321delish

I learned this weekend that Florida is not just beaches and palm trees.

No my friends, Florida actually gets pretty rural and HILLY! It’s no Colorado or anything of that sort, but if you travel about 40 minutes away from the coast, the geography looks quite a bit different.

On Saturday, I went up to San Antonio, FL to run some hills with Meghann and Mary. And by “some” I mean 17 miles of hilly terrain. Ouch.

Ok, so it might not look THAT bad to some of you, but I certainly haven’t done any hill training up to this point.

Our carload of runners (Me, Meghann, Mary, her hubby Marcus, and his friend Anthony) arrived in the tiny town of San Antonio (who knew there was a San Antonio in FL?) a little before 8.

Anthony is pretty speedy, so he took off for 22(!). Mary’s also quite the running rockstar, so she took off on her planned 20. Marcus is injured, so he was super sweet and biked along with Mary 🙂 Before taking off with Mary, he gave us some directions for the route. We were pretty sure we got it, and took off on our own.

We were pretty good with the directions until about mile 6ish. We stopped to look at the map and recognized some of the landmarks that Marcus had told us about. We took a right as we thought we should, and I thankfully breathed a sigh of relief- to the left there was what looked to be a SUPER steep hill. Glad THAT wasn’t included in our run…

Shortly thereafter, we randomly ran past a zoo!

We stopped to take a few pictures before continuing on our way. Shortly thereafter, we came across an intersection that we thought we were supposed to hit a little later in our run. We kept moving, and after one more consult with Google Maps, we determined we definintely had missed a turn somewhere. At least we knew where we were, and decided that we’d probably hit our starting point at around mile 14, and then we’d just keep running for another 3 miles. We later found out that we actually were supposed to run up that super steep hill we had avoided. Whoops. It wasn’t intentional, I promise!

I had run out of water at mile 9ish, so was thankful that we’d be at a water fountain in 4 short miles. Unfortunately those miles seemed to last forever. I knew I relied on water a lot, but I didn’t realize how much until this run! I wanted to take a gel at mile 10ish, but without water, I held off until 14. I was DRAGGING at this point.

After our pit stop to hydrate, Meghann said that we only had three more miles to go. Only 3, I can do this. By this point, the clouds were clearing and the sun was starting to beat down on us. I can do this, I kept repeating to myself. Those may have been the slowest three miles ever, but I did them! 17 miles- CHECK!

Side note- This is Meghann’s watch. I would have taken a picture of my watch, but unfortunately, at one of the “map check” stops, I stopped my watch and forgot to restart it until a little over half a mile later. Then, I stopped it again at the water stop, and again, forgot to restart it until the watch beeped at me to let me know it was going into power save mode. DOH!

We did it! I’m so glad I had Meghann there to push me through those miles. I wouldn’t have done them alone! Thanks Meghann!

Hopefully, this run will help me to prepare for this:

At least the second half doesn’t look as bad as the first (minus that sneaky little uphill right at the end!)

I got home and made me a protein-packed omelette:

I filled it with some peppers, spinach, salsa, goat cheese, and some leftover “Mojito beans” and quinoa I had made for dinner the other day. I wouldn’t normally think to put beans in an omelette, but hey, it worked!

Topped with some Greek yogurt and cilantro, it was a perfect post-run meal!

I spent the rest of the day reading by the pool. Ah, March in Florida. I like it! 🙂

Question of the day: How was your weekend?