I feel good

I just did a 22 miler and I feel good! Which is good, because I needed this last long run to feel good after my last failure of a run. I should just go with it and be happy, but we all know that I like to over analyze. So during my run I thought about WHY I was feeling good.
1) I ate well yesterday. I ate 3 solid healthy meals with lots of fruits, veggies, and protein. I also drank a lot of water (thank goodness I had an aisle seat because that meant I had to get up to pee about 6 times).
2) I got a decent night's sleep in a bed. I only got about 6 hours, which is not a lot for me, but it was uninterrupted sleep in a bed. Quite a few of my long runs were done immediately after getting off a red-eye. Not fun.
3) I ate real food before the run and stuck to gel during the run. After listening to a few interviews with the Hammer Nutrition guys I decided to try their advice for a lot of my runs. They said that if you don't have 3 hours to digest a meal before you run, you should just have gel right before you go out so that your insulin levels don't have time to spike. Today, I had a small bowl of Kashi shredded wheat and Heart to Heart. I felt much better with some solid food and not weighed down at all. I've also been using Hammer Perpetuum blocks on previous long runs, based on the advice that it's beneficial to have some protein as well as carbs. I just found the blocks to leave a terrible chalky feeling in my mouth and not give me the energy I needed.
4) I slowed down. I re-read my Jeff Galloway book and actually paid attention to the fact that I should be running these long runs at 2-3 mins slower than race pace. I forced myself to slow down in the first 2 hours, and in the last hour I could actually pick it up instead of feeling like death.
5) The road surface was better and I wore my Yak Trax. It's been a full 24 hours since the end of the last storm so the roads were slightly better. The Yak Trax kept me from getting the hip flexor and foot pain I had last time. However, when I took off my shoes at the end I realized that my Yak Trax are shot. The wire is all falling off and the rubber bands have broken in quite a few places. Def need a new pair before Antarctica.

Just had a nice bowl of pasta and now I'm spending some well deserved time on the couch.