This past Saturday I ran the final 20 miler in my training for the Asics LA Marathon. It was originally scheduled for this coming weekend, but I signed up for the San Diego Women’s Half Marathon as part of the X-1 Audio Headphones team (with Elise), so I rearranged a few of my training runs to make this work.

This training run was not easy. This was my peak weak, at the end I ran just shy of 64 miles. My legs were tired and I was running late to meet the group. But off I went. I left my house and with a little bit of a convoluted route, met up with SCE runners at Verve. Their run was 16 miles, so I had tacked on 4 miles before I started with them. Thankfully they had waited for me and we were off. We started with 5 runners, added 2 more a few miles into the run, and then added 1 more for the last 6 miles. I love these kind of runs, adding new runners makes the run feel new and helps break up all those miles!

The plan was to run 4 miles easy, 12 miles at goal marathon pace (GMP) and 4 miles easy.  I was not loving this run for the first half and keeping around that GMP was hard! At mile 15 I decided to go ahead and drop to the easy pace (but then I picked up another GMP mile at 19!). But even though I hurt and was tired, it was not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I was ready to be done when I hit mile 20, but I didn’t feel overly fatigued and in fact, almost felt better than when I started! What!? This was a great feeling to have and made me feel like the last few months of training was really paying off. I thought back to how I felt after my last 20 miler in my CIM training cycle. I was tired, defeated, and a little concerned about the reality of running 6.2 more miles come race day. Saturday’s run was a totally different experience! Come March 17, when I’m running streets of LA, I just need to keep this in my mind!

After finishing our run, the remaining runners treated ourselves to some serious caffeine from Verve. (I swear, if I could be sponsored by Verve and The Penny Ice Creamery I’d be in heaven!) Starting and ending runs at coffee shops is the best idea, and its so nice to drink that coffee with good friends.

So, how is your training going? Are you ready for LA or your marathon? Will you be taking on the LA/SF Challenge??