Four 4-Mile Runs

So it was absolutely perfect timing that in my Facebook feed this morning, Women's Running magazine posted a link to an article about Mental Tricks For Long Runs. Thinking about running 16 miles gives me the excited "butterflies in your stomach" feeling, but it also scares the bejeezus out of me at the same time. In the article, the author breaks her long runs up into manageable distances. She took her 20 mile training run and divided it up into four 5-mile runs. You only concern yourself with the section of the run you are in. You do not think about the one you ran, nor the runs you still have left to do.

A 16 miler becomes four "easy peasy" 4-mile runs. After reading the post, I plotted our course. It's basically the half marathon course we've been doing. I am still hoping for those ocean breezes to make the run more pleasant. We will park in the same spot, run a 4 mile loop south, out over the bridge, around the beach and back to the car. From there, we will run 4 miles north to the Dunkin Donuts (using it only as a mile marker hopefully), zig zagging a bit through one development. The third 4 mile leg will be the reverse of the second, back to the car to refuel, and finally repeat the first leg out and around the beach for our final four miles.

When you take such a daunting task and nibble at it in human bites, it no longer seems that scary. I mean, I can't eat an entire layer cake in one bite, but if I take a forkful at a time, it will eventually make its way to my stomach, right? ;)

 Here's the course:

Gonna have to figure out how to get rid of the extra .08 miles! Ain't nobody got time for that!!

I truly am hoping this technique will do the trick. Why did it take so long to think of it this way, though? How do you get through long-ass runs?