Half Marathon Week 11 - 13K - Wowza

Into the homestretch now...two more weeks to go until I hit the Oak Bay Half Marathon.  Hubs and I decided to run on Sunday and I'm glad we did...it was absolutely perfect running weather this morning, which is fabulous because Victoria is having its Times Colonist 10K run today, which is a really popular event...plus the BMO Vancouver marathon is on right now too.  So a shout out to all those who are participating in those runs today! 

I've been feeling really tired the last few days so I woke up feeling a bit worried.  We were on the trail by 7am, and was feeling parched from indulging in a bit too much sodium yesterday...when I woke up, I looked at my wedding ring and it was absolutely encased in my bulging fingers.  Feeling a bit unsure, we headed off...and I had the BEST.RUN.EVER.  I decided to see how fast I could post a 10K run today, just to compare my fitness to what it was like a year ago when I did a PR of 54:17 at the Times Colonist 10K but practically died doing it.  Today, I hit 54:04 easily and had enough juice to keep running 5:15 splits after that!  I felt like I had so much energy out there, and Hubs felt the same way...today was our best run that we'd had ever. 

After we got home and were having breakfast, we realized that we may have done accidental carbo-loading.  We were reading an article in the newspaper about carbo-loading, which said that essentially you drain your body of its glycogen stores by doing strenuous activity then reload them back up again, filling the muscles with more glycogen than they held before:

"In his book Exercise Physiology, William J. Kraemer, et al, describe a more modern way of going about carbohydrate loading.  Six days before the event, the athlete works out for 90 minutes.  On the fourth and fifth day, the workout is 40 minutes.  No diet change is made on these days.  On the second and third day before the meet, exercise is shortened to 20 minutes and a high carbohydrate diet is eaten on both days.  On the day before, continue with the high carbohydrate diet but do no training."

Huh.  Last Saturday we had our last long run which was 20K and took us almost two hours and I'm sure sucked every once of glycogen out of us.  Check.  We did some workouts early in the week that were about 40 minutes and we ate normally.  Check.  I wasn't able to go to bootcamp this week, so did some short 20 - 30 minute workouts on Wed/Thursday and skipped Friday.   Pretty close.  On Friday and Saturday, I ate way, way more carbs than usual thanks to the Royal Wedding breakfast (yum, scones!) and had two huge bowls of white rice which I never eat and indulged in some left over cinnamon buns that I'd made for our neighbourhood Easter egg hunt.   I just checked my carbs on MyFitnessPal and yup...I went way over my carb goal...and my calorie goal, for that matter!  Check, check!!

Soooo...pretty cool!  We're going to test this out next week as we have one more run until the race and see if it makes a difference.  I'd heard of carbo-loading but didn't know that you actually had to drain your stores first and then build them back up - I just thought you ate more carbs a few days before and that was it.  I actually had to rein myself in a few times when I was out there today because I was hitting a 5:10 - 5:15 pace and it felt easy.

Oh!  And my stats for this run - 1:10:27, average pace 5:25/km.  If I kept up that kinda pace, I could do a 1:53 half.  Hello carbs...here I come!