An Unbelievable 18 miles

this 18 miles was unbelievable for sure. but not because it was so fast or anything like that. it was unbelievable to me because i did it on a treadmill. yes, this is more than double in distance than any previous run on a treadmill for me. it is also my longest completed training run ever. i know running on a treadmill isn't nearly as tough as running on the road, especially with the hills around here. however, i did the entire run at no less than a 2% incline. my walk breaks were scheduled at 5, 10, and 15 miles. the half mile before all of those breaks i raised the incline to 3% along with the 1/2 mile before the finish. so i basically ran 2 miles at a 3% incline and 16 miles at a 2% incline. i kept the pace at 5.9 mph except for the walk breaks and the last mile and a half. the first 2 walk breaks were at 4mph and the last one was at 3mph. however, i was feeling so good, the last mile and a half i ran at 6.5mph. i did have some trouble with the timing since after 1 hour my treadmill only keeps record of the minutes. also, at an hour and a half my treadmill stops and i had to restart it, which i did rather quickly, especially since i wasn't expecting it to quit. i had started the chrono on my watch to time me after the hour mark but i stopped it around mile 10 when i had to switch dvds and i forgot to restart it when i began running again. so, i finished the run somewhere around 3 hours and 9 minutes, maybe a little faster. that is a 10:30 pace. i was pretty excited about that, even though i was on a treadmill. 2 weeks ago i ran 14 at a 10:15 pace and think i could have done a little better, a week before that i ran 15 miles at a 10:31 pace and was pretty surprised. so not too bad. i think i could have ran this one a little faster since i was able to speed up considerably for the last mile and a half, even with a 1% increase in elevation for the last 1/2 mile. oh, the reason i ran this on a treadmill is because we had an 80 chance of rain/thunderstorms all afternoon. it did clear up around 4pm, giving me plenty of time to run during daylight, but i already had in my mind i was running it on a treadmill and i couldn't change my mind. i watched a dvd of some bowhunting shows for the first 10 miles and then a movie called "Unstopable" for the rest. they kept me occupied enough. thought of the day: most of the time things don't go the way i think they should. good thing...i am not that smart.