20-mile Run

Mike and I are training for a marathon.

I forget who I've told at this point, so we'll just start with that. I decided I wanted to run a marathon - my first marathon, as in 26.2 miles - shortly before Thanksgiving of last year. I decided that starting my training after Thanksgiving would be good if I planned to run the Austin Marathon on February 19th of this year. Mike jumped on board and, to be honest, I may not have kept with it had it not been for him doing it with me.

We've done amazingly well! We've found new running routes around town and each week we add on more milage. This past weekend we reached a real milestone - our longest training run: 20 miles. We've been planning out our 20 mile run for some time now. We knew we wanted to run to the Blue Star Brewery south of downtown and meet some friends there so they could haul our tired butts home. We knew we'd have to eat and rest properly before hand.

On Saturday evening, Ellie and Geoff had us and others over for a belated Chinese New Year Celebration. We had noodles, dumplings, and chicken wings.

We left around 10:30pm (after pavlova dessert, of course!) I had washed the sheets that day, so we tucked ourselves into the clean sheets around 11pm and set our alarms.

The morning of the run, I woke up a few minutes before my alarm. The birds were chirping. I had a huge bowl of cereal before putting on my "marathon" clothes. (The list of clothes that won't rub you raw gets really short really fast during marathon training!) My GPS watch was fully-charged and ready to measure the longest distance I'd ever run. We walked over to Geoff and Ellie's house to drop off a bag of clean clothes for them to bring to us at lunch.

The sun was shining and the air was cool. We were ready!

The first part of our run was sort of dull. I feel like I've run through Alamo Heights a million times in the last 3 months. Ugh! Once we got to the river at Pearl Brewery I was energized again. I LOVE running by the river! It makes me giddy to think about living in a city that has miles of path along a river in the middle of a bustling metropolis! By the time we got up to street level we were just blocks from the Alamo. It was like running while on vacation. We're rarely downtown, especially on a Sunday morning. We swung by the Alamo and grabbed a picture, just like the tourists!

The guy who took our picture would have laughed if he had known we live about 10 minutes away!

We arrived at the Blue Star Brewery with 10 miles still to go so we headed back north up the river and ran through the beautiful, serene King William area before arriving at the Riverwalk (I call it the Riverwalk with a capital "R" because that whole path is called the Riverwalk).

We took a picture with us in front of this, but our faces are too dark and you can't see the cute umbrellas well.

Running back south, past the brewery, there is a nice path but very little to look at. It sort of reminded me of Oklahoma. There were water fountains and shelters along the way. Mike and I took some gel blocks (like fruit snacks) with us and stopped to "fuel up" twice. Having water along the route was invaluable - another benefit to the Riverwalk!

Finally we returned to Blue Star (after passing it 3 or 4 times!) for lunch. Ellie and Geoff were there and we all grabbed a big table on the patio. Shortly after, Clarissa, Justin, Kristin, Onae, Thomas and Tater (Thomas and Onae's dog) showed up. We all had a delicious lunch in the South Texas sun.

Thank you all for meeting us for lunch and supporting us!!