17 miles

“Pain is weakness leaving the body.”

I told myself this at mile 14. It wasn’t encouraging to my aching body. Nevertheless, I completed 17 miles. I ran 5 of those miles, however, with a full bladder. Why? Because the first bathrooms that I pass on my run were locked. I have no idea why. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen them closed, and of course it was the first time I really had to use them. Thankfully, I made it to the second set of bathrooms, 5 miles later, without any accidents.

Including bathroom/drink breaks, my pace was pretty much exactly the same pace at which I ran my 14-mile-run. Although it’s nice to know I’m not slowing down as the miles keep building, I really would like to see myself getting faster. I’m praying that the cool weather coming this fall will somehow impact my pace, but I have a hard time trusting in temperature alone to get me across the finish line under 6 hours…

Dilemma. Yes, I can switch from the marathon to the half-marathon. And I don’t even have to decide until October. But, it makes sense (at least to me), that I should try to decide sooner, so I can train accordingly.

The Hammer HEED was great. Lemon-Lime tasted completely different from Gatorade’s Limon-Lime or Limon-Lime Sports Beans, but it seemed to do its job and definitly has a conservative amount of sweetness to it.

On a side note–school starts again Wednesday, and I move into the dorm on Saturday. Class work load might be the sole determinator of whether I drop down to the Half. School definitly should come first. Theoretically, I have time to both study and train. The one difficulty, though, is having the disipline to do both with 100% effort. But such is life, I suppose.

Update: ITBS

Apparently, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I’m sure you already figured that out. The iliotibial band does NOT run from the hip to the inside of the knee, as I inaccurately asserted in a previous post, but it runs down the outside of the leg to the outside of the knee. (Although I still think I saw “inside” in some article I was reading…)

Therefore, I have no idea why my upper leg randomly feels tight at times. I’m still doing as much stretching as possible, but I still don’t do enough.

The 14-mile long run went well. I need to start deciding when I’ll be stopping at aid stations and then mimic the same conditions on long runs (only 4 ubber-long ones left!). Yesterday I bought two single-serving pouches of Hammer HEED, the energy drink mix that will be used at the race. I normally use regular Gatorade powder (cheeper), but I decided that I needed to at least try this new stuff. And you never know–I might like it better.

Oops. I think it’s time for an update.

My monthly mileage for June didn’t come out like it should have, but I have good excuses.

The first week I took completely off from running because of my knee. The second week consisted of one slow 2.4 mile run. My cousins came for a visit, meaning that I didn’t have time, and when I did have time I was dead tired. But that doesn’t really bother me, because I knew my knee was still healing, and we were doing tons of sightseeing on the side. Visiting relatives left on the third week, meaning–freedom! I only accomplished two runs of 2.4 miles (and a short run-walk day), however, because my knee still felt “weird,” and I didn’t want to undo the healing that I had been patiently waiting for. I finished off the month with an addition 10.8 miles relatively evenly dispersed. My longest run of the month was my 3.1 miles that I accomplished yesterday, and my knee was okay. Yay!

I found quite a few supposedly good running stores in my area of NC, so I’ll be visiting one of those right away when I get there in three weeks.

For now, I’ll just be building up weekly mileage by the 10% rule and trying to create a “long” run as well.