Longer than last week

Miles: 6.7 (warm-up included)
Pace: 9:55???
So last week I ran farther than I ever had before, and today I pushed that distance a little more. I was intent on definitely hitting 6 miles, and I decided to go for an extra .2 to make it a 10K distance. I looked up the route ahead of time on Gmaps Pedometer and found that the 3.1 mile mark is a very easily recognizable spot, so I knew exactly where to turn around.
It was a beautiful day for a run, and I started out a little faster than last week. The first mile seemed to go by very quickly, and I felt pretty good. It was a little warmer than I would have preferred, but I can't really complain. By mile 3, I was feeling tired, and my feet started to hurt. My trail shoes are too narrow for my toes and cause some pretty nasty blisters, and today was no exception. I kept going because I really want to condition myself to run longer. I've been reading Runner's World and so many running blogs about marathon training and hearing about my friend's half-marathon training, that my mindset about not being physically able to run long distances is changing. When I had run 5 and a half miles 2 years ago, I was in pretty good shape (it was shortly after the 5K PR that I still haven't broken yet), but my knees ached by the time I was done, and I thought that running that distance or further would be too taxing on my body. Today and last week I ran more and my knees felt fine. With time and a lot of training (and shoes that don't destroy my skin), I really could run much further. And that all starts now with my everyday runs. So I tried my best to ignore the blisters and just run. Chic Runner, whose blog I started following last month, ran her first marathon today, so when I felt particularly tired, I thought about how she was running 20 more miles than I was. The first post of hers that I had ever read was actually of her first 20-mile run, so I told myself that I could definitely do 6.2.
At about 5.2 miles, my stopwatch said it was somewhere above 51 minutes. At about half a mile later, it was above 56 minutes. I assume that my ending time was about 61 minutes, but I can't be sure, because for some reason, the watch decided to reset itself 2 minutes before I ended. Yep. I didn't look at it until I stopped it, and it said 2:00. I don't know what happened, but I do know that I was faster by about 15 or 20 seconds per mile than I was in my long run last week, which is a really nice improvement.

On a different topic, I went for a bike ride on the trail on Friday that was really nice. It was really dirty, but really nice. At one point, I caught sight of this heron sitting on a rock in the river, and I climbed down a path from the trail and stood on a rock to get this picture. I say that the ride was really dirty because it had rained a lot in the preceding days and I rode through a lot of deep puddles that spanned the width of the trail. I had mud splatters everywhere, even on the top of my helmet! It's funny, though: the mud didn't make me look any more sporty or outdoorsy. I just looked like I had little polka dots all over me. I don't think that I can shake the librarian look, even while wearing spandex.