Can you believe I’m actually getting a little blase about these runs? I mean, for most sane people a twenty miler is a big deal. Before this one I made sure to eat a good sized pasta meal for lunch on Friday, then screwed it all up by stuffing my face with TexMex at Maudies for dinner. Oh, well.

Despite that, I was up at 4:15 this morning to shower and get ready for my run. We were doing the old marathon course again, starting at the Gateway shopping center at 5:30. I was doing well enough, but somehow didn’t leave the house until after 5AM and got to RunTex a couple of minutes late. Luckily everyone else was running late because they were all still there; I hopped a ride with Mike and headed off for parts fairly well known.

For the majority of this run, things just went fairly smoothly. I mean, they are getting a little routine, which I guess is a good thing. The weather was cooler, but quite humid, and I found myself wanting to get something to drink fairly often.

Once we got to the Mile 16 water stop, I had the pleasure of Gilbert pulling me aside and showing me what I hope was an exaggerated impression of how I was running, bouncing from one foot to the other in a truly bizarre manner. For the rest of the run we were supposed to pick it up a bit, and I tried hard to stick to a vertical position and pick up my turnover a bit. It seemed to help, but its not “natural” just yet.

By about mile seventeen it was down to just Kim and I, others were ahead of us and behind us, but we stuck together through the last few miles and had a moderately decent finish. We still aren’t picking it up like we should - for my part, I claim a combination of being tired, the weather, and the fact that my shoes were bugging me. In fact, I went to talk to Gilbert about the latter after we’d eaten, and he steered me into a pair of Filas that I’ll be trying out on Monday.

My final time was 3:09:11 over an apparent 20.43 mile distance. The dashboard has a longer length, but the analyzer and my watch both go with the shorter one so I’m going with it: that means a 9:15 overall pace (and a claimed 8:56 moving pace, taking out the stops). Fair enough.

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