18.5 mile run: 3:36

I took the day off from work today-- I'm a little burnt out after this hurricane season.  I goofed off, read about a hundred pages of John M. Barry's excellent Rising Tide about the Mississippi flood of 1927, and generally didn't do much.  After lunch with Sònia I was pretty set that I was going to take a nice long nap.

But something odd happened.  I remembered I meant to run with some friends from the State Department at 6:30 pm.  It was 2:30.  I thought, I could go for a really long run and meet up with them after.

Before I knew what I was doing I had headed out the door.  I wasn't sure how long I would go out, but I had just under four hours before I met up with my friends.  I headed out to the Rock Creek Park trail and entered the old Capital Crescent Trail in Georgetown.  I was feeling good then, just enjoying being outdoors.  It rained a little-- I always have loved running in the rain.

I turned off on Massachusetts Avenue and hit the first hills of the run right at about an hour and a half.  I was unhappy about this.  I started to question the wisdom of my decision to run this far, my own sanity, and whether I was a good person or not.  About then I saw a CVS, where I stopped and had a Clif bar and some Gatorade.  Suddenly everything seemed brighter.  Hunger is bad, real bad.

I basically looped around through Georgetown until I finally ended up at State where I met up with my friends, Kevin, Mother, and Richard.  Kevin and Mother were feeling fast, and Richard wanted to take it easy, so I hung with him.  We chugged along for about a half an hour.  After that we went for a huge plate of burritos at Santa Fe in Rosslyn.

In the end I had run about three and a half hours.  Had I gone for about 15 minutes more I would have been out as long as I was for the Marine Corps Marathon in 1990.  I'm stiff-- but nowhere near as destroyed as I was after the Marathon.  I wonder why that is.  Probably be sore tomorrow, though.

Route: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2306524