The Ceiling is in shards at my feet

Yes my blogging friends, I did it. Yesterday was the day I head butted the glass ceiling and then broke through. I hovered there with all of my long runs, maybe even left my dirty fingerprints on it, but never broke through.

Once again my husband decided that we needed to run the trail of Pocohantas Park for our long run. Once again, I questioned the wisdom. The trails are tough, they are way hillier then I need to run, but I had a fierce determination to conquer the milestone my friends.

We got ourselves up, ate our breakfast, mine was a bowl of granola and Life cereal, because not only Mikey likes it, and a few brownie bites. I know, the breakfast of champions, but I figured what the hell, the carbs would be needed.

I made 6 water bottles up of Gatorade and plain water and ice. Gathered up a bunch of GU packets, a few cliff bars and protein bars and we were off to Pocohantas.

It was cool yesterday. A bracing 48 degrees when we started, and that bodes well for me. I run way better in the cool then in the heat. We got out, I made a potty stop while Brad got his I-Pod all ready for the trek and we were off.

I had a strategy in my back pocket for this run too. I had started training for the marathon with a book about marathons written by Jeff Galloway. He recommends 2 minute walk breaks after a certain amount of mileage run to help save your legs and avoid hitting the wall at 20 miles. I told Brad I wanted to do that, I know he likes running harder then I do so I didn't expect that he would want to join me. But he did, he said he wanted to see if he did that would he be able to pick up his pace towards the end. So off we went. I remember that Galloway said as tempting as it is to not take those breaks early on, take them, you'll be thankful later that you did. So after two miles Brad said let's walk now. After two minutes we started running again, then we walked for two minutes after the two miles. We skipped our last walk break because I needed to hit the loo again during the last bit of our first almost 7 mile loop we had set up. Got back the the truck, refilled our water bottles with Gatorade, GU'd up, and off we went. This loop we vascillated between speeds, but still took our 2 minute walk breaks, but not necessarily after two miles. Sometimes we stretched it because we were on a good downhill and wanted to wait until we were finished with the uphill of that. But we did still take our breaks. We added to our second loop so we actually ran 9 miles as opposed to 7-ish. We refilled, GU'd up and we were ready for the last bit of our 20 plus miles.

It was fairly uneventful other then the fact that my legs hurt like a motherf*@$%r and I wanted to throw in the towel. We had two or so miles left and Brad said he wanted to pick up the pace, he had legs left the bastard, I told him to go on ahead and I would catch up, that I would probably need a walk break before I could finish. My last two miles were dicey. I walked/ran it, I can't say I was Speedy Gonzales, but I kept reminding myself that I had never run or walked that far before. When I realized where I was and that I was about 1000 meters or so to the parking lot where we were parked I really started to run. I ran because I knew I was close to the end, I ran because I knew I would be able to stop soon, I ran because it still hurt like a bitch when I walked. I ran until I got to Christine our black truck, and then I stopped. I felt like Forrest Gump(I'm pretty tired, I think I'll go home now) only on steriods. I was pissy that my legs hurt like they did, Brad said it looked like I was going to kill someone. I did say the first person in my path was going to get punched, and punched hard. Brad ducked back in Christine laughing at me.

Why? I dunno, I think maybe all of those endorphins went bad because it took too long to release them after all of those miles. Hmmmm, I wonder if endorphins spoil?