About 3 hours after the race. I'd had one sip of beer but was so tired pretty sure I was drunk. This from my last blog post:  "Anything under 3:29:45 is a win." 

I like to cut it close. I finished Saturday's Richmond marathon with a time of 3:29:32, shaving off a whopping 13 seconds from my last marathon. 

In fact, I am THRILLED with that time. This was a challenging run for me. It's the the first marathon I've ever run where I struggled more mentally than I did physically. And let me tell you... I struggled physically as well. 

If you look at my mile splits, I was running pretty strong until mile 18. (I fell apart at mile 20, but we'll get to that in a minute.) But even before I got to mile 6, I was not in the game. I remember passing the mile 4 marker, picturing the 22 miles still in my future and thinking, "I don't want to do this."  

That's not good.