Training, Week Seven: Don't Stop (with special guest star Katie!)

(This is the proper music to listen to when reading this post, by the by. Maybe don't watch the video, though; I'd like for you to like Brazilian Girls when you're done.)

Week Six was ending, and I headed out to Milford to do my six-mile "long run" (actual marathoners are laughing right now) with my dad and my sister, who was in town for the weekend.

Katie (my sister, not the Katie from the bacon bourbon experiment) is also training for the half Pig, but she runs faster and is using a more rigorous training program. (It actually asks her to run 14 miles two weeks before the 13.1-mile race, which seems anticlimactic to me.) She eats six-mile runs for breakfast. (Or brunch, seeing as how it was Sunday.) So she was saying that we should try to run it straight through and make a 10-minute pace and all this other stuff, and my dad and I were all, whoa girl - we run slow, and we stop and walk when we feel like it, which is usually once a mile or so.

Still, off we went. I was trying to keep pace with Katie, who I think was slowing down a bit for our benefit, so we still hadn't stopped to walk after a mile and a half. At that point, my dad - whose knee has been giving him a lot of trouble lately - tapped out and walked back home, and Katie and I kept going.

And going.

And going.

(And then we stopped because I had to use the Porta-Potty conveniently located at the three-mile mark, but then we got going again.)

And going.

And an hour or so later, I had run the whole six miles with only that bathroom break. (I was such a jerk to Katie when she said I shouldn't lie down after.)

Thanks to my lovely sister's inspiration that day, I've realized that I haven't really been pushing myself. So my new goal on any given run is to go as long as I can without stopping to walk. So far, it's going pretty well.