how quickly we forget

(too embarrassed to look at the camera)

I am exhausted. On Wednesday and Thursday of last week we drove 18 hours to St. George. I coughed and coughed the entire way, but it is a beautiful drive full of my favorite kinds of scenery, mountains and deserts. My heart gets happy even now just thinking about it. It is, however, a really loooong drive. We spent half of Thursday and all of Friday with the grandparents and playing in my favorite desert in the whole world. And then it was Saturday.  I ran the race and I finished. I learned a whole lot. I learned that you really must train for hills. Specifically. Because if you don't you will get huge cramps in your quads for the last ten miles of the race. This is highly unpleasant and destroys your already lame time. Also, running a marathon while still recovering from the flu is a lot harder than normal. You will not get a PR this way. You will not even come close. You will be downright embarrassed by your time. This is, however, my favorite race ever to run. It's so amazingly beautiful. Every inch of the race is worth staring at for a million years. This was the one benefit of the long, long time it took me to finish this race. I got to look for longer. By mile 18 I had decided that I was taking a break from marathons. This was hard. Why was I doing this to myself? Why wasn't I better at this? But now it's Tuesday. And I'm itching to run. Weird. I will definitely try to get into this race next year just so that I can redeem myself. And I need to completely re-examine the way I'm training because I think I might be doing it wrong. I don't want to be the back-of-the-pack anymore, I aspire (for now) to the middle. But I will do it again, possibly soon, I just can't seem to stop. I will not, however, ever drive the 18 hours home straight through anytime soon. It was pretty awful towards the end, and I don't feel the same way about driving.