Great Training Idea #1 High Mileage (120 miles in 3 days)

Steve has just finished his 3 day experiment! Results are as follows:

Monday: did 22 miles in the morning, 10.5 miles pm and 7.5 miles early evening. So 40 miles in 5 hours 30 mins.

Tuesday: did 19 miles morning, 10.5 miles pm and 10.5 miles early evening = 40 miles in 6 hours.

Wednesday: 20 miles morning, 10.5 pm and 9.5 miles early evening = 40 miles in 6 hours.

Conclusions:

Steve now knows that he can survive the first 3 days. The remaining 72 may present some problems though...

Let's hear his words of wisdom:

"I reckon I could keep on going, so that’s good news. No injuries, blisters, or any real problems, just a general tired feeling. This amount of running does take up most of the day though and I haven’t had the energy to do anything else other than a bit of reading and writing. Whether or not that would improve as I got more used to the distance, or whether it would just get worse, I'm not sure. 

My running speed dropped rapidly and stabilised at 6.5-6.75 mph. Whether it would have slowed further in time is something we will have to find out. Longer runs in the morning gave me a big psychological boost because of the feeling of 'miles in the bank'. 

We've got to make sure that we don’t have any additional things to worry about on top of this run; (ie behave like prima donnas) because I guarantee that the thought of trying to fix a puncture on the vehicle or go shopping in a supermarket really won’t appeal after day 3!..

Training

You can't just set off from San Francisco and hope to run all the way across America without having done any training first, unless you are Forest Gump.

In order to gain the stamina required to push out endless 40 mile days without getting injured, we came up with a rough plan, which may be of interest in case you are thinking of following in our footsteps...

Here's a few things we did:

1) Run high mileage for several consecutive days, to see what happens.
2) Run from Sheffield to Cranleigh in Surrey.
3) Run some ultra races.
4) Do a couple of Bike Races (Steve's idea)
5) Run round the Lake District for 3 days (Steve again)
6) Run some foreign marathons (Madrid, Lisbon, Seville) (Another of Steve's ideas)