Are you ready?

With only deciding to run such a short time beforehand, one key question is how well prepared can I be for it?

The first key thing to consder is that there is no substitute for training that is similar to the event. That will be the biggest challenge, as illustrated by my Strava activity chart:

Only three runs since October, all of which were two to three miles at medium to slow pace.

Whilst acknowledging my previous statement, this will hopefully be mitigated by the fact I haven't ever gone a long period with no aerobic activity during that time. Up until the current situation closed most exercise activities, I was going to the gym regularly and playing futsal every week.

Running on the treadmill is not the same. At all. Generally, I used it as a warm-up and method for expending the last after my energy before and after anabolic workouts. Therefore, I was usually running faster, with less focus on stamina for distance. However, when I ran 10 km on the treadmill earlier this year I did run significantly faster than the best I have ever managed outside, as would be expected on a treadmill, but it is still reassuring, given less focus on distance running.

The futsal, like the treadmill, is more explosive, sprinting and stopping, which is very different from the steady pacing of distance running. It helps a little, but more importantly it was in hotter conditions than I expect to encounter at 5am tomorrow morning, so it helped me to adjust to the different climate here. This is also true of the gym, which had air conditioning, but was still usually at least as hot as the typical early morning temperature.

My most recent run was the 15th of April. This was an ill-advised effort quite soon after dinner, which typically is my only significant meal of the day and I felt sick almost as soon as I started. Including stopping twice to prevent actually throwing up and some wlaking, the pace was 9:35 per mile, which is about as slow as I've ever run and not much faster than running. This might seem inauspicious, but looking on the other side of this, with better planning for eating and hydration, I feel like running less than five times that distance at the same pace is definitely viable, which would result in a time of 2 hours 5 mins. That would mean concluding the run just after 7 am, an hour after sunrise when the temperature should still be close to its minimum.

Since that most recent run, my aerobic exercise has been limited to three to four minutes per day, but I have done that every day and I can feel an improvement in that performance. Again, it's short preparation for a long run, but in similar conditions and at much higher intensity.

Finally, this challenge is set to be completed in a two week period. I will try to complete it as planned on the first day, but having been running pretty regularly for probably almost 10 years now, I am quite in tune with how my body feels and how close it is to my limits. I will probably have a good idea early in the run of whether I am capable of completing it, based on how I'm feeling and how easy it is to settle into a rhythm. I have no time or pace goals at all, my only target is to complete it. If I know I cannot do that tomorrow, I will still have two weeks to reassess how to complete the challenge, so long as I've not pushed myself too hard to be able to run again in that time.