Welcome Back Little GU

I remember laying on my sister's bed in Logan about 5 or 6 years ago after my first marathon, feeling so sick, and swearing I would never eat another GU again. If you're wondering what the heck GU is, it's basically a toothpaste-like substance that is full of sugar, carbs, and electrolytes designed to give you quick digestible energy. I get food aversions a little too easy, so the GU got blamed for my nausea following my first marathon since that was about all I had eaten that day. Well, 7 marathons later and who knows how many half-marathons, I was still hanging on to that food aversion and promise that I would never eat another GU again. I tried several other sports energy supplements, most of them being just as sickeningly sweet and unappealing as the GU. I love sugar every other time, except the time that I actually need to eat it, during races. I finally realized that running and food were never going to be a happy mixture for me, so I might as well try the GU again since it seems to be the most quickly digested and easiest to eat.

So...Last Saturday as I stepped up to the starting line of the San Antonio 25K endurathon (15.5 miles), I had a chocolate GU in my pocket. Around mile 6, I hesitantly forced half of that gooey mixture in to my mouth, and to my great surprise, I actually liked it!! Hence the title of this post.

I'm excited to welcome GU back in to my life, and hopefully it will lead to more races like this one. I felt really good the whole race, and I didn't even hit the wall. That's a very rare occurrence for me in long races. It seems like I'm almost always hobbling in to the finish barely able to stand up straight. I was shocked by how good I felt. It also helped that the weather was perfect, and I had just gotten some sweet new shoes that were lighter than the ones I had been training in.

I was also really happy with my time. I thought I would be around an 8:00 min. pace, but ended up being about a 7:20 pace. That made me really optimistic about geting a PR in Boston. I'm really hoping for my best marathon time this April. I can't believe that a marathon in still 11 more miles though! Yuck.

I got a cool tile souvenir for getting first in my age group. Boston was very possessive of it as you can tell by this picture. It was funny. He wouldn't even let me hold it.

This was a great first race of the year! I hope it's a good predictor of how Boston will be! Training time is a lot harder to come by these days, especially now that the jogging stroller days are over. I've been doing a lot of training at night, and recently started trying to do some early mornings before Scott leaves for work, but he leaves at 6:45, so the early mornings are going to take some serious mental pep talks. It's worth it to me though to get up early and not have to leave right when Scott gets home from work. I like being able to have dinner and just relax at home with the fam during the nights. My goal this week is to get up at 5:00 Monday thru Thursday and go before Scott goes to work! We'll see how it goes!