13.1

A drive to a specialty grocery store? A drive to the beach? Drive to the doctor's office? Who knows if those actually take 13.1 miles to get to, but often we take for granted how fast our cars can get us to that distance. It doesn't seem like much. With gas prices skyrocketing, 13.1 miles can cost up to $4 in that trip. That's about a whole gallon!! Perspective.

After Insanity I made a goal to do a half-marathon. 13.1 miles...doesn't seem like that much. I started training in October, doing about 2 3-4 mile runs and then saving longer 5+ mile runs on the weekends. I didn't realize how much this was going to kick my butt until the last two weekends. The first weekend I did 9.5 miles. From training I had a 6.75 mile loop one direction of my house and a 4.88. Because I made it a loop I had cut out some of the starting distances and it was 9.5.  I cramped pretty bad between 3-4 miles (which isn't that uncommon for me), but by mile 7 I was in a groove. A lot of this route was hills and signals. I thought it cut out a lot of my time and wasn't really accurate of my true time, but I did it. After that 9.5 mile run, I was hurting. I came home, showered and slept for 2 hours. I didn't realize it would take that much out of me! Two days later my ankle was hurting pretty bad. I was limping around most of the day. The next day it was better. By Tuesday it was fine and I was able to run a smaller distance on it.

The second weekend, or last weekend, I wanted to do a longer run, but didn't want to set a course. I told Jason what streets I was going to take. He asked if I wanted to know how long that was and I said no. The run was nice. Most of it was flat hills. The most time consuming portion was the stupid signals! Seemed like they took forever! On the way back I told myself that if I got to a signal by my house and I was only at mile 8, then I would do an extra loop by my house. I didn't know how long that loop was. So sure enough, I get up to that exact signal and my phone says "8 miles" exactly. I was feeling pretty good. Even though I was SO close to home, I jaunted around for that extra 2 miles. I was pretty much jelly by mile 9, but when I got home it was exactly 10 miles and took exactly 2 hours! I was stoked! I managed to get a nasty blister underneath my toenail. The toenail is going to fall off. I just call it battle-wounds :)

My ankle hurt less than the 9.5 mile run, but we went to Disneyland on Wednesday and it kind of aggravated it. With most training scheduled it only recommends a few light runs. I had a small run on Tuesday and after Wednesday I decided to rest my ankle until race day.

(To be continued...)