After getting an excellent start to the week with treadmill runs of 17, 15, and 15 miles, I had completed 48 miles in just three days. On Thursday I felt good enough to run again and did an easy 4 miles with DART. Then on Friday I felt fine and ran the 6-mile DART loop by myself. After just five days of running I had completed nearly 60 miles.
I seemed to recall that my highest-mileage week was right around 70 miles. How hard could it be to break that record now? A little searching revealed that I had actually done 76 miles one week last spring, but still, I'd need only 18 miles or so to break that record. I decided to try to break 80 miles for the week.
On Saturday I tested out my new pair of trail shoes and got in 7 miles on a warm, humid morning. I was drenched in sweat, but I quickly calculated that I needed just 14.09 miles on Sunday to break my record.
I decided to run 16.
This morning I met up with the DART group. Just one runner, Kevin, was planning a run as long as me, and he had already run 6, so he was willing to 14 with me. I figured 14 was better than nothing so I ran with Kevin as far as he was willing to go, right about 14 miles on a very hilly route.
We arrived back in town and I thought about turning it in right there, but I decided that would be wimpy. Plus, I had made the mental commitment to run the Blue Ridge Marathon in three weeks (with 3,620 feet of climbing, its tagline is "America's Toughest Road Marathon"), so I felt like I needed to show some grit. And also to run a few more hills. I picked up the pace for another 2.7 miles, and finished my run solo, again soaked through with sweat.
That brought my total for 82.61 miles for the week, a record by more than 6 miles!
Details of today's run are below:
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