After my mini-meltdown about the half-marathon last week, I’m feeling a lot more positive about things this time. It may have something to do with all the marathon excitement that populated the internet in the past few hours (with a friend finishing the marathon in Porto – his first marathon!), people I have met finishing the NYC marathon and other cool stuff like finding out that the fourth place belonged to a Portuguese lady (is she fast or what?). I mean, between the article about the couple who got married *while* running a marathon and this great read about the un-sporty turned runner, there’s a lot of running goodness out there on the interwebs right now.

I am sure it this positive vibe I’m getting is also somewhat related to the fact that, after running 6km on Saturday and feeling like crap, I ran 16km on Sunday and felt amazing. Not sure what happened there but boy was that a good run! I think that’s exactly what I needed: a good long run to put my mind at ease and remind me that, yeah, I’ve done it before so I know it’s not impossible.

On sunday morning, in spite of the cloudy (sometimes rainy) weather, S. and I headed over to St Heliers for what we thought would be a 12km (maybe 14km) run. Our goal, when we started, was to run non-stop for 45 minutes, then stretch, turn around and run another 45 minutes to where we’d started.

The temperature was just ideal and all the other runners around really added to our motivation. Once our 45 minutes were up, we decided we could keep going a bit longer and ran another 5 minutes to the port, where we sat on the grass overlooking the shipping containers and had a good stretch. Then we turned around and ran another 50 minutes back, with a total of 16km (according to her app) or 16.25km (according to mine) done. The best part? We felt great afterwards! And may I add this was a mere 30 something hours after my epic running fail when I met up with her, ran 1km (yes, one!) and had to walk home with some sort of weird stomach pain? I was glad to see that hadn’t stuck around.

The half-marathon is now less than two weeks away and I’m feeling a LOT better about it. We’re making a girls’ weekend out of it, staying at a cool hotel and heading to the street party that the town is putting on after the half-marathon too. I don’t know what I’m more excited about but the important thing is that I no longer feel like Kerikeri is the place where I am going to die. Win!

On a less positive note, I’m so far behind on NaNoWriMo it’s not even funny! I wrote about 300 words last night and felt myself hitting a bit of a dead-end in the story so decided to sit there and let it simmer for a while. Time to stop over-thinking it and get that word count up, seeing as that’s what this challenge is all about anyway.