10 miles!

10 miles

Start: 7:55 a.m. Finish: 10:22 a.m.

Total: 2:27 hours

I started off feeling good except for my wobbly knee and this caused me to not be so great mentally. I kept thinking that my knee was going to wobble out of place and I was going to be stuck somewhere unable to walk. It sounds cheesy but I started up a mantra "I am strong, my body is strong" to bring the focus to something positive. Hey, if mantras work for Kara Goucher maybe they will work for me! About 2 miles into the run I arrived to a really beautiful place in the woods. There were mini fluff balls floating in the breeze and the light was filtering through the trees and dancing on the stream. It looked like a Fairytail Forest and I was content to drink it all in.

Let me clear up any confusion here. I say that I run on "trails" but it is actually a myriad of paved paths that extend for miles in the woods. I would run on dirt paths in the middle of nowhere but I fear that I may become lost. I am not that confident in my navigational abilities and the "map" on my GPS is meerly a line on a screen. Right now the park suits me just fine and I am usually passed by other people on my run.

After miles I finally came to the end of a trail and ended up running on a busy road with no shoulder. This seemed to break up the monotony of the run but after a half mile I was thrilled to be in the woods again.

On a side note, I am in love with my strawberry banana GU. I feel like a GU addict because I crave its sugary goodness and the boost of energy that it brings. I squeeze out every sweet sticky drop!

I was a tad bit annoyed that I stopped the Garmin for a potty break (there is a decent porta john) in the parking lot of one of the trail heads) and I forgot to restart it which messed up my mileage. Luckily, I knew where I had turned around last week at 4:50 miles and was able to deduce that my watch was about .20 miles off. Furthermore, the battery on the Garmin began to die around mile 7 but ended up having enough juice to keep going for the remainder of the run. The face read "low battery enter". It took me about 5 minutes until I realized that I had to press the enter button to clear the message. Duh!

Serious Closing Message:

Up until last weeks run my long runs were something of a lark. I mean, I had my challenges, we all remember "Poncho Princess", but something changes when your mileage increases and you are out there running for hours. Let's face it, at 15 minute miles I was shuffling for almost 2:50 hours today! I don't care how slow I am going, that's a long time. The mental part becomes as hard as the physical part. It is challenging in the beginning to know that I will be out there for such a time, and towards the end I don't even feel my body (which is kinda cool and weird at the same time). There are highs and lows on every run now. I still love running and I have become much more serious about the whole endever. I ran 10 miles today, I am a runner