Running is Our Life

I feel like running has officially taken over our blog! Which is fine because it's not like we have a whole lot else going on right now. Yesterday was our 14 mile run. It was the furthest I've run since I ran 15 with Tony on Thanksgiving in 2005 and was out of commission for a few weeks after that because my knees weren't ready for it. Our 14 went really well though. It didn't seem that much longer than the 12 we did the week before. We also held a faster pace (8:23 per mile) than the 12 mile run (8:30 per mile). This time we started at an area called Turkey Mountain.

It's part of the Riverside trails that we normally do our long runs on, but it's more hilly and it starts off of on the west side of the river which makes it more quite and scenic to start and end. Minus is that it's hilly at the end.

We tried a different kind of gel this time. It's called Hammer Gel, raspberry flavor. I liked this a lot better than the GU I had last time. It just seemed not quite so runny or something. We also brought along the iPod shuffles so we had some music to listen to when we didn't feel like talking. So we'd do a few miles with music, few without. So it kind of broke up the run. We were smarter about hiding our water bottle and it was there when we ran back by...plus there weren't that many people out on the trails yesterday, so that helped too. No one saw us hide it! Here's a picture of me after our run. Looking good with the red, sweaty face, but happy to be done!

After the run, we came home and crashed for the rest of the day. We made a home-made pizza for dinner, with the Sofo's pizza sauce we got in Ohio, and some breadsticks. Then to reward ourselves even more, we went to Braums and got frozen yogurt mixes (with Heath bar pieces and Reese's)...yum! Braums has the best frozen yogurt! We were pretty worn out though and went to bed around 10 last night.

The good thing is, I feel like I'm adjusting to running these longer distances much better than I thought I would. It's nice to have a plan and know what's coming, so I can mentally prepare! I hope I still feel the same way when we get into the 16, 18, 20 mile long runs in two weeks. Our fourth week doesn't have a long run or speed workout. It's supposed to be like a recovery week. We'll be 25% done with training after next week!