I made it...

21.26 miles that is in 3:41:40, it took me 3 tries but I did it today.

I won't say it was easy, in fact I pushed through more pain than I ever thought I would. I also never would have made it without the support of my lovely Wife. She gets up early on her day off and drives out and meets me at the 13 mile mark and takes all my pods and refills them with water and Gatorade for me. I am only able to carry 46 ozs of fluid so if she didn't do this for me there is no way I could go that far. And then to top it off when I get home she is making me a nice breakfast and boy am I hungry. My HRM says that I burned over 4600 calories for that run... wow.

I was good through mile 18 at that point I told my body "Just a little more than a 5k to go." At 18.5 miles my body said "hey this is where you got to last week, we could stop and walk a little" My reply was "Yeah thats what you told me last week and you lied you wouldn't start running again.

At mile 19 my body said " hey look 19 miles done you could stop here thats farther than last week" my reply " Ummmmm yeah we are doing 21. 19.75 miles my body said "oh come on look you have done 19.75 miles thats a lot" My reply was "yeah and so a mile and a half is just a little drop in the bucket.

At mile 20 my body really protested "look you just made to the farthest point you could please, please stop here." at that point I took my headphones out and said "shut the heck up you are going the full distance and that is all there is to it"

Fortunately my body listened to me or I quit listening, when I came around that last corner and saw the end of the last block I sped up. I don't think it was a big speed burst but it was more speed. When I got to the end I hurt but you know what not anymore than on any of my other long runs and as I write this the soreness is slowly fading but the knowledge that I did it is still with me.

It was important for me to make this distance today not because it was my third try but because last year this very weekend. The last one in Sep Dennis and I had a goal to run to Sutter and back on the bike path 9.2 miles. When we set that goal we were only running 3.5 miles at a time so it was ambitious but we made it. I wanted today the anniversary of that date to be the day I did the 21.26 and it was.