MNF - Monday Night Fun - 20 Miles

I did ANOTHER long run in the middle of the week...and not just a moderate-distance long run, I'm talking the longest run I've done training for this marathon yet.  Mac and I ran 20.5 miles in 2 hours and 40 minutes - averaging 7:48 pace .

Would you like to know why we had to do it on a Monday night instead of over the weekend?  Mac overslept on Sunday AGAIN.  But that was fine with me because I felt a lot better running last night than I would have at 6am Sunday morning.

Here are the splits from the Garmin for 20 miles:

8:08, 7:53, 8:01, 7:44, 7:53, 7:51,7:39, 7:35, 7:29, 7:31, 8:00, 8:00, 8:07, 8:29, 8:17, 8:24, 7:59, 8:05, 8:07, 8:05

We started at my apartment and ran to the lakefront path and then ran south...really far south.  On our way south, we decided that we would turn around to be back in the downtown area at about 10 miles and then run essentially the same route as the first 10 miles of the Chicago Marathon, which would end right near my apartment.

Picture break (because I have none from yesterday and my dad loves being in blog pictures): 

The course goes north on Columbus drive, underneath some other streets for a little while, so you are basically running in a long tunnel.  We lost reception on the Garmin here, so those 2 miles I highlighted in red were skewed...the Garmin told us each was close to 10 minutes which I can tell you was not correct.  Once we were at around 8 miles into the run and started hitting some good splits, we decided to try to keep that up until at least 12 miles, which I think we did.  I'll just call them 8 minutes and leave it at that.  I was wondering though if the loss of Garmin reception in that long tunnel makes a lot of people angry during the marathon.  I bet it does, but it's in the first mile or 2, so I'm sure they get over it.  It would be super frustrating though.

And then around miles 14-15, we both really started to crash I think.  I felt like I was trying really hard, but just not moving fast anymore.  Over the 2nd half of the run while we were on city streets, we did get randomly slowed down by slow people walking/blocking the sidewalk and stopped for a few seconds at a few street lights - nothing too crazy though...so maybe if we were on the lakefront path we could've more easily maintained a solid pace?  We stopped in a Chipotle for a water/bathroom break around mile 15 and had only made 2 other quick stops around miles 8 and 12 for Gu/water.  I felt a lot better over the last 4 miles and felt surprisingly strong when I finished...although I was VERY happy to be done of course.

I went to bed shortly after the run...then woke up about 7 hours later to run again.  Mac came back in the AM and we did a super easy 3.5 mile run to stretch out.  So now I don't plan to run again for at least 36 hours.

Do you get frustrated when the Garmin loses reception?

Do you ever stop in random restaurants for water breaks?  - I usually try to find a McDonald's when I need to.