What does it take to run 18 miles?

Yesterday we found out.

Babysitter for 4 hours: Check! Jacey, my amazing, wonderful, super awesome friend (who will also be running on our Ragnar team this August) Agreed to take the girls for four hours in the morning so we could tackle our 18 miler. We are lucky to have such supportive friends out here!

Route: Check! We decided to run from Jacey's house down to Rice Lake (1 mile and 3/4) and then do three loops around the lake (5 mile loop) and run it back to Jacey's.

Pace and distance tracker: Check! We learned from our last long run, which was 14 miles, that pacing is everything!! We tried to push too hard and I barely made it through the last mile. This time we wanted to keep around a 9 minute 30 second mile pace so we wouldn't run out of gas. Taber wore his trusty Nike Plus iPod foot sensor to keep track of how far and how fast we were going. Thanks to the sensor we made sure we covered the full 18 miles and our average pace was 9 minutes 36 seconds. Not too shabby!

Fuel during the run: check! When you're running for 3 hours straight you burn up a lot of calories! (According to the Nike plus we burned 2,133 during our run) So to replace those calories and keep our energy up we carried Gu energy gels, which are basically little packets of syrup packed with glucose, electrolytes, carbs, etc... We choked a packet of that down every hour and it really kept us going.

Water: Check! Since you don't exactly have water stations on a training run they now sell these lovely little water belts that are a little pricey, but definitely my favorite splurge (besides my shoes) for running. Taber wore the belt loaded with two bottles of powerade and two bottles of water. We also stashed a bottle of powerade on the trail. We ended up drinking every last drop of liquid we brought, (which necesitated a bathroom stop for me at mile 7) but it was great to be able to stay hydrated.