20 miles!!

Today was my longest running day before the marathon-20 MILES!! This was pretty hard. From mile 16 on I was feeling the pain in my legs. They were just tight, sore and wanted to be stretched but we continued on! When I was closing in on the finish I had 400 yards to go so I was going to pick up pace and sprint the end. Right at 200 yards, when I was going to switch to sprinting, a dog comes out of no where right for me!! I'm pretty scared of dogs on the loose since I have been chased twice before in my single days. But the funny thing is that my friend called the dog's attention so that I could keep running and finish so I just took off not even knowing if Marissa was being mauled to death or not! Pretty bad on my part but pretty heroic of her.

The other funny thing was that it was sprinkling steadily at 7 miles and I thought "that's ok. Heavenly Father is just going to send this rain to let me know that I can make the race even in bad conditions" Within three seconds it went from a sprinkle to full-on raining. I couldn't believe it but I was going to just keep going.

By the end I did wonder if I could make it another 6 miles. I'm still not entirely sure how I'm going to make it but it was pretty awesome to finish those 20 miles and know I had done that. The marathon is 3 weeks away. There's still a lot to prepare beforehand that has nothing to do with running. We need a babysitter. We'll have to leave around 6 in the morning and we are going to need a babysitter at 6. They will have to get the girls all ready to go in the morning and then drive them down to the race because they, and I, want to cheer me on. Since the race will take over 4 hours the girls are going to need breakfast and lunch. Ben will need something for lunch after his race. And then we are going to need cheerleaders during the run. So any one planning on going to the marathon will need to find a location to set up and cheer us all on. There are so many of us running and it would be awesome to have people rooting us on. Signs. We need to make signs, too. My brother won't really know any of you our friends during the race but I hope they will recognize him and cheer him on as well. He will probably be ahead of me. Look at all this work we still have to do! Only three more weeks!