20 miles

This year I got to "celebrate" Easter by running 20 miles.

I've been dreading this run for pretty much the entirety of my training, despite knowing that a full marathon is even longer.  I geared up with a bunch of jelly beans, new socks, and a long sleeve shirt to keep from freezing once the sun went down.

Due to other festivities, I didn't start running until 5:30pm which kinda sucked because that meant I'd be finishing in the dark.  Aside from that, I felt ready to go.  I decided to do a long, flat run at a reasonable pace.  I wore my new knee brace for the first time which helped immensely.  I am happy to report that I didn't have any severe knee pain through the whole run!

The run felt slow and steady.  It seemed to take forever to reach the halfway point which was a bit frustrating, but I didn't feel overly tired...mostly just bored.  The sun was already beginning to lower in the sky by the time I was turning around.  The second half of the run was straight into the wind, yet again.  I was smart this time and took gloves with me to avoid the cold hands syndrome.

It was a weird feeling this time around.  I never really felt sore or super tired.  I mostly just wanted not to be running anymore, haha.  The last 30 minutes of the run were in complete darkness.  I had blinky LEDs on, but no headlamp unfortunately, so I just shuffled along the bike path trying to follow the edge as closely as possible.  The run took about 3 hours and my mile pace was just shy of a 9 min/mile pace the whole time which made me extremely happy.

At no point did I stop, even to eat the jelly beans.  I consumed a pack before, one around mile 11, and the final one around mile 16.  The caffeine content of the final pack didn't seem to make too much of a difference, but I definitely felt more energetic after eating a pack of sugar pellets, hah.

I felt pretty good by the time I got home and felt like I could have kept on going!

Overall this was probably one of my best runs, mostly just because of the boost of confidence it gave me.  I feel like running 20 miles is a great indication that I can tack on another 6.  I felt like I could keep going and managed to keep a pretty great pace for 3 hours straight.

Now begins the fun part - the taper!!