My Sunday 13.3 Mile Training Run

This past Sunday afternoon...after slogging it out in the rain Friday night and most of Saturday...the skies over Gainesville miraculously cleared up, with moderately-warm temperatures and relatively low humidity.  After cancelling my planned long-distance Saturday training run because of the adverse weather, I found myself stepping out my front door to try an unplanned Sunday run...and my goal was no less than to cover a course of 13.3 miles, slightly longer than a half-marathon.  I figured it might be more challenging since I didn't prepare myself for a long-distance run the previous day as I customarily do through carb-loading (usually with pancakes, pizza, or pasta), but I was game anyway.  I continued to employ the strategy that marathon guru Jeff Galloway suggests, involving regular short walking breaks interspersed throughout the run.  This I did and easily surpassed my 10.0 and 10.6 mile runs accomplished September 28th and October 12th, respectively.  But as I approached the 12.5 mark near the very end, I hit the proverbial runner's wall when my energy level plummetted and I was struggling step-by-step to finish...which I somehow accomplished.  That's a marked improvement from last week's run when I ran out of steam after about 9 miles, though.  I kept a slow, regular pace as I listened to a mix of songs I like (many of them on my personal "top 500" list that I'm gradually unraveling on this blog each Monday) and carried a bottle of Zero-Sugar Powerade, which I sipped during those brief breaks.  My course took me up and down most of the residential streets of my Northwood Pines and the adjacent Northwood Oaks subdivisions up here in far northern Gainesville, along with a 3-mile stretch on the sloping NW 53rd Avenue walkway between NW 34th and 43rd Streets.  For a couple of hours following the run I experienced some painful cramping in my toes, feet, and calves...which gradually subsided into a general lower-body soreness.  Now a couple of days later I'm "good to go" and looking forward to the next weekend trek.  I'm planning to enter Gainesville's Tom Walker, Jr. Memorial Half-Marathon, to take place on Sunday morning, November 10 at Boulware Springs Park and the Hawthorne Trail southeast of Gainesville.  I've twice run that race before a few years ago, but at age 63 my strategy has been shifting away from fast finishing times toward that of successfully covering the distance...my fastest-ever half-marathon time, in March 2013, was 1:50:53 at the Orange Blossom Half-Marathon in Tavares.  My time on this 13.3-mile training run was considerably (and deliberately) slower at 2:40:00.  I'm wondering whether or not I should continue to ramp up the distance on my weekend training runs to possibly get myself into marathon territory, but at least for now I'll be focusing on getting through the next half-marathon, which will be my twelfth race at that distance since I began running them in 2010...