What a day. I decided i would try to PR on this morning’s marathon, key word being “try”. The race started off with out and back over a mile long hilly bridge before the route settled into a stretch down the coast. 
I was doing fairly well on the first half of the race before the turnaround, averaging about 8’15” miles. That all changed once we got to the turnaround point. The first half of the race had the wind to your back, and not much sun BUT once you hit the turnaround point, the sun was beaming right down on you with no wind. Temps got up about 85 degrees, so the sun took control over the majority of the runners. Even with the water stops I could see my pace was slowing, until I had to take a break and walk around mile 7. As i was walking another runner came up beside me and told me they were hurting and wanted me to run with her. So we started up, working together over the next 3 miles and stopping when we had to. Those last 3 miles felt like they were sooooooo long. Once i realized a PR was out of the question, i concentrated on trying to get 2:00 or less. I crossed the finish line at 2:00:25 seconds. I will take that any day. But the fun was not over. My marathon training called for 22 miles today, so you guessed it, I needed to do 9 more miles. Since we had to check out of our hotel by 12, I decided to see how many miles I could get in before we had to leave and head back to the hotel. I was able to run the 5k route and got in another 3 miles. That still left another 6 miles i needed to squeak out. I decided since i passed by my parents house on the way back, I would stop by there and do the remaining 6. By the time I got to my parents, it was almost 2pm and the sun was sitting high. Besides the sun, the other issue i had was that I’m from a small town so i had to figure out how i could map out 6 miles in this little town. I decided to run up and down the main highway. One thing about a small town, they are not used to seeing runners on the street so I had to stop and walk quite a bit since cars didn’t seem to know how to react to me on the side of the road running AND i certainly didn’t want to get hit. Another thing i noticed, my hometown had ZERO crosswalks signals and the sidewalk was very limited. After stopping for a gatorade along the way i was able to finally complete the remaining 6 miles. Everything hurt, but my parents were ready. They had gone and got me something to eat and had towel ready for me to jump in the shower. 22 miles total today and I couldn’t be happier to get through them. #running #runners #marathon
TMilesAndRunning 