Abysmal

Today was my longest run of this training cycle. I was hoping it would go better than last week's long run so I could go into Race day feeling confident. The plan looked great on paper.. 6:00 run, 1:30 recovery walk x 30 sets. The run bit had a pace goal of 8'00" - 8'10" : nice and easy! Garmin estimated that I would be covering a distance of 27K in the whole time if it went as planned. Perfect!

I estimated that last week's recovery interval of 1 minute and the longer run interval of 9 minutes probably was the reason for the achy knee 2 hours into the run and the reason I had to do completely walk the last 1 hour or so. I assumed then that a shorter run interval (6:30 minutes) and a longer recovery walk interval (1:30 minutes) would get me more desirable results. Wrong!! 

I'm not quite sure why but quite early on in the run itself (around the 1 hour mark I think) the right knee started complaining. I tried telling myself it was all in the head and that it wasn't too bad and continued the run/walk plan for another hour or so. By the 2:30:00 mark, it had become quite clear to me that the pain was not in my head and that it was very much real. I decided then that I would have to walk the rest of the duration of the workout but in another half an hour or so even walking became quite painful and finally at 3:20:00 I called time of death and literally limped home. 

Crazily enough, I put the workout on pause mode to be completed later and the last 25 minutes of the workout was spent slowly pacing my living room later in the evening after I felt I had recovered some.

Abysmal.