For those who do not run at all, or who have never run this far, that must seem like a daunting distance, but we have logged these long runs so many times in the past that there reaches a point, as I said in an earlier posting, where a 10-mile run is considered a "short" run. I don't say this out of egotism - it is merely a matter of perspective. I ran the second to last mile yesterday with my friend Anthony, who ended up with more than 20 miles (his marathon is coming up sooner than mine, and he is a truly gifted athlete). I guess he thought I was going short!
Anthony Lampros
But the last three miles were difficult because my last long run until now was 13 miles. I have found that every long run seems to push the envelope a little more, and when I run 18 miles in a couple of weeks, I will feel pretty good . . . until I go past the 16-mile-mark. To borrow a phrase from Prince Hamlet, those last miles seem to be an "undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveler returns," but one which we learn to visit a little bit at a time so that on Race Day it will not seem so foreign a place.
A couple walking their dog saw me as I was going into the final mile and said, "Are you still out here? How far are you going, anyway?" I have learned that it is best not to say, exactly - they already know I'm a lunatic; let's not give them a statistic to prove it.
But how far am I going? Being a meticulous planner, I have entered all of my training runs in my Outlook calendar. Since I began this plan on Week One, way back on July 23rd, I have run 223 miles. If I don't succumb to injury, or have a cupola fall on my head, I hope to run 323 more miles until I stand on the starting line - a total of 551 miles to Richmond. Mapquest tells me the actual distance, by road, from Highlands to Richmond is only 455 miles.
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