sweet sixteen

I've learned a lot with marathon training---things about myself, about running, and about others. I can officially say that I understand the highs and lows of running: last week was a low, I hit the wall and doubted myself. Today I felt the elusive 'runners high' as I completed 16 miles in 2:32, which is right at a 9:30 mile. I'm quite proud of myself for staying positive throughout the run even when I started to hurt. It must have been my new sports sunglasses:
Nate had to work today, so I attended the group run down at the lakefront. I met a new friend [!] and we ran together the whole time, which obviously involved us chatting up a storm. This is concept is new to me: running and talking, without music. When I run with Nate we don't have much to say so we just listen to our Ipods and veg out. Although it definitely expended more energy I am pretty pumped to make a new running friend and proud of myself for ditching the Ipod. Besides, I'm pretty sure you aren't supposed to wear them for the marathon anyway so I should probably get used to the pounding of my feet as my new form of music.

This will be both of our first full marathons and we were blatantly obvious with our lack of training knowledge. Want to know why? Both of us wore brand new shoes today for the long run, which apparently is a big no-no. Some hard core dude came up to us afterwards and asked how we were doing, while we were hurriedly removing our shoes and socks. We told him that our new shoes were killing our feet and he just kind of grinned: I guess we are supposed to wear our old shoes for long runs and rotate the new ones into shorter runs. Whoops!

You wanna see my new fabulosities?


Here are the old kicks: worn down, kind of ugly, blah:

And these are my new babies, in all of their pink glory:)



I had to stay with Asics but decided to switch it up a bit from my trusty Nimbus style--I went for the GT-2130 and adore them so far [minus the killer blisters throbbing on my footsies right now].

So thank you ladies for all of the support after my 'bad run' post. I definitely thought about some of your words during this run and it helped me get through. Next week will likely be an 18 miler [yikes!] if we run with the group again. This training stuff is no joke but right now, I love it:)

Who else is in training right now? Anyone contemplating a full marathon? If so, I say go for it! But I suppose we'll see how the rest of training goes before I get too gung-ho, right?