A Few From the 20

And we're off!!

About 1 mile in we pass this school. Pleasant Hill's Relay for Life was going on. We pulled off for a second to listen, watch, and take a few pictures. I'm thinking this was a very small Relay from my limited knowledge. All 4 of our local towns had/are having their own this year.

On our 18 miler I took my camera thinking if I took one pic every 10 minutes I would have one every mile and it would make things go by quicker. So for our 20 I thought the same thing...but ditched the camera after the first few miles...so there are no pics from the middle of the run.

These next ones are the last .5 mile of the 20. You usually see us running alongside the trail in the gravel, sometimes with cows in the open space behind us. Today they had cut the path in the open space. It is usually overgrown single track. We have collected a few snake skins from this section, and I am not comfortable running it due to the snakes. But, since they cut it back nice and open and clear, the girls and I headed up and ran the trail.

So at the end of the 20, I mistakenly chose to leave the nice, flat, gravel...and run on ankle breaking, tractor track, uphill, downhill trail.

The girls loved it!

Came back through the cow gate to the paved trail and down a steep hill to the road where the car is. It is funny how tired I was before going up on the trail, but just being on a new section and having to watch my footing completely made me forget how tired I was.

It was a good reminder for me of how much of dealing with fatigue is mental. I definitely need to work on distracting myself more and not allowing myself to focus on being tired or hurting....and remember that 99% of the time, I can (we can) always go further.

As much as I have quoted the quote on the bottom of our training schedule, we probably all have it memorized by now, but it's on the training schedule for a reason. I need reminded repeatedly!

"If you are going to win any battle you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give up. It is always tired in the morning, noon, and night. But the body is never tired if the mind is not tired."-Patton