Last Long Run Before Taper Time! 21.5 Miles with a New Friend

Happy Easter everyone! I have had a pretty fantastic day so far, all things considered. Before I get into today, how bout a wrap up from the last time I saw you guys?

So on Thursday I said I was going to do my 20 miler Friday morning since I had the day off work. But unfortunately (or fortunately as it turned out) I woke up Friday morning feeling nauseous and hung over...even though I only had two beers the night before! I think the true cause was all of the crap that I ate throughout the day Thursday. I was having a bad day at work and I basically was consuming anything and everything that I saw...including 1.5 donuts, some leftover pasta and 3.5 huge slices of sausage and black olive pizza for dinner! So I went to bed sick & bloated, and woke up "hung over" & nauseous. I tried to wait around a bit to see if I would feel better, I even went back to sleep for a while, and eventually I decided that some sort of run was in order.

At about 2 PM I finally headed out the door, I told myself that if I was feeling good, I could try the 20 but that my first loop of 4.5 was just okay too. I only did 4.5 :) After that I decided that I needed some more rest & recovery time, so I skipped running Saturday and decided Sunday morning would be my day.

Saturday night I was on Twitter, and saw that the lovely Amanda was doing her 15 on Sunday as well. So I suggested to her that we meet up and run it together! She thought that was a good idea as well, so I started out with a 6.5 mile loop this morning at 6:45 AM and met up with her at around 8:45ish at my apartments to finish up our run.

Amanda and I had never met in person, only via our blogs and Twitter. So I think we were both kind of worried about doing such a long run with a relative stranger. I was worried that my run would be awful and I would have to walk, she had some crazy idea that I was fast...I think she knows I'm not as fast as she thought after today though :) But I was totally excited to meet her in person and also excited to have someone to distract me during this LAST long run that I had been dreading! Marathon training solo has been very challenging!

When I got done with the 6.5 mile loop, I got back to my apartment's parking lot and looked for Amanda. I chugged down some Sport Beans (good, but too hard for me to eat in motion) and some H2O. After a few minutes we found each other and headed out. I would give you a mile by mile play by play, but honestly I don't really remember anything significant about any of them up until the end because we were too busy chatting! It was for sure, hands down the easiest long run I have ever experienced.

I decided long ago that I wanted to do a bit over 20 for at least one of my long runs, so I made my solo loop this morning a mile longer than usual. I am so glad that I did this, because now I am feeling pretty confident about the full 26.2. (I also have a better idea of how tough it is actually going to be.)

The route we took was a 15 mile out and back, over the Ravenel Bridge & into Mt. Pleasant and then back. Once we were done with the bridge, we were both feeling the tiredness in our legs but it wasn't really showing too much in our pace so we kept on. At that point, I tried to resist looking at my Garmin because I knew we had roughly about 5 miles left and I was getting pretty run down. I would say that around 18.5 was when I started to hit the wall, we had 2 miles left.

But Amanda was so supportive and we just kept telling ourselves (and each other) that we could do it, that we were rockstars, and that we were sooo close to being done. This would be both of our longest runs ever! Just knowing that was enough to push both of us to the end.

Finally, my building was in sight and we started to push it (as much as we could) to get to the finish. When we stopped at 15 miles for her and 21.5 for me, we were both so thrilled that it was over, but more importantly, we were both so proud of ourselves for finishing our longest runs ever! And for finishing strong!

Here are my totals (I will spare you all of the splits):

Time:	03:54:26
Distance:	21.50 mi
Elevation Gain:	3,167 ft
Total Calories:	2,444 C

Avg Pace: 10:54 min/mi

Best Pace: 8:23 min/m

Once we stretched a bit & said our goodbyes, I headed back upstairs for a nice, cool ice bath. Then a shower. Then a lay on the floor for a really long time.

For my celebratory meal, I was craving something cheesy and not good for me! I tried to eat a banana with PB & some cantaloupe, but it just wasn't cutting it...so I woke Matt up and we headed to Bojangle's!! For those of you who are not lucky enough to have Bojangle's (it's a southern thang) you sure are missing out! I had a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit with seasoned fries and a sweet tea! I never drink sweet tea so I enjoyed the hell out of that.

Now I'm feeling pretty good and looking forward to dinner :) Hope you all have a fantastic Easter and are looking forward to making this week a good one!

Thanks Amanda for the company today, I had a really good time considering we were running an extremely long distance! Let's make it happen again soon!

Also, I am lucky enough to have some very special house guests arriving Thursday evening, one of my best friends who now lives in DC LiLu (not her real name :) and her lovely boyfriend B. We are hoping to get into some serious trouble this weekend and have a great time!

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You might have noticed I changed around the blog a bit. I kind of effed it up last night, and now I don't know why the comments are at the top of the post, but please continue to comment! At least my header looks better now...I will probably be editing this a bit more this week.