20 Fantasy Miles

Made it through 20 hard miles Sunday morning, although technically I should have only been running 6 miles. Why would I choose to add on 14 fun-filled miles? I’d like to say it was due to some noble, altruistic pursuit. Or perhaps a multiple-hour runner’s high. Sadly, the real answer is Fantasy Football.

Not Pictured .... Fantasy Football

I’ll explain in a bit, but first, a look back at week 6, and the painfully obvious reason that the 20 miles was a bit of a death march.

As covered in an earlier post, the week was supposed to start with an 18-mile run last Sunday. Thanks to an unfortunate bit of rain-drenched timing, this turned into 10 late-night miles on Sunday, and 8 early-morning miles on Monday. If I include the 5 miles last Saturday, then by the end of the day on Saturday I had run on 7 out of 8 days, covering 48.6 miles. Compound this with the first week of school for the kids, a heavy workload at my job, and entirely too little sleep, and I was less than optimally rested and fueled for yesterday’s run. No better time to take a nice 6 mile step-back run and turn it into 20 miles of self-flagellation. Here’s where the Fantasy Football enters the picture.

About a month back I got an email from an old high-school friend letting me know that one of the guys in their fantasy football league was dropping out, and seeing if I wanted to join. Most of the guys in the league are old high school friends, including the best man from my wedding whom I have done a terrible job of keeping in touch with. Maintaining friendships with old friends is definitely not my strong suit. I thought this would be a good chance to get back in touch with these guys, so I said yes. Never mind the fact that I haven’t followed football in years, and am completely clueless about fantasy football.

Contrary to what the name implies, this does not involve teams of gladiators waging football-battle in the heavens riding fire-breathing unicorns.  Nor does it resemble any of the ‘sweet’ airbrushed scenes one might find on the side of most any 70’s era conversion van.

Apparently this requires some fairly detailed knowledge of the teams and individual players in the NFL, and, if one wants to have some success, a great deal of time. 0 for 2 for this guy.

Draft Day is the most important day of the season. For these guys, this means coming from miles around to meet up at one house for hours upon hours of drafting, eating, drinking, and trash-talking, not necessarily in that order. Draft day is this Saturday. Per my training plan, I am scheduled to run 20 miles on Sunday. The marathoner-wannabe in me would stick to my training plan and spend Saturday drinking sports drinks while picking my team. The realist in me knows that I’ll wake up Sunday morning feeling like I had carpet installed on my tongue, and wondering why my team consists entirely of kickers with last names starting with ‘J’, most of whom retired sometime in the 80s. Not wanting to risk my 20-mile long run, I decided to swap this week’s 6 with next week’s 20. Looked like a good idea on paper.

The 20 miles actually wasn’t horrible, but I didn’t have a lot of spring in my step at the start, and I knew it wasn’t going to get better. The first 10 miles went pretty well, but the week that was caught up with me in the back 10, and I was definitely wishing it was over. At mile 17 I took a walk break to down my last gel and the last of my water, and extended the walk break to 10-minute stretch of walking as fast as I could. I picked the running back up from that point, and was pleased to see that my pace over the last 2.5 miles was around 9:30. Net result was running 8 of 9 days, covering 68.6 miles. I was pretty useless for most of the rest of Sunday, which may have been hard to distinguish from most other days. Shades of gray I suppose. My PF and ITBS seem to have weathered the 20-miles, and the excessive mileage for the week, which is very encouraging going forward. The real test will be getting out of bed tomorrow morning and going for a run. Probably need to start training my liver for Draft Day as well. This could get ugly.