It's not pretty, but it's 20

This past weekend was my first 20 mile run in training for the Lake Wobegon Trail Marathon. It was best long run of this training cycle yet. Wait, no, best isn't the word I'm looking for. Worst--it was the worst long run of this training cycle.

A few things went wrong for this run. First, my wife and I were going to go and look at houses around noon on Saturday and I was planning on putting in the 20 when I finished. When I woke up, however, she asked me if I'd just go and run now (about 8 AM) so I could stay out of her hair while she cleaned. I didn't think that would be a problem but I made at least 2 mistakes; one was easily fixable that morning and the other was too late.

First, I drank a pint of Heineken the night before and probably didn't drink enough fluids afterward. That may or may not have made a differences but I'm going to go ahead and lead toward it did as I felt a little dehydrated. Second, I thought a bagel would be an OK breakfast before running. Unfortunately I know I put too much cream cheese on it. Right after I put the cream cheese on I was thinking, whoa, that's too much cream cheese. When the right amount of cream cheese on a bagel before a 20 mile run is none and I just happened to pile it on. It wasn't sitting well in my stomach from mile 1 through 20.

So the whole run my stomach went between a dull ache to severe cramps. I also brought along blue powerade (powerade doesn't have flavors, only colors) and that crap only made me feel worse. I was going to dump it out and fill the bottle with water, but all the stupid drinking fountains haven't been turned on yet.

So pretty much the whole run my gut hurt, I'd get thirsty, drink some powerade, and then it'd hurt worse. Yuck. I put in the whole 20 though, slowly but surely. It was still fast enough that it fell into Mr. McMillan's pace range for a long run but I was definitely feeling it.

Fortunately my legs didn't get beat up too bad and I was able to do an easy 8 with the MN Running Wild group yesterday and another easy 6 today with some hill sprints thrown in for good measure.

I hit 60 miles last week which is a post-collegiate mileage PR. This week I'm cutting back a little and I'll aim for about 50. I'm running a 20k on April 10 so that next couple weeks I'll keep my mileage steady around 50 so I have some legs for the 20k.