For anyone who has ever seen a greyhound dog race, you will know about the rabbit. For the races, this little stuffed animal rabbit travels around the track on the inside rail and the dogs chase it. That way they don’t stop mid race to pee on the fence or hump somebody’s leg.
For longer distance track events and long road races (with humans), “rabbits” are used to set a certain pace that the lead runners want to hold. Often this is a record pace of some sort therefore getting started at a fast enough pace is crucial. As the race progresses, the rabbit pulls off the track and lets the rest of the runners continue.
I want to do the opposite. I need a turtle to set my pace so it is slow enough for me to conserve my energy and have a chance at finishing. Going out too fast will be a death sentence and doom me to a DNF or a long miserable slog. As I mentioned yesterday, I am running out of chances to experiment.
I have a theory about the pace that I want to start the race with. And it is much slower than any of my training runs. Usually when I go for a long run, I just run whatever my body feels like that day. And the faster the better. I never have a reason to take it easy, so I don’t. But that will not work on race day. I will have 100 miles of reasons to take it easy early.
Tomorrow I plan on running for 3.75 to 4 hours. And I don’t care how far I go. I am going to set up the virtual pacer on my watch at a slow pace and just keep him on the screen. At the end of my workout, I will look and see how many miles I ran. Whatever it is, it is.
My main emphasis will be to practice running a slow controlled pace and to test my gear. When I get done, I hope I am feeling like I could keep going for a long time! In this case, long time means another 26 hours.
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