"It" finally happened today!

After a series of great runs I finally had a "clunker" today. I'm not sure if it was the weather, the time of day, my body just being worn down or a combination of all of these, but my run today was terrible.

Because I'm watching my two boys this weekend, I had to do my LSD (long slow distance) run this afternoon. My goal was to do 25K and I wanted to time it so I could pick up my son from his school at 2:30. Initially, I thought I was going to have to leave my house around 12:00 which would have given me plenty of time to do my 25K and then pick up my son.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to start my run until just after 12:30, so finishing 25K in 2 hours (which I could do if it was a race) was not going to happen.
I decided to just run for 2 hours at a comfortable pace and see how many K's I could bang out.
For most of the run things were going well although I think I was going a little too fast at times. I also decided not to do too many stops along the way so instead of 20 minutes of running and 1 minute of walking I simple paused for a few seconds here and there with no set schedule to follow. Usually I would walk through intersections, drink my water or e-load for a few seconds and then keep on going.
This turned out to be a big mistake as I paid for this later on in the run.
I also decided midway through my run, to change my running route. I wanted to do 2, 12K loops but knowing that I wouldn't be able to time this right, I decided to just stretch out my route a little longer.
I don't think the fatigue set in until the last 5K of my run when all I could think about was getting home. I had to stop about 3 times during this process to collect myself but managed to keep going. I found this to be more mentally draining than anything else and I found it very tough to keep focused.
When my run was over and I looked to see how far I went (22.5K) I thought to myself that this was the hardest 2HR run I've had in a long time.
I think it's important to listen to your body and mine was obviously saying that I need to take a few days off. When I looked to see my mileage for the week (over 100) it was clear to me that time off is what I need right now.
With my marathon only a few weeks away, now is not the time to become mentally drained.
As poor as this run was, I'm glad that I finished it and will use this as an example of how to work through tough runs when I run my marathon in May!