Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Week Twenty: Saturday

Saturday was the big 20 mile extravaganza. I signed up with Brother of Fat Guy and was a little nervous about it. The Saturday before we did 18 miles slowly and painfully. This time I prepared like I had before other long runs: Spaghetti the night before, as much rest as possible, Clif Bar (I switched to a Power bar just to mix things up a bit) in the morning for breakfast and a 20 oz. Gatorade and some water.

We got there a little after 7am, which was when registration started. They were running a little late, so the race did not get started until 8:15is, which meant a lot of waiting around. Not a big deal, but at that point I just wanted to go.

We got off to a good start. We let the fast folks do there thing and there seemed to be the perfect amount of people so that in the middle everyone was spread out. I was very conscious not to run to fast, which was a lot easier because I was wearing my watch. The route had us running about 5 miles to Bald Eagle Lake and then twice around the lake. In the run up to the lake, we were very steady, keeping about a little less than 11 minute milt pace. We were passing people along the way, but when we hit the route around the lake, it opened up even more because the people that were running the 10K dropped off at that point.

Both Brother of Fat Guy and I had to go potty really bad at around this point. I wasn't paying attention to megaphone dude so I had no idea where to go pee. We finally came upon a porta potty and waited for that to open up. This screwed up our time a little bit but we were reinvigorated after that.

I finally was unable to run any more between mile 14 and 15 I think. We ended up walking for a while and then running. We ran almost all of mile 17 and then we picked up a little before mile 19 started. When we hit the last stretch I was able to muster up enough strength to start sprinting and taunting my brother at the same time.

When it was all said and done, we did 20 miles in 3 hours 47 minutes. This was 13 minutes faster than I had hoped to finish in and like 12 minutes faster than we did 18 miles. I managed to place 140 out of 157.

All in all a very good run, both physically and mentally. My confidence is back. I am a little concerned about how my feet started doing weird things at mile 15. Everything seems to be healed up for the most part.

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