I take it back, I AM a Runner!

My fitness goal is to run a half marathon and I've been slowly building up my mileage every week and sort of working on my speed. I'm running a 10k race in three weeks so I've been really trying to get quality runs in. Since getting back to running in August I ran my first 10k non-stop on Friday and was really proud of it, I had to blog about it! So this is a bit of an update from that post.

My longest run was two weeks ago, I ran 9.1 miles/14.6km. I was so proud of that and thought wow only 4 miles to a half marathon. So today I set out for my long run. When I plan my long run of the week, I have to psych myself up and tell myself over and over the distance I'm going to do. So all night last night I said to myself I'm going to run 10 miles tomorrow, I'm going to run 10 miles...

I brought my Gatorade, some raisins, water and my ipod and I was ready to go. I knew from about the second minute, I'm good, I can do this, I WILL run 10 miles today. I felt great the entire run. Stuck to a run 15 min/walk 2 min approach, twice I walked for 4 minutes but I always ran the full 15 minutes. I miss calculated my distance a bit and realized by the time I get to the end I'll have done 10.5 miles! As I approached 10 miles I was feeling great, and thought if I run 11 miles that's only TWO miles away from a half marathon, I shed a couple of tears! lol

So I kept going, I hit my 15 minutes and kept running, decided I'll run till the end. I went up some side streets so when I hit 10.5 miles, I still had a bit to go to get back to my street and I was still feeling fine so I kept running. I ran until my watch said 11.50 miles/18.51km!!! My last interval was 26 minutes, 2.08 miles.

My knees were killing me, and my quads were sore but I felt so strong and so proud! I realized I'm only 1.5 miles/2.5km away from the HALF MARATHON! WOW! I'm doing it, I'm going to run a half marathon! When I was running last year I felt like the half marathon was so far away, almost out of my reach, but now, it's RIGHT there. I will do this before the end of the year. In the meantime, I'll keep you posted on my progress!