and my internal awesomeness meter goes wild!!!

I did it.
I totally did it!!
I came, I saw, I ran my a$$ off!

The daunting 12 miler has been looming at me from my running plan since April. Today was that day.
The day.
12 freakin' miles yo!


....T W E L V E miles...of running....me.....RUNNING.

It is so amazing to me that just this year. I have gone from barely being able to eek out a mile to now...running T W E L V Emiles. Wow, just wow.

Today I went down to the local park to run. I decided to run there and save myself from being eaten alive by mosquitoes and deerfly. As you might guess it takes awhile to run 12 miles so in that time it rained, twice. I didn't mind though, I love running in the rain. It was a good kind of rain too, that nice misty light rain. Temps were about 69 degrees so the rain was cool and refreshing. And since it was raining, I was the only person at the park.
As I was running I noticed the church looked very scenic, so I stopped for a sec to take a picture.


I also found a portion of trail that I hadn't seen before. It was just a short section about a quarter of a mile long. But, as you can see it's a very enchanting quarter mile.


It has that sort of Alice in Wonderland feel about it. And on the left there is a river which gives the area a nice calming sound. Very relaxing.


and surprisingly enough, there weren't any mosquitoes in there. The park association must spray for them or something.

At mile 10 my droid crapped out on me and shut off completely. Luckily runkeeper saved the data of that 10 miles so I just restarted run keeper and did 2 more miles. Stupid Techno FAIL .... grr. At least I didn't lose my data! I'd have lost my mind if I lost all the data on that run. Not THAT run, not my 12 miler. I wonder what caused my phone to freak like that?

So, I finished up my run and walked home. I had to combine the data from the 2 runs to figure out all I did. Thanks to techno failure. Still, I got my 12 miles in, plus some and did it all at a nice steady 13:47 pace. I'll take it! I feel fully ready for the half marathon now. I'm guessing it will end up being about a 3 hour race for me. Not great, but not bad at all for my first half marathon!

Today's Half Marathon Training Stats:
Time: 2:49:59
Distance: 12.32 miles
Pace: 13:47