
Saturday: I was interested to see how I’d handle 4 hours, but I wasn’t looking forward to it. Four hours is longer than I’d ever run in one go before, but it turned out pretty much as I expected: painful, not unbearable, great to have finished. I managed 43km, as best I can tell (shout-out to the footbridges missing from Google Maps). The “marathon as training run” aspect made for a nice ego massage on Saturday night, and (I’m sure) some pretty boring conversation for those lucky enough to be around me at the time – and now you!
Sunday: After Saturday’s effort, I wasn’t enthusiastic about another 3 hours, but around 4:00pm, I forced myself out and did another 34km or so – nine laps of Prince’s Park, plus there and back, from home.
I’m kind of in awe of these numbers, so if I sound like I’m blowing my own trumpet, that’s why.
I’m still pretty wigged out by the idea of 100km in 12 hours, though. 43km one day and 34km the next is a lot different from 77km in one outing, let alone 100km. But I can almost picture a world in which I can do it. It looks a lot like this one, except with much sorer feet.

Just over a year ago, I decided to have a crack at my first marathon. To force myself to commit, I made my intentions known on this blog, and overall, it worked out pretty well.

I’m employing that strategy again now. Lately I’ve been contemplating the Tan Ultra, 100km^[1] in a maximum of 12 hours. I’ve signed up for it and I’ve been training as if I will do it. But so far, I’ve reserved the right to back out on the day. I’m not confident that I can run 100km inside 12 hours (or y’know… at all); even my longer training runs on the weekend (~30km at the moment, increasing weekly) have started to intimidate me.

So here it is. I’ll run the Tan Ultra in August this year. I may not finish, and I’ll definitely feel like shit at the end of that 12 hours, but I will give it a shot. Again, wish me luck.

[1] Well, almost 100km. 25 laps of the 3.8 km Tan.

I’ve ignored this blog for a long time. As of right now though, I’m planning to get it back into active service. Don’t expect anything too amazing, but I’d like to post at least something here, at least once or twice a week. We’ll see how that goes. Expect a lot of Youtube videos, to save myself the burden of original expression.
I’ve also moved the whole thing from http://daynemay.com to http://blog.daynemay.com, to free up the main URL for all the amazing things that I’m won’t do with it, but could, in a hypothetical universe exactly like this one, except with a version of me who actually pulls his finger out from time to time. That move has broken a few things. I’m slowing fixing them, but if there’s something you think needs particular attention, let me know and I’ll take a look. Of minor note: RSS feeds are likely to stay broken until at least mid-June.

testing rss feed(s)

“And they shouldn’t fence at night or they’re going to hurt the gymnasts.”