July 18

The sun ws rising over the cornfields as I drove to Pioneers Park for the team walk/run this morning. I left home at 6:30 AM & passed 2 wild turkey hens with their little ones. It was cool enough this morning to start with a jacket, but I took it off after 1 mile. It was just Rachel & myself today so Rachel ran with me the whole time. I cut it back to 5 minutes walk and 45 seconds run & that was plenty (with the hills). I did not have a lot of energy today & my feet hurt - after all the standing I did yesterday...actually I canned until about 11:30 last night. No wonder I didn't have energy today! It was good to have Rachel to help me keep my pace up as best as I could. The important thing is that I got it done! I did 12 miles in 2 hours and 22 minutes (16.8 min/mile) & even though the time wasn't great, I felt really good about doing the 12 miles - that's only 1 mile short of a half-marathon - and that was good mentally for me to do that. The walk around Pioneers park was really pretty - again, I took my camera - and here are some of the sights I saw as I walked through the park. I think I can only include 3 pictures on this particular post...so I'll do a second post for today to include the other 3 pics.

I drank my recovery drink on the way home but I was in a semi-rigor mortis state by the time I opened the car door at home & took the first few steps - ouch! My feet hurt & so did everything else! Leo was kind enough to go buy me a bag of ice while I was on my walk so I could do my ice bath. I ate some lunch & then took my usual 20 minute ice bath followed by about 45 minutes of sit time, then Leo & I ran some errands. I bought some more recovery drinks & some Carb-Boom energy gels. I tried one again today & I think I can tolerate them now and I think they are better absorbed in the gel form instead of the gel blocks. Rachel said it was best to take 1 gel pack every 45 minutes followed by water. It seemed to set fine with me today. So my grand total of miles this week is 27 miles! I had to take ibuprofen today for my feet - nothing else was quite as bad as that. Total miles walked from the beginning of training = 151 miles!! Hot damn! I'm on a roll!!