Another 20 miles

I am always late with my posts...actually I am doing prettty good this week; trying to catch up since????

Last Sunday was our sencond 20 miles long run. Marc and I switched to Sunday instead of Saturday because Mark and his wife travelled to Michigan with their church members to help build houses for the flood victims. Knowing how hard it is to run a long mileage alone I decided not to run with our running group on Saturday but to run with Marc so he would not run 20 miles by himself.

We met at 6 am at the prairie path in Elmhurst(about 15 minutes drive from my house), which is my running club meeting point on Saturdays. It was still dark out and since most people were still sleeping, with the exceptions of a few runners like ourselves. It was quite nice as far as the weather goes; with a nice breaze, around 65 degrees. We made sure to carry our water belts to keep us hidrated during this long run. We took off at exactly 6am. The nice thing about this path is that it's most wooded area with a lot of shade and several water fountain along the way. Mark was very sore from working on constrution previous 2 days so this 20 miles would quite challenging for him. As for me, my previous run was a 10 miles on Friday, so I was feeling rested but again, 20 miles is a very hard and for some reason my biggest challenge.

The weather could not have been better that day. Our morning started with mild temperature. It was a blessing to have such a perfect morning when you have such a long mileage in front on you. We kept running at our usual pace of 9:00 minutes per mile and was doing quite good until we reached mile 13. My legs started feeling heavier and heavier by the minute.. so was Mark... but we kept going trying to ignore the discomfort and just do what we usually do at times like this: right foot, left foot, left foot, right foot..... trying to keep your mind off the distance yet to reach and just keeping running until the end. We stoped once to use the port-a johns which slowed us down a little bit at the same time it was good; we had time to stretch a bit before continuing. We completed our 20 miles with an overall pace of 9:10 quite slow actually. Well, we all have bad and good days and this was one of those days. It's ok with me at this point. I am glad this was our last 20 mile until race day... from now until then is "tapper time".