11 miles…and done!

Last night, I went to Taproom No. 307 for my friend Eileen’s birthday. We’ve known each other since freshman year honors Geometry in high school. Which is also about when I started hating math. I actually loved it and it came easily to me before then, but it was all downhill after Mrs. Solomon’s class. Also, how was that 15 years ago?!

(Also, despite usually screwing up Photoshop, I’m proud to report that the above is not an Instagrammed pic, just using Photoshop to do one of my favorite Instagram effects. Here’s the tilt shift tutorial I used.)

After an intense Thursday night, I wasn’t so into drinking last night and took it easy with a cider and a margarita over the course of a few hours. I loved the mason jar water glass, though.

This morning, I had 11 miles on deck! The first month of marathon training never quite feels like I’m training for a marathon. It doesn’t feel real until I run longer than 13 miles. But 11 miles is still longer than I’ve run in a while, so I was excited.

He wasn’t excited that he had to be woken up early for a walk. Sorry, bud.

I ran down Broadway to meet Rebecca at the Brooklyn Bridge. Our plan was for me to meet her on the Brooklyn side, but my Garmin couldn’t find satellites and then I wiped out colossally crossing Broadway, so I ran a little late. Which meant we met when I was about 3/4 of the way across, and didn’t have to run the hill twice. Win.

(Photo via Rebecca)

I don’t miss too much about living downtown, but I do miss living close enough to run the Brooklyn Bridge often. We ran down to South Street Seaport and through Battery Park over to the West Side. I was trying not to obsess over the pace on my watch, but it definitely felt like we were running a fast pace, although comfortably fast. I was happy the few times I looked to see we were running between a 9-9:10 pace.

The kind folks at Gatorade sent me this box of Gatorade Carb Energy Chews, which I tried out today around mile 6. They didn’t have much of a taste, but they did the job.

I ended up keeping an average pace of 9:11, which I was very happy with. Also, I’m not sure the last mile is accurate–I ran under a little tunnel and lost satellite. Still, I’m happy I had such a great long run.

How’s your training going?