20 miles and headed downhill!

Last Saturday Ryan, Lauren and I braved the cold, the rain and the wind to complete our last long run of the training season before the marathon. Tomorrow we will run 12 miles and then the next week, only 6. Supposedly, if you can run 20 miles, you can run 26. We shall see about that. Lauren's sister will be running a few miles with us of the course and as Lauren has run a couple of marathons already, I believe her when she says that we'll be need some encouragment in those last miles. I've asked Jay and my mom to run a few miles with us too because I think it would be fun to have someone else to carry the conversation. Lauren and I talk just about the whole time we run but last week, as we found out, after about 3 hours of running, we'd both run out of things to talk about. In order to take our minds off the last two miles we had to brainstorm topics to talk about so that we wouldn't think about how cold it was getting and how tired our legs were. We finished the 20 miles in just over 3.5 hours so if we run about the same on race day we should finish in around 4.5 hours; that's a whole morning of running. I'd better not think on that too long because it seems crazier and crazier the more I imagine race day.

As we are now finishing up our training, we are also nearing the deadline for fundraising. I'm very close to my goal, which is a really good thing! The deadline for donations is March 31st so if you were thinking about donating, now's the time! The fundraising link is at the top of the blog so scoot on up to the top of the page and click your way over to the fundraising page.

Thanks to all of you who have already donated! We're almost there!!!!!

18! We're almost there!

This past weekend we ran our next to longest run before we actually run the marathon. My training partner Lauren and I ran Sunday afternoon in the rain and at the end we were both surprised by how not terrible we felt. There have been several training runs where we have both felt pretty miserable at the end, but this wasn't one of them.

We trekked through muddy water puddles for just over 3 hours to complete our long run for the week. Our shoes went from dry to damp to drenched to soggy and back to semi-dry again, when we would then inevitably hit another unavoidable puddle.

The first hour of the run yesterday went by very quickly because I talked for the entire hour telling Lauren about the book Three Cups of Tea. I'm guessing it took me an hour to tell her about it because I didn't leave out any details and because I could only get out a few sentences before I had to work to keep my breathing normal. We've decided that maybe we should both try to finish a book before the marathon so we can have 2 hours worth of talking material for the run.

When we finished the run Ryan met us at base and had recovery foods for us to eat while we walked around to stretch out our legs. I really think it's the camaraderie that I enjoy so much about the training. It's fun to get to visit with someone for three hours straight - a pretty captive audience I'd say.

Anywho, just wanted to write to touch base and let everyone know that we're still running.

Don't forget to donate if you had planned on it. If you hadn't planned on it, plan on it :)

(Fundraising link at the top of the blog)