Twice as nice!

After weeks of trying to do a long run, 20K's or more, it happened this morning. Of course I had to pick one of the coldest days of the year, -20 with the wind chill, but it least it happened in the trails.

Two of my friends joined me at 6:45 AM and we ran through the trails with the help of Ken's trusty headlamps. The footing wasn't as bad as I expected it to be and although my two friends each took a tumble, I was fortunate enough to stay on my feet. We finished the first loop in just over an hour and then met up with the rest of our friends at 8:00 AM to do another loop.

As soon as we got to my car I split half a banana with my friend. I also had to replace my water bottles which were now frozen. We had to wait for about 5 minutes before heading off with the rest of the group. This may not seem like a long time but when you are sweating in the cold, the last thing you want to do is stand around. Once we started out on the 2nd loop I started to warm up though.

The 2nd loop was all about staying mentally tough. My main goal wasn't about just running for 12 Miles today but I also wanted to increase the amount of time I was running. I knew that the slower I went, the better it would be for my training. At the same time, though, I was getting so cold that all I kept thinking about was getting home as fast as I could. I had visions of drinking a cup of hot chocolate and was imagining how nice it was going to be to have a hot shower.

Just as we headed towards our cars, I realized that I was going to be about 1 mile short of what I wanted to run today. Thankfully one of my closest friends also wanted to run a little longer so we both decided to run a little longer until the goal was met. It would have been easy for me to be satisfied with doing the 2 loops and I could have justified it by saying that the trail run was harder than doing it on the roads. In the end, though, I wouldn't have satisfied myself so I was happy and proud that I decided to keep going.

This was the longest run I've been able to do since my race in October and it will help with my confidence as my runs increase in time to over 3 hours or more.

AFTERNOON UPDATE

Since we are supposed to be getting a large amount of snow over the next 24 hours, I decided to do another run this afternoon. I've been slowly trying to increase my weekly mileage and I was about 5 miles off from last week (43 miles). Being as competitive as I am, I wasn't going to let the day go by without making sure that my weekly mileage was where it needed to be. Last week I went out for 2 runs on my birthday and because of my schedule at work and when I watch my 2 boys, getting two runs in from time to time will have to be something that I'll have to do to get my mileage up.

The 5 mile run was at a nice slow pace. I realized that the more running I can get my body accustomed to, the better it will be for my race in the spring.

By the time I had finished I had run a total of 17 Miles (27 K's), 3 hours and burned over 2,000 calories (the best part....LOL)