A long, long way

I met up with a couple of friends to run 20 miles on Saturday. Ugh, that's a long long way to run. We began at 5-ish a.m. and started at the Trax station in Sandy. Our run took us on a trail next to the railroad tracks for about 3 miles, then through the neighborhoods of Sandy and Draper for about 3 miles, then back to the rail trail for about another 4 miles, then back again.

One of the group was having a difficult time getting towards the end, so we had quite a bit of "paused" time, where our unofficial clocks don't really tick. Our unofficial official time was 3:41:37, or an 11:04 mpm pace. Our splits were all over the place, as you might expect.

1-11:08
2-10:47
3-11:04
4-10:40
5-11:07
6-11:14
7-10:50
8-11:14 - uphill mile
9-11:07
10-10:44
11-11:08
12-10:37
13-10:28
14-11:13 - some walking here...
15-10:44
16-10:58
17-12:21 - there was quite a bit of walking here too...
18-10:57
19-11:13
20-11:30

It was a fun run, all in all, and although running with a group of friends is fun, I'm actually a little bit excited about seeing what I can do on a 20- or 22- mile solo run here in the next couple of weeks.

This week is a "cutback" week, where the running takes a step back for recovery (although I'm feeling pretty dang strong right now, I don't want to push it), and on Saturday I'm volunteering for the Salt Lake City Marathon at the starting line, so I won't have as much time for running anyway... I'm looking at maybe doing 10-12 on Saturday.

There are 5 Saturdays until the Ogden Marathon, and my long run schedule looks like this:

April 19, This week, 10 (cutback week and volunteering)
April 26: 20 miles
May 3: 22 miles
May 10: 12 miles (taper time!)
May 17: 26.2 baby!!

It's crunch time!!