To tell you about my 30k (18 miler) race, I need to start at the beginning.  The beginning being Friday, the day I decided to drive up north to a cottage with friends, for drunken good times the night before a huge (huge!) distance race.

The decision wasn’t an easy one, but ultimately I decided that as I’m leaving Canada in 31 days for my Big Trip I should try squeeze in every second of debaucherous times with my friends. Makes sense, right? Right. [[hussshhh. It did at the time]]

The race I was running was a night run - it started at 5:30pm on the Saturday, which would allow me to make some poor life/running/training decisions the night before, yet still have plenty of time to drive home and take a nap, before heading downtown for the race.

As per the usual, Friday night was awesome-awesome. I had set some ground rules for myself in an attempt to help myself stumble through, what I had resigned to be, a rough run. Number one? No drinking. Number two? Go to bed before 3am. Number three? Try stay off your feet. 

I think it was around 2:45am, when I looked down at a rum n’ coke in hand, and was dancing with my friends to LMFAO’s Everybody Shuffling (which btw, I really want to learn the dance to in the video). Needless to say I broke all 3 rules…

I woke up around 9am on Saturday, feeling exhausted. My legs actually hurt from dancing, and I had a wicked headache <— awesome ((but I should note: not from drinking. I think I only drank 2 drinks over the whole night. I’m not that stupid.)). I hung-out with my friends for an hour, or two, fueled up on bacon, eggs, sausages (omigod where was my carb-loading?!), Timmy’s coffee, and then made the drive home to become one with my bed for a glorious (glorious!) nap. [[I should note, I was sooooo tempted to skip the run, and just stay up north. Soooo tempted]]

I awoke from my nap 40 minutes after my apparently-not-set 3:20pm alarm (it went off at 3:20am this morning) to my mom frantically yelling at me that I was late, and my friend was here.  OMG this is going to be the worst race ever! EVER!!

I was out the door and on the road within 10 minutes of waking up, blasting air conditioning around me to try and disguise the 30° (which felt like 40°) weather, on route to what I thought would surely be a horrific race…