David and I spent many hours this spring training together for our marathon (which was in June). We did our regular weekday runs separately, but we did our Saturday long runs together. Saturday afternoons meant dropping the kids off at Grandma's and hitting the streets of Frankfort. David did a great job mapping out our long runs. Even with hydration packs, it is difficult to carry enough liquids for the really long runs, so we would drive ahead and leave cold water or powerade bottles in strategic spots along the run. We would look forward to reaching our next "watering hole" at a certain tree or telephone pole. There is an art to doing that many miles over and over while keeping the mental strain to a minimum. We love going other places to run (our favorite being downtown Indy), but we found it much more practical to just stay right here in Frankfort instead of adding extra driving time to our already full Saturdays.
I cannot imagine training for a full marathon alone. We had a good time logging the miles together. But Long Runs can get rather - well - long. So we started taking a camera with us to capture things along the way. Sometimes we would take a picture at every mile. It was an interesting way to tick off the miles. Other times we would use it to just capture random beauty that we encountered along the way. These are some pictures from two different training runs - one was 18 miles and one was 20 miles.
We prefer to finish our run before dark, but sometimes it just didn't work out that way if we couldn't get an early enough start in the afternoon. |
What a great sight to get home to - exhausted but happy. |
A lady we see often around town as we're running. |
Very welcomed beauty along the way... |
A horse rescue farm near our house |
This is a barn back behind the Frankfort water treatment plant and behind the manor. |
Love this time of night!!! |
I love it when we get to this home stretch of a long run. By this time I'm excited because we're almost done and David is rather cranky-ish. |
A rainbow! A promise that this long run will never again happen to the whole world. Or something. |
I need to say a humongous thank you to my mother-in-law, Rose Fry. Without her commitment to give up quite a few Saturday afternoons to watch the kids for hours while we trained, we would never have been able to do this marathon together. We love you! You spoil us!
This post was written 10/10/11....Now that it's all over, we really miss those long runs together.....good times.
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