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Yesterday I ran 32.24 km and felt knackered before I had even set off. It was a struggle throughout. There wasn’t a particular point where a good run suddenly became a bad one. I started tired and stayed that way.
With about six weeks left before my December 50 km ultra, that was difficult to make sense of. I’ve been following the plan, the distances have grown and the consistency is there. But this Sunday felt far worse than the other long runs. It made me look more closely at everything around the running.
Looking at the whole month
I shared my Strava export to get a view of the build beyond that one morning. The review put my last four complete weeks, from 5 October to 1 November, at roughly 280 km of running. That’s about 70 km a week, alongside around 90 km of recorded walking and 80 km of virtual cycling.
Back in August, several weeks were nearer 40 km of running. October has been more consistently in the mid-sixties to low-seventies. There have been easier weeks along the way, but the amount of training now sitting around a normal working week is considerably different.
The latest long run came after 10.65 km on Saturday. Sunday’s recorded pace was 6:23 per kilometre, with an average heart rate of 137. Those figures don’t convey how reluctant my body felt from the beginning. I can look at the completed distance and be pleased with it while still recognising that it was a rough morning.
I wrote after the two 30 km runs in October that I could get on with the rest of the day afterwards. This time, the part that concerned me was feeling exhausted before the run had started.
Broken nights and the 4 am alarm
We have an eight-month-old daughter, and I’m getting up once or twice during the night. Sometimes I’m awake for over an hour. There isn’t a neat way of arranging that around a training plan, and I wouldn’t expect there to be.
Some long-run mornings then involve getting up at 4 am to start running at 5. That alarm comes round very quickly after a broken night. By the time I leave the house, the run has already taken something out of the night before.
During the conversation, we also looked at the Garmin sleep and HRV figures I’d shared. Some of the numbers were more reassuring than my description of Sunday might suggest. But I can’t use a reasonable sleep score or a balanced HRV status to dismiss how I actually felt.
The expert consensus on sleep in athletes makes the point that a single sleep target won’t suit everyone. For me, a recorded total also needs the context of how often I was awake and what I am asking myself to do the following morning.
The early start has a reason
The obvious suggestion is to go later. In practice, things start happening with the family around 9 or 10 am, and I want to be there. Running early is how I have made room for these longer sessions. That matters to me as much as getting the distance done.
I’m on the roads with a head torch, a handheld torch and a dimmer light attached to my vest. Even with those, running in darkness changes the experience. I pay more attention to the surface and feel more cautious about where my feet are going.
I’ve noticed the stride estimate nearer 0.9 metres in the dark, compared with around a metre in better visibility. Pace can affect that number too, so I don’t want to turn it into a conclusion about my running technique. I certainly don’t want to force a longer stride just to make the watch show a familiar figure.
I usually enjoy having that time to myself. Running gives me space to think through work, family and the things I want to learn, or just listen to something. On Sunday, getting through the dark first hour felt like another demand on an already tired morning.
Being more deliberate about food and drink
I set off before breakfast, but I do eat while running. For this long run, I reported a 175 g bag of Tangfastics and a 500 ml bottle of Lucozade Sport. The sweets have been easier for me to stomach than gels, so they have become a fairly regular part of these longer outings.
That detail changed the conversation. It was easy at first to assume I simply wasn’t eating enough on the run. Looking at the quantities made that explanation less straightforward. It still didn’t tell us what I had eaten the day before, how evenly I took the sweets, or give a complete record of all my fluid intake.
I want to use the remaining long runs to be more deliberate about those details. A small, familiar carbohydrate snack before leaving is something to test, along with when I eat and how I arrange drinks and refills. I don’t want race morning to be the first time I try to work it all out.
The ISSN guidance on ultra-marathon nutrition emphasises meeting training demands and practising an individual nutrition strategy, including what the stomach tolerates. I find that more useful than assuming a bag of sweets that sits well must mean every part of my fuelling is sorted.
Letting the easier week stay easier
This week is a deload on my Runna plan: 42 km in total, with a longest run of 15 km. After the last month, its timing feels welcome. The question is whether I let the week do what it is there for.
I even found myself asking whether I could still do upper-body training. I enjoy cycling as well, and there’s the walking pad. It would be very easy to take the missing running time and fill it with other activity until the week barely felt lighter.
Walking and cycling have been useful parts of this build, but they still take time and effort. Their kilometres aren’t interchangeable with running kilometres, and I need to look at the whole week when I’m deciding whether I have actually reduced what I’m doing.
The next two weeks on the plan are substantial again, at 74 km and 71 km, including long runs of 35 km and 32 km. After that, the planned volume comes down towards December. Those are scheduled sessions, not distances I’ve already completed, and how I recover this week needs to be part of how I approach them.
One bad Sunday doesn’t give me a diagnosis of overtraining, or prove that I won’t manage the ultra. Equally, finishing the run doesn’t prove that everything was fine. If the unusual exhaustion continues despite taking things easier, it deserves proper medical advice rather than more interpretation of my watch.
What I want from the next few weeks
Following a plan has helped me build far more consistency than trying to decide each day what I fancy running. I still value that structure. I’m learning that it also needs room for the life happening around it.
The December event is still something I’m looking forward to. I love the atmosphere of running events, and I want to find out what I can do over a distance I haven’t completed in this build. There is plenty left to learn about the later kilometres.
For now, I want to see what an easier week does for my energy before deciding how to approach the next big block. The distance is moving in the right direction. I need to give just as much attention to how I arrive at the start of each run.