Post 2 of 2 today - 30th birthday run

Saturday. I turned 30.

30^th birthday, booyah!

Our GTS on Saturday morning was a “drop week” at 14 miles.  We were meeting to run at Percy Warner Park, which I had never run in before.  I was LATE to GTS.  Long story but the resolve is that I didn’t pay attention & walked up as they were breaking out to run.  My running buddy Jenny & I headed out together for 14 miles while everyone else was dropping WAY back to 8.

Soooo basically it was the WORST RUN OF MY LIFE. THE WORST.  I never want to experience it again (even though I know I will at some point.)  We got lost having never run in PWP before & essentially being left on our own with a terrible route map.  After getting lost, we got ourselves found again and even though we were both feeling awful, we kept trying to push each other along.  At 10 miles we thought we were golden.  We were wrong.

At 10 miles, instead of being 4 miles from the finish, we were still about 7 miles from the finish – from the getting lost thing.  We just keep losing more and more steam.

Our mentor for TNT called to check on our location – which was a place called “at the top of 9 mile hill.”  9 mile hill. You do the math.  She knew exactly where we were and said she was on her way. At that point, we knew we were done.  I absolutely had nothing left in me to give.  We did 13.2 miles.

It’s so hard to run 13.2 miles on your 30^th birthday and feel like you failed.  Obviously I know I didn’t fail, but it was my first time to be picked up by a sweeper and that just does something for the psyche.  I cried.  Jenny cried.  I cried more in the car.  Then I took a nap and decided to get over myself.

I’m so lucky to have gone through that terrible run WITH a friend – along with having 2 great, supportive fellow TNT’ers come and pick us up.  In a text message later that day, I was comforted even more with this message:

It reminded me of how far I have come, not only in the last 15 weeks, but the last year.  I’m getting ready to run a marathon & I’m raising money to save people’s lives with cancer.  A bad run is forgotten the next day & should always be treated as a lesson for next time.

Onward!