Marathon Training Week Nineteen--MILE 20

We made it!! And, while things were a little rough immediately following the run, we were functioning enough to clean the house for our friends staying with us that night, go over to my parents to celebrate my mom's birthday and then hang out with some friends later last night at our house. So, that's fun because we're hoping to not to so dead after the marathon that we can't enjoy our "vacation" to Chicago, haha!

I am so glad Saturday's run is behind us, because I was anxious about it for the last couple of days. It started out fine and we were both cruising along around race pace. Then, it was started getting rough for both of us right around mile 17 or so, as we started getting hungry and thirsty and tired, but we both finished the run at a respectable time--neither of us were at our race pace for the whole time, but we weren't too far off. I think I was about 30 seconds off my race pace on average, and Landon was a little closer to his race pace time--it took me right around 3 hours and 51 minutes and took Landon a little over 3 hours. It was hard but not TOO much harder than our 16 and 18 mile runs, so that was encouraging. Somehow, running 3 hours and running 4 hours doesn't feel all that different...they all just start feeling really long. :) Here's to hoping that five hours won't feel too much longer...I can always dream, right? :)

The first half marathon or so today was fine and we were both at our race pace, or pretty darn close. So, we're hoping that on the day of the marathon, the pace groups, the cooler weather, the drink/food stations, the fans, the fact that it's the actual marathon, the fact that we'll ease up on miles some and get some rest over the next 3 weeks, the fact that we won't have play practice until 11:30pm the night before and the excitement of race day, will help us to keep our pace and stay with our pace groups the whole way.

It's still weird to me to think that we actually ran 20 miles; that's not something I ever imagined doing. And, thankfully, that's the longest mileage we'll have to run in our training program--we have 12 miles next Saturday, 8 the week after and then we leave for Chicago!!