27 miles 7/31/2010

Today, I was only supposed to run 24 miles.

A few weeks ago, I tweaked my schedule so that I would run 24 this weekend and 27 the following.

Today, was going to be a cool day, high of 72. Perfect running conditions.

I parked on Thurman, almost 1 mile away from the gates of Leif Erickson. I ran up to the gates and up to Wildwood via Wild Cherry. I had forgotten how steep Wild Cherry is and walked some, didn't want to trash my legs already. I took a left on Wildwood, ran .30 past Birch, ran back up and past Wild Cherry all the way to Firelane 1, turned around. A little past this, I hear someone call out "Are you Jeannie?" I am thinking, oh no, this can't be good. He asked me if I was one of his Facebook friends. I couldn't recall his name at first, but a moment later I did. I didn't recognize him because of my flaw. We made small talk and then I ran off. He caught up with me about a 1/2 mile later, scaring me, but not on purpose. He only asked how far I was going today. We talked some more, but he was running faster than I normally do and I was feeling dizzy running behind him. After chatting for a short while, I said goodbye. I ran .30 past Birch, turned around and went back down Wild Cherry, eating my first 1/2 of my PBJ sandwich. I ran to my car, which was at mile 12, filled up my camelback and grabbed another sandwich. I ran up to Leif again and calculated that I would need to turn around at mile 18. Well blame it on Rhianna's song S.O.S. as I now was using my IPOD. I thought, "you know I am feeling really good" All my other runs, I felt like crap, but today was different and who knows what next weekend would be like. I would now just have to go 1 1/2 miles more. So I went for it. And besides, being on Leif, there is only one way back, you turn around and go back. So an out and back was perfect. Strangely, when I got to 19.5 miles, I kid you not, it was right in front of the landslide which was blocked off to keep people out. I turned around and was starting to feel it. But it wasn't until mile 21.5 that things really started to hurt and my moments of feeling good didn't last very long. But, I persevered, hardly walked. I would purposely play a favorite song more than once and said just run to the end of the song. Or I got excited when I saw that I was 2 3/4 miles away from the start. I did things like that. Oh and believe it or not, my attitude improved when I smiled at people, even at mile 24. At 26.17 miles, I was so happy about having ran another marathon and just as 26.20 came, Marilyn Manson's song the Beautiful People came on. Now, a few months prior, I would have changed the song, but for whatever reason, I actually like the song now. I thought that I would walk from 26.20 to 27.00, but I thought walking .80 would be too boring. So, I ran it all the way back to the car.

It's now hours later and I feel better today than I did last week at only 22 miles.