And 9 more to go

Sunday marked the beginning of a new week and a new record.  I ran 17 very long miles and if you don't think that's far, well, to me, it was never ending.  I think it was a combination of not running the long run last week and having a head cold.  The first 8 miles were going well, right at the pace we usually go, chatting, the regular running routine.  I was really holding out until mile 8 before I ate any gummi bears, because I didn't want to get too used to them too early.  Along with the gummies, I brought a belvita soft cookie, which proved to be fairly hard to eat, while I was literally on the run.  Since we were running low on water, we stopped to refill our bottles, and I'm pretty sure that's when everything became an issue.  I managed to push through miles 9 and 10 fairly well, didn't loose too much speed.  But suddenly at mile 12, I hit it.  Call it whatever you want, the wall, the blerch, exhaustion, whatever, but I hit it hard.  Suddenly those last 5 miles seemed to stretch on forever.  I fell back from the two I was running with and dropped my pace down to around an 11/11:30 minute mile.  Considering we've been training at around a 10, that's a big drop.  Especially since I made 15 just two weeks ago, coming in at an average of 10:14.  We stopped again for waters at mile 15, and by then I was seriously contemplating just walking the last two miles.  Everything hurt, more than it usually does.  My legs were burning from the toes to the hips. I did end up walking for a minute between more than a few miles overall, which is something I normally try hard to avoid.  Needless to say, I had the worst run I've had in a long time.  It was one of those runs that challenges everything you think about wanting to run a marathon and makes you seriously consider giving up.  Even with the encouragement from my running partners and later from Ryan, I was pretty doubtful that I wanted to keep this up.  But, as a new day dawned and I spent 6 hours sitting in a professional development on writing, I knew I had to keep going.  There's only 69 days left before the marathon.  If I can make it through these last days and finish that marathon, I'll never have to worry about it again, unless I want to.  If I give up now, I'll always have that in the back of my mind.  What kind of example would I be setting for my students, if I was telling them to never quit when I had done just that?  So, next weekend, I'll be back out there, doing a shorter long run, and the weekend after that, I'll be out there doing 20 miles.  And once you get through 20, what's 6.2 more really?

Here's my splits and overall from yesterday. If you go and check out my connect, let me explain something real quick. The 14 something split is from when we actually stopped to wait for someone to get the water, instead of jogging on, like we did for the first water break.  When I said I slowed down to an 11 something pace, I wasn't kidding.  But to me, the 11 pace felt like a 15.  That shows how bad it really was.