Running by Numbers

I am a week away from my 24 hour race on a high school track. I have put in 160 hours and 52 minutes this year running 1229 miles while only running three days most weeks. Just over 390 of those miles were on high school tracks. Yes, over 54 hours of running on a track between 11 training runs.

Every weekend since March 22.

I wish I had a count of how many hours I have spent on my race spreadsheet. The spreadsheet includes formula based calculations on different strategies for pacing. I have been using it all year for my track training runs. Now I have printed out, backed in cardboard, and covered in contact paper the pacing that I expect to keep for the first 12 hours as well four variations that I expect could happen the second half of the race.

Example of one pace sheet.

My collection of pace sheets.

The plan is not carry these sheets and run every lap exactly as I have it recorded, but they can let me know where I expected to be at any point of the race and also if I am ahead that I may want to consider slowing down.

My largest adjustment during training was to now walk one lap every 20 minutes instead of every 30 minutes. I have found this keeps my legs much more fresh and it also aids with my nutrition to eat smaller portions every 20 minutes instead of larger amounts every 30 minutes. The goal is 50-75 calories every 20 minutes.

I also learned during training that my best way to handle nutrition is to keep within my calorie goal while eating the foods my body is craving. The foods I have craved from one run to another has changed from golden Oreos to turkey sandwiches to watermelon to York minis. For that reason I will take more than twice the food I could possibly eat to make sure I have enough of the foods that are working for me on that day. The lineup is:

Watermelon
Golden Oreos
Nutter Butters
York Minis
GU
Turkey Sandwiches
Flat Coke
Chicken Broth

All items except the soup will be portioned out into 50-75 calorie servings prior to the race.  Even when I can no longer maintain walking only three times per hour I plan to eat three times per hour. This comes out to about 4300 calories consumed during the race. I expect to burn somewhere around 12000 calories so it is important that I have trained my body to burn fat since I will likely go through a couple pounds of it.

There is not much running for me between now and my race. It is time to take it easy and expect a report of how things go in a couple weeks.