I have the best little brother ever.

So... I'm home, back in MA for the weekend, and it's the weekend of my first 20-miler. I was really nervous last night, and my dad made me eat a hamburger AND spaghetti.... I thought I was going to explode. Anyways, I mapped out my route last night, into town center, down the bike path to the neighboring town, into the old army base, 6-mile loop, and back home on the bike path again. My little brother, Sam, goes to school in the old army base and helped me plan out the route. Then, he told me that he'd wake up this morning, bike out to meet me at the 7-mile mark, and bike around the 6-mile loop with me. So anyways, I downloaded Harry Potter 7, started out at an easy pace, and by the time I got to the end of the bike path I was already dreading finishing the run. I was just so... alone. And sort of bored. So then I see my brother and dad in the car, and I felt a bit better. Sam had on his backpack full of bananas and water bottles for me. I told him that he didn't need to stay right next to me, considering that I was running so low that he almost had to WALK his bike... but he did. He stayed next to me, biking right alongside, chatting me up, for the whole 6 mile loop. And then the next 7 miles back. SAM BIKED NEXT TO ME FOR THIRTEEN MILES ON A SATURDAY MORNING. He was so awesome. And I didn't listen to Harry Potter at all once we'd met up. We talked the entire time. The surprising thing was, I was ABLE to talk that whole time while I was running... and that helped me to keep pace. It was so awesome and Sam was my hero today. Maybe for the next month even.

I ended up running really really slow today. When I started my run, I decided to go at it with this mindset: "This is all I have to do today. I just need to finish, there is no rush." So I tried to run at (what I thought was) about a 10-minute-mile pace. It ended up being more like 11-minute miles at the end, which is really slow-sounding to me, but I'm so glad that I did it now. It was a great learning experience, because at the end I didn't feel nearly as bad as I'd anticipated feeling, so now I know that I can definitely do that distance faster than I did today. The only thing I feel a bit disappointing... is that we took a little detour and I ended up only doing 19 miles... OH WELL!! Great run. Great, great run.