Wine is for SISSIES!

It's come down to the very last 20 miler for Space Coast.  It was amazing, bittersweet, fun, and painful all at the same time.   As this blog is being written, we are officially 18 days away from the big day.  It's been a long road.  This week we started at Longleaf around 5 am.  One of the greatest things about this training is that we have had so many people join us along the way.  This week, we were joined by Jamie at the beginning.

As the big day approaches, we are all planning our dinners, travel, hotels, etc...  Since we have a few hours together every week, we chat about a variety of different things.  This week we were talking about alcohol.  I have a drink recipe where you freeze Mike's Hard Lemonade in a ice cube tray and then pour iced tea in a glass.  (Try it, it's delicious!)  So this led to a whole discussion on drinks.  At 6 am in the morning.

This is about the time that Melanie confessed that she is not a wine drinker.  And that if she is going to have to a drink, it's going to be hard alcohol.  Well, ok then.  Which led to the title of this blog, "Wine is for sissies".  Because real women drink liquor! ;)

The longer runs seem to go by really, really fast.  I always remember the first few and the last few miles, but the middle miles are sort of a blur.  On Friday night, I ran Richard's Run for Life.  It's one of my favorite runs, and this is the fourth year in a row that I have done this particular race.  The best thing is that The Columbia caters the post race party and there is free beer and wine.  Woooo!!  Now, I couldn't really drink on Friday night since I had to run in the AM, but I got my fair share of Columbia 1905 salad!  Yeessss!!

I was planning to take it easy at Richard's Run, but that didn't happen.  Ben landed up pacing me to a pretty good time (for me), 25:41.  Which is an 8:11 average mile, not taking it easy for me.  It showed in my long run towards the end.  Luckily, I was still able to finish it and now I know not to do that anymore.  We landed up finishing in Starkey Park this week to check in with Melanie's mom and the rest of the Strider "camp" Social Hour.  We even got our picture taken!:

Overall, I'm so excited about this marathon.,  I really just want it to get here already!  Here are the splits for the 20 miler:

Laps 20

Split Time Distance Avg Pace Summary 3:19:46.3 20.00 9:59.2 1 9:23.2 1.00 9:23.2 2 9:23.0 1.00 9:23.0 3 9:33.0 1.00 9:33.0 4 9:47.5 1.00 9:47.5 5 9:41.1 1.00 9:41.1 6 10:02.0 1.00 10:02.0 7 10:03.0 1.00 10:03.0 8 9:58.2 1.00 9:58.1 9 10:23.4 1.00 10:23.4 10 10:28.5 1.00 10:28.5 11 10:15.2 1.00 10:15.2 12 10:42.4 1.00 10:42.4 13 10:17.2 1.00 10:17.2 14 10:13.4 1.00 10:13.4 15 9:53.5 1.00 9:53.5 16 9:58.3 1.00 9:58.3 17 9:51.8 1.00 9:51.8 18 9:46.4 1.00 9:46.4 19 10:00.0 1.00 10:00.0 20 10:04.2 1.00 10:03.8