Week 10: 11 miles is a lot of miles.

So I'm not sure why it took me so long to recap yesterday's training.

Oh sure, yesterday was kind of busy- I had a friend in town (hi Mindy!) that I had to take to the airport, and then I drove to Irvine to go see John Mayer (no, no Jennifer Anniston sightings) at Verizon Wireless. (Big thanks to Tracy Becker and the Live Nation digital folks for the tickets!) Today at work was nutty, so there was no time to dash off a quick recap. So all that makes sense.

But I'll admit that I had some time right after I got done running, before I took Mindy to the airport. But let's be honest, right about then, all I really wanted to do was sit on the couch and kind of revel/wallow in the knowledge that I had just run 11 FREAKING MILES.

Yes, that's right folks. 11 MILES. And I am not lying, or stretching the truth by telling you that 11 miles is a long way. Oh sure, going 60 miles an hour down the freeway, 11 miles is a drop in the bucket. But 11 miles when you're running them is quite a long way. According to my really cool GPS watch (on loan from the fabulous Jen Butler,) I burned 1,097 calories. Yeah, that's a lot of calories. It took a little over 2 hours, and I will admit that I hit a little rough patch at mile 7.5.

I was cruising along for the first 7.5 miles. We ran about 2 miles along the beach, hit a water stop, turned up San Vicente and ran all the way to Brentwood to water stop #2 (if you'll remember my blog from 2 weeks ago, this was the stretch where I got sidelined by the banana I had for breakfast.) I am happy to report I made it all the way there feeling great this week. That was about 5 miles into the run. Then we did a loop around the Brentwood Country Club Golf Course, back to the water stop, which was about a 2 mile loop. Well, I got to the water stop at the beginning of my group- we always wait for everyone else to catch up before starting off again. I SHOULD have continued moving, stretching, but I didn't. I drank some water and chatted- didn't stretch like I should have been. Well, when we started up again, I immediately felt pain in my left hamstring. It was pretty bad- there were a few minutes there where I wasn't sure if I would be able to keep going. But I slowed down and walked it out, pausing to stretch quite often, and slowly I worked the pain out and was able to catch up to my group at the next water stop (they had all passed me by this point.) We continued on back to the civic center all together- 11 miles down!

Usually I feel like I could keep going- that I'm glad to be done but I've got a little bit left in me. Not so much this time. I was completely ready to be done, but really proud of myself for hanging in there and getting it done.

Now if I can just get through the 13 miles next week! Can you believe it?!?! Pretty much running 1/2 a marathon next week! Stay tuned...