6 miles into this Saturday's 8-mile long run I reached a major milestone in my base building program: 200 miles. It's such a profound accomplishment that passed by me with little acknowledgement. I've been a week behind in my logging of miles, so I didn't realize at that time that I was hitting such a huge statistic. My run wasn't the best, either. I was feeling really fatigued, which was odd because it was a low-mileage week. The previous two weeks I hadn't run 4 days/week but 3, so I wonder whether getting back into the 4 days/week did it. It also could have been the fact that I was running on an empty stomach, which is something I rarely do, and without fluids (which spurred a realization-- it's time to buy a water belt!). Little did I know that as I hit that 6 miles, likely mentally toughening myself to continue on, those tired legs had officially run 200 miles. So cool. Such a blessing. Another accomplishment in my marathon-training preparation.
I've been remiss in blogging as much as I thought that I would. My program has been going fine, and I have had some cool running moments in the past few weeks. I supported James in his first ultra marathon, which resulted in his impressive completion of 101 miles in 24 hours. Personally I ran/walked 16.8 of those miles with him, resulting in my highest mileage in a single day. I reconnected with two high school friends on long runs. My family and friends have been really interested, talking to me often about the feat that I am going to be accomplishing. It's been a cool few weeks. Now if I could just get some literally cool weeks, I'd feel so much better about these training runs!
2 more weeks of this base building program, and then I am giving my mind, body and spirit a much deserved 2 week hiatus from running. That's time to gear up for official training, and then it's 18 weeks to 26.2.
