Hey, I ran 20 miles too! I think I should talk about it.

Actually, Leah said it all. 20 miles is really, really far. It is really hard to head out from the house and keep going farther and farther out when you know you have to eventually comeback. And once you are 9.5 miles away from your end point, there is no choice. You simply have to finish because walking would be even worse (especially if you combine failure with pain). Btw, when I say walking, I mean for miles. We always walk a bit when we get gatorade or water. I'm very okay with this.

There was a lot of pain involved in this run. For the first 10-11 miles, my knees and ankle hurt most of the way. The knees are nothing big, just the usual runners knee. The ankle just hurt off and on for the first half. In the second half, all my joints stopped hurting (numb?) but then I found some new body parts. My hips started to get really sore as well as my feet and stuff. Not a big deal...20 miles is far. Stuff is going to hurt. But I just thought it was interesting that I had no two things hurt the same between the two halves of the run. I guess that is better than one, long, sustained soreness.

But the run went great and it was very exciting. I still felt I had plenty at the end and I finished running strong (so did Leah, if she didn't mention it below). One little concern: about an hour after the run, my ankle started to hurt pretty badly. It was very sore to walk on, probably a bit of tendonitis. So I rested it the rest of the day and iced it (And iced it. and iced it). The next day I iced it a bunch more and when I went for a walk it didn't hurt, so that's a good sign. I haven't tried to run on it yet, but I'm fairly confident that it won't be a problem.

Okay. 20 miles is the bag. Let's taper, baby!