13 miles to go

As you may know I started my marathon training January 1st for the Wisconsin Marathon May 4th, so I am currently at the end of week 4 training.  For the past few weeks my mileage has been hovering around 24 miles or so, but this week I got to up the mileage.  On Saturday I had a 6 mile race pace run on the schedule.  I went out by myself with a plan to stay around a 9:30, I have a really hard time achieving my "normal" race pace of about a 9 minute mile.  So the plan was to go out to Wright Road and just run the neighborhoods and check out some houses.  Running alone is never ideal, but I seemed to find my groove around the 3.3 mile mark, and started to kill it.  I ran the next 3 miles around an 8:53 pace, which is pretty fast for me.  Another reason I feared my 13 miler today.  By 7pm on Saturday my legs were already feeling sore.  I suppose tiring your legs out the day before a long run is actually the plan so you are used to running on tired legs, but I was not thrilled about it. 

This morning I decided I better suck it up, and go meet my friends at ASR.  I am so thankful that I did.  Although the plan was the hills in Oakhill Cemetery and back to ASR for 8 miles.  I was running with Dustyn, and we both decided we were not feeling the hills, so we made our way out of the cemetery and down to Riverside to run.  We did have one big hill down there, but I didn't mind too much.  We made our way back towards downtown on the path and headed towards the bus station for a little bit of extra mileage.  I'm glad I had someone to run with and keep me going.  On our way down Jackson we saw Maria and Andrea on their way out for more miles, they were the only other ones doing more than 8 miles, I asked where they were going, and decided to jump in with them.  I ran miles 8, 9, and half of 10 with them, until my turnaround point.  Maria joked that I might as well just keep going with them for 17.  I said no thanks and started to make my way back. When I hit mile 11 I felt a small surge of confidence, I COULD do this.  I had been contemplating with myself scaling back to the intermediate mileage for the week, which was 11.  At mile 12 I knew I could do it.  My ankle felt tweaked but it didn't matter I was going to run 13.1 miles in less time than my first half marathon.  This may not feel like a huge deal, but it is to me, I am about 5 minutes from being a sub 2 half marathon, which is one of my goals for this year. 

I can't express how awesome it feels knowing that I had an almost 20 mile weekend, and I feel great!  I can't wait to keep going.  Thanks so much to my running and non-running friends for their support.  13.36 down, 12.84 to go :o)