Winter Solstice Running

Months ago, I was looking at the calendar I noticing that June 21 is the longest day of the year, I thought "how fun would it be to run from sunrise to sunset." As I thought even more, my mind moved to the winter, and the winter solstice (the shortest day of the year).

I thought about running a 24 hour race. When I did my 50 miler in November I officially started training for 24 hours. Each month I plan on doing one thing to get ready for it. In November I ran overnight a 4 hour run from midnight to 4am. So to celebrate the shorted weekend of the year, decided to run nine hours, from 7:30am to 4:30pm.

To get ready I stopped at the Dollar Tree, I bought so pretzels, animal cookies, peanuts, m&ms, and some other stuff. I knew that the weather would be cold, and maybe wet. I drove my car down to the park near my house and used that as my "home base".

My plan was to run 45-50 miles. I started out at 7:30am, which was just before sunrise. I started out in a nice pace, but to fast. In the first hour I ran about 7 laps, which was 6.7 miles and a pace of 9:17. I ran 15 laps (14.3 miles) without stopping then I took a break. I got something to drink and eat.

In my second stretch I ran 12 more laps. I passed the 20 mile mark in about 3 hours, I knew I was running to fast, so after 27 laps (25.8 miles), I started a 2/1 split (run 2 laps, walk 1 lap). It worked well for me, but it was cold and wet, so just before my third stretch I changed my cloths. My sister joined me for three laps (#40-42). My dad got on a mountain bike and rode alongside me for about the last eight or nine laps.

So I ended up running 53 laps (50.652 miles), I ran till 4:45pm, which was just after sunset. I ran a total of 8:28 (pace of 10:02), I rested for 45 minutes, which mean that it took me 9:13 overall (pace of 10:56). In that time I burned a total of 6,181 calories, I had an average heart rate of 129 (peak of 148).

I had a fun time, I hope this will help me in training to run 100 miles in 24 hours. This run does not officially count as an ultra, but I did run my second 50 miler.

Here were my splits:
5k = 0:28:09
10k = 0:57:34
15k = 1:26:53
Half Marathon = 2:01:49
30k = 2:51:12
Marathon = 3:59:45
50k = 4:49:10
60k = 5:56:41
50m = 8:21:27