September 18th

Matt and I woke up really early again. 2nd to last 20 miler for Chicago. We ran 3 miles to the gazebo to meet up with the rest of our crew. We got there to find about 10 other people that were also planning on running. We stretched for a bit and then took off. We started off at a decent pace and soon the guys and girl seperated. I ran with Don, Colin, Matt, Matt Hogan, Dustin, and some other kid whose name I forgot.

We got a pretty good pace, Matt H left us around 2 1/2 miles for ROTC training. At 3 miles, it was just me, Matt, and Dustin. We were feeling good and headed out down Linden. Pace was pretty quick still and around 5 or 6 miles out, Dustin headed back to campus while Matt and myself kept on going. Just before getting into Linden, my legs started to get a little heavy. We ran past a dead toad, stopped to check it out which kinda killed my legs. At the turnaround we made a brief stop for h20 and gels. I was not drinking too much but took some water here. We were pretty beat, but continued to push the pace. Running back down Linden was pretty rough, temps weren't too bad, I was just tired.

When getting back onto the trail, Matt said he wasn't doing the whole 20 due to IT/knee/shin issues. Not gonna lie, this kinda motivated me. But I still needed to finish so i slowed a little. Matt kept up the pace so I had to run hard to keep up. I filled up on h20 just past northtown. Just before we got to Raab, Matt changed his mind for the umpteenth time and decided to keep running. He was moving faster than me at this point so I tried unsuccessfully to catch up. He got a couple yards on me and I did everything possible to keep up. When we got to the quad, I was about 10 strides behind him, but by Adelaide he started to pull away. My body was getting near shut down/dehydration at this point and I started slowing down. Gregory was rough, but at Parkside things got a little ugly. I shuffled the last mile and lost a lot of ground. Matt was prob about a half mile ahead of me and things got so bad I started walking over last 1/2 mile. Finished and was thoroughly exhausted