20 miles

Saturday was my first 20 miler for this training cycle. (Technically it was my 2nd, because I only had 12 weeks to train but I skipped that first one.)

Amy said she was willing to run the first 10 miles with me, but we had to start early.  Heather said she would run the 2nd 10 miles with me after she got off work.


6:59 I got a text from Amy.
"Sorry, I'm not going to make it"

PUNK!

I would have turned over and gone back to sleep but I KNOW that if I don't do a long run like this first thing in the morning there is a 90% chance that it won't happen at all.

So I dragged my butt out of bed and headed over to South Sound Running.

My Garmin died within a mile.

I saw a Doe and her twin fawns!

Runkeeper has earned my loathing by basically making up my distance and pace information and then announcing it every 5 minutes.

Pandora has an extremely liberal idea of what constitutes "fitness pop"
(That was after I tried to access my running playlist from Spotify.)

At about 8:30 I realized I wasn't going to make it back to the store at the time I told Heather to meet me for the 2nd loop so I stopped and texted her.

It turned out to be a moot point because she had a super busy night at the hospital and felt like death warmed over...10 miles was not in her immediate future.

By this time I felt like stabbing my phone.

HOW do people run with those things!?  It was constantly beeping and opening random apps while I ran even after I locked the screen!

As luck would have it my friend Mike was looking for a running buddy and found out that I was running that morning.  We don't actually run at the same pace at all, but by that time I didn't even care about my pace.  After all I had no idea what was even running when he called!

Mike saved the day and met me at SSR for my last 10 miles.  We split the difference in our paces.  He ran a little bit faster than normal and I ran a little bit slower and averaged 9:15 per mile.

That last 10 miles were SO much nicer than the first.