Tomorrow I will wake up bright and early run 20 miles. 20 miles? Eeeep! To be honest I am pretty nervous. 20 miles is really far. I will definitely be getting a doughnut when I am done.

Just one month from today I will be participating in my firtst marathon. I am so excited! It's weir that when I think about running 26.2 miles I am an not worried or scared (I probably should be) I am just excited. I have been so amazed by how far I have come in training with team in training. 3 months ago I was doing good if I could get through running 3 miles. Now I am up to 17 miles. We have a couple of easy weeks in a row. Last week we did 10 miles and this Saturday we will be running 13 miles. Tha fact that I can say running 10 and 13 miles is easy is pretty amazing to me. We'll see how I feel on the 12th after running 20 miles.

Here are som pictures from Saturday's run in Simi Valley.

Yeserday was a run day for me and to be honest it sucked. My body hadn't fully recovered from the 17 miles we did on Saturday and really just refused to cooperate with me. I was distracted by everything. I took twice as many walk breaks than I normally do, I couldn't keep anything close to my normal pace and I kept stopping to take pictures of pretty little things with my phone.

On the up side, I have lots of pictures of pretty little things.

The pictures sure are pretty but hopefully I am mentally and physically prepared for tomorrows run.

Saturday was a big day and by big I mean 17 miles big. Of course on this big day I set my alarm for 6 pm instead of 6 am. I woke up at 630 (15 minutes before I had to leave) confused by the amount of light pouring through the windows. After checking my phone and realizing how late it was I jumped out of bed and raced around the house getting myself ready before Brenda got there to pick me up. I remembered last minute that I needed to eat so I stuffed a granola bar in my mouth and a piece of bread with almond butter and honey and washed it down with some much needed water. Good enough and somehow I managed to be ready in time.

Unfortunately my late start left me feeling completely unprepared for what I was about to do. Mentally I was feeling scattered and my stomach wasn't happy with me either. It could have been nerves or the fact that I had just inhaled my breakfast just 10 minutes earlier. The run was spilt up into two bits, one 10 mine course and a 7 mile course. During warm ups I secretly decided that I would do the first 10 miles and if I was still feeling bad after that I would call it a day.

So we set off on our 17 mile adventure. Thankfully I immediately started feeling better. I made it though the first 10 miles and happily continued on for the final 7. Brenda and I finished 17 miles in just 3 minutes over the time it took us to fun 15 miles 2 weeks earlier. We were feeling pretty awesome about that. This run really made me feel confident that I will be able to make it though the actual marathon without any trouble or without too much trouble.

After running Brenda and I decided to reward ourselves with doughnuts and coffee. Of course all the doughnuts looked so good I couldn't possibly choose just one. I was forced to get 2. So good!

The weather has improved since the last post which makes for a lot less whinning from me.

Two weeks ago part of our team did The Great Race of Agoura. The rest of us had a pretend 10K / half marathon in Ojai organized my some of our amazing coaches. Way back February when we got our training schedual I was a little shocked to see that in just a few weeks I was expected to run 13.1 miles. I wasn't really sure that that was even physically possible. But when the day came I did it and it felt great! Ojai was a pretty amazing place to run. It was so beautiful I had to stop and take a picture.

Beautiful right?

Last weekend my husband and I decided to take a trip up to the Bay and visit our friends in Oakland. I missed practice with team but still woke up early Sunday morning and got my miles in. We just recently moved from Oakland to southern California so I was excited to get to run arouond Lake Merrit again and it was a short week so I only had to run six Miles by myself. It was a beautiful morning and a really great run. I must say that my time has greatly improved since the last time I ran the lake. It used to take me 45 minutes to get around the 3 mile trail. On Saturday I ran 6.5 miles in 1 hour and 4 minutes.

Now it is time to prep my mind and body for tomorrow. We will be running 15 miles. That seems like a large number right now. Wish me luck!