¡Ándale! ¡Ándale!

Today we hit what I consider a milestone for our marathon training plan- we did the 12 mile run.  And it was a very good run.

The 10 mile run was pretty good- I thought it was crap until it was over.  But we had a great pace and felt good after so chalked it up as doing alright.  Then the "step back" week came and we only had a 7 mile for our Saturday run... and it was total crap.  I woke up drained and just never got into stride.  I was cursing Dan for pushing me to try to keep our normal pace and was irritated with myself; I mean how can I think that I will run 26.2 miles if a little 7 mile run felt so crappy? (to be fair, it was freakin hot out last Saturday morning and my running playlist had accidently been deleted so my music was completely off... those little things matter!)

So this week I was determined to get to bed on time, get up earlier around 5:45am to beat the heat a little bit more and have time to eat something, and not be wimp.  But I was also a little nervous that I would feel like crap again.  Saturday morning came, total downpour thunderstorm.  I went back to bed and slept in until the luxurious hour of 8:30am. Saturday night- back to an early bedtime.

This morning, I woke us up at the charming time of 5:40am... "We HAVE to get up NOW or our run will be CRAP!" was the alarm for Dan.  I then discovered that we were out of English muffins, ok, then toast... nope, out of bread (Sunday mornings are the worst for eating in our house) and for good measure no bananas either... ok then, a couple fist fulls of Cheerios and a bit of Gatorade.  We still were too slow out the door for my preference but we were on the path by 6:40am to start our run.

Started out ok.  Proceeded to feel really good.  Realized at some point as we were running south and the wind was whipping my hair into my face that on the trip back we were going to be against the wind. And then all of a sudden we at Navy Pier and it was time to turn back.  Holy wow was the wind horrible on the way back!  It was some tough stuff and a tiny bit of me thought "great, this is going to kill my awesome feeling run."  But I stuffed that little nagging thought into the back of my mind and focused on the path in front of me and the beat from the music. 

Before I knew it we were past North Ave beach and at Fullerton.  So there was much less in front than behind and we just stayed in our stride.  The last couple of miles I focused on trying to not wimp out like I did last week and to push it with the tunes of Weezer keeping me going.  Finally we were done.  And this run, although tough, felt so awesome. 

As we turned off the path and started walking to the car, Dan said "Um honey we did that in 99 mins."  So both of us were a little fuzzy trying to think through the mental math and then this total stranger comes up to us and says "Do you guys know what pace you were running at? I was trying to keep up with you guys to push myself."  Um, what!  So we are still not sure what the pace is so say "Well we ran 12 miles at a total of 99 minutes... so maybe 8 min 30 sec mile average?"  And he goes "Oh! you were doing 12 miles!" Then we all said, have a good day and went on our separate directions.  Dan remembers passing the guy around Fullerton... and for the record he was fit.  So I will take that as compliment! 

And our pace? It was a 8m 17s mile average.  That is way beyond the pace we are targeting for the marathon.  And well over a minute a mile faster than we were doing last year.  Yay!

We then celebrated our awesome run with a big breakfast at a sidewalk cafe with the doggies at our feet.

{Speedy Gonzales might have all kinds of ethnic stereotypes wrapped into it but I still love the cartoon character...}