35k is a long way!

Phew, what a training week. At 85km total distance this week, I am in the 2nd heaviest week of my training cycle. Things slow down a bit next week with a 80km week and then the final stretch begins with another 85km week and a 90km week before slowly reducing the distance before tapering begins. This week's runs were pretty successful with a great tempo on Tuesday, a satisfying 16km of intervals on Thursday (avg 4:10m/km for fast intervals, 5:12m/km for the slow intervals), a medium tempo 13k (4:56m/km) on Friday and an easy pace 35km yesterday.

I've said it before, the easy pace long runs are everything but easy. 35km is a long distance to cover, at any pace! Yesterday's route took me over the canal, alongside the Rideau river through Beechwood to the Aviation museum and then alongside the Ottawa river until it was time to turn back and take an alternate route home through Rockliffe.
What a beautiful city in the fall. Colors are turning on the trees and the quietness of the path alongside the Ottawa river combined with the fall colors made me want to stop running and take my time to enjoy the scenery :) Being an easy pace run on back-to-back-to-back running days, I wasn't too worried about my speed. Logging the miles was my main concern.

The run went really well except for one little detail. Alex always laugh at me when I carry my camel pack with the tube to drink while I am on the run. That's pretty much the only way I can think of carrying 2L of sportsdrink when my route doesn't include cornerstores everywhere along the way. For those of you watching the Office, you'll have noticed this week that Dwight started using a camel pack to stay hydrated because he is too busy between his many jobs. This gave Alex plenty of opportunities to poke fun at me and my drinking tube. Well, when I came back from my run, he had a lot more opportunities to make fun of my hydration techniques. You see somewhere at about km 15, my camel pack sported a leak. By km 20, my backpack was sloshing around and the sportsdrink was permeating through the backpack mesh and made my shirt and shorts all wet and sticky. I eventually stopped to empty the backpack (twice) and ran out of sportsdrink by km 25. At least I could look forward to drying now that there was no more sportsdrink to leak onto my back :)

Next week will be a bit of a break before the last stretch of this training run. Only 80km in the plan with the long run capped at 32km. This should be easy :)