Recovering

You should all be very proud of me, because I'm rather proud of myself. I've been very careful with upping my mileage and with easing out of the brace. I haven't upped mileage more than I should and I've been smart about transitioning to braceless.

Well, smart about mileage uppage until a couple weekends ago, anyway . . .

See, I have two friends (Lisa and Marcus) who are both running their first 100 mile at Sawtooth. We'd been planning an overnight run on the Superior Hiking Trail for a while and I'd been very excited about the idea and now, here it was - time to run it! My previous long run had gotten up to 11 miles - woot. So I was originally planning on going 15-16, a reasonable jump. However, it turned out that we were planning on starting in a different spot than I thought, which meant that I'd be stopping just before the Sonju section. The section so many people complain about and that I really wanted to see. It meant running just under 24 miles instead of 15ish, but hey, we'd be going slow so I'd be fine, right? Silly Sam.

It was a fabulous run for most of it. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and the stars were amazing. It was funny coming to what you knew to be a beautiful overlook just to see a black drop off into nothingness.

I made it about 20 miles just fine. And then my legs realized that I was more than doubling their mileage. And then we got to this little sign near when we should have been done. A sign which indicated we had 2.5 more miles to go since we didn't park in the parking lot . . . Since I had just spent the last mile convincing my poor legs that they only had to go one more mile it was rather a shock. The last section was a slow crawl and I felt bad for slowing down Lisa and Marcus who still had another 12 miles to go once they dropped me. I kept trying to make them go in front of me so they could hit the car and do their aid station stuff while I was following but it was a no-go. So that made for a total of 26.something miles. Oops.

I did learn that it wasn't a problem staying up all night while moving. Of course, how that works out when I've already been moving for 12 hours and have much more to go when it gets light again I don't know yet . . .

I have more to talk about, but we'll save that for later so that I actually get this one posted.

Up next is pacing Marcus at Sawtooth this weekend. I know a ton of people running it (extra good luck to Marcus, Lisa, and Christi in their first go at it) and so good luck to everyone! Exactly when/how far I'll be pacing is still up in the air, but I'll see people out there, and I'll be at the finish. Good luck everyone! And to those doing one of the many OTHER races this weekend, too.