I Ran 18 Miles?

I have less than four weeks until the Memorial Marathon.  Holy cow, I only have less than four weeks until the Memorial Marathon.  After a weekend in Dallas for the Rock N Roll Half last weekend it was back to training this weekend.

My previous longest distance was 16 miles, done twice.  Once HORRIBLE, the second much better.  This weekend we set out to go for 18.  We selected a nice not too hilly course with lots of side walks, and we left the Y at about 7:15 on Saturday morning.

Our plan was to run two miles and walk a minute, give our bodies time to recover a bit so we could keep up our pace.  It was a beautiful morning to run, and Abby and I had three other runners out with us.  They are all training for the half, so they were only going to go part of the distance.  Abby set up our water stops, and I had my Garmin set to notify us of our miles. 

We had to take a bathroom break about mile 5, but we made it through the rest with only our water stops.  I had some Jelly Belly Sport Beans that I snacked on in the later miles, and we did good to have water and Gatorade out to drink on our water stops. 

Overall, it was not too horrible.  We finished in just under 3 hours, and had an additional 8 minutes for our bathroom break at the Embassy Suites and our water stops.  We were only terrified by dogs barking at us from a passing truck once, and we even managed to navigate a little construction area.  I only took my shoe off once to get rid of some gravel that found it's way in, and I ran the entire 18 with NO MUSIC!  I hear that you are a real runner if you run without music.

Abby, Tommy, Kim and I freezing after we finished.

Atleast that's what Tommy would have you believe.  Tommy even meet up with us when we were running over I-35, that hill is the most challenging of the whole route.  But then he was off to run with others, running much shorter distances than us.

After we were done, I went home, drank 40 oz of Gatorade, and took a three hour nap.  Josh and the girls wanted to go to the Medieval Fair, and we had to go to the grocery store too.  Why, after running 18 miles would everything I wanted and needed to do involve walking or standing?  Makes no sense to me.

I did make one mistake on Saturday.  I decided that I might need to break out the knee brace I wore on my right knee before my lateral release in 2006.  What was I thinking?  My knee hurt worse during the run than it had in any of the miles I ran up until then, and it has been KILLING me since.  I went with ice/Advil routine yesterday, and I even broke out some tape that I got in my race pack for the Fall Classic Duathon that had instructions for taping up your knee if you have runner's knee, and put that one.  I think it helped because it is less swollen and hurts about a million times less today than it did yesterday.

Abby and I hit the track at the Y this morning and did a nice slow 3 miles and then sat in the sauna for a while.  I think my knee is OK, but I'm planning on taking it easy this week in light of the fact that we are going to do 20 on Sunday.  Lord help me.


I didn't post this pic in my Rockin recap.  How cute was this?  Again, when you are on an empty train for 40 minutes at the crack of dawn on your way to a race, what else do you do but take pictures?  We had to document our pink awesomeness.  Ha.

I did get one picture of Tommy posted on my blog.   He was there the whole weekend, really.