Breaking Down a 20-Miler

On Sunday, I ran the longest I've run since October. 20 miles. The cool thing now with these long runs, well, with any run I suppose, is that I can go back and analyze it. With my Garmin, a lot of data is kept and stored and I can upload it to a web site and see what the numbers have to say.

What did the numbers say about Sunday's run? Well, for starters, it was hilly.

I opted to take my group into Redlands. Now, we start off in neighboring Loma Linda and run five miles there. Our course is supposed to take us down a drab bike path but it's mind-numbingly boring running down there. I did that all last year, in part because my then-co-pace leader was staunch about running down there, but she's gone and I've been taking the runners more and more into Redlands.

Anyway, Redlands is hilly. I knew that but I guess I didn't realize just how hilly it was. We seemed to gain about 600 feet of elevation in about four miles.

This is part of the Run Through Redlands course. We jumped on at about Mile 3 of the race (we saw a painted mile marker on ground) and stayed on until about Mile 10 or so. It's a really fun race, and it makes me proud that I broke the sub-2 hour mark on that course, with a great friend running alongside me to boot. Marvelous day that was.

For Sunday's run, I also broke out the heart rate monitor. Check out the peaks and valleys.

The peaks were me huffing and puffing and putting in extra work. The valleys were our various breaks we took along the way.

I averaged a heart rate of 161. That's interesting. My max is 183 so I wasn't close to my max but I wasn't far off either, and if that was the max there must have been times when it was quite higher. Towards the end it's climbing, and that's because there were four of us together at that point and two of us were bringing it in quickly and I was trying to keep up. I did, but man it was tough. We were all at under 8:30 pace, probably closer to 8:10. Finish strong!

And lastly, this is the map of the course.

It's pretty cool that it shows us detail. I'll have to post one of the maps of a soccer game I refereed. It's pretty interesting.

Well, there's plenty more information, including the splits, but I've probably bored you off this page already. Anyway, I'm happy I was able to get my 20-miler in and happy that I can look back at it and break it down in this manner.