Up Hill Struggle

Phil & I did plan on running the 10 mile in Phoenix Park on Saturday morning as it is part of the Dublin Marathon race series, but due to lack of funds for the entry fee..... and lack of sleep all week, we could not & did not make it.
Still, we decided to do the same course a day later ourselves. Though as usual when we leave a run for the following day... we wished we had run on Saturday after all.
After waking up well into the afternoon it was now or never.
Phil happily munched his way through a piece of toast an hour before running, but seeing as it usually takes my food at least 2 hours to settle, I decided against breakfast.... bad idea!
We got to Phoenix Park about 2.30pm. Due to the lateness of the day, our lack of energy and my lack of food, we decided to run just 6 miles of the 10 mile course. We started off along a straight, down the main road. This was easy as it was only for 2 miles & its a very flat part of the park so no effort is required. But as it is a straight it is extremely boring & I find myself not wanting to look up ahead of me to see the stretch of road ahead of me yet to run.
Thankfully we turned the corner away from boredom & into a series of winding roads. Though I wasn't thankfull for long.
For the first half of the course we were running down hills & up slight hills so it wasn't too much of a strain, even though the sun was beating down on us, but come the second half of the course we encoutered, for the most part, continuous hills!
Nightmare. I wished I had eaten breakfast.
Just when I thought there may be an end to the hills we took a wrong turn & got ourselves lost! We had run out of the park & were running up a hill with no sign of another entrance to get back in. By time we reached the 58 minute mark & we got to a set of traffic lights without a clue where we were or how far we were from the car, I gave up. I was feeling quite light headed.
Phil had every intention of continuing with our run, hoping we would reach the exit eventually, but he stayed back with me. He was quite annoyed as he was convinced we had not run our scheduled 6 miles. I also was convinced of this as we had been running up hills at what I assumed was a slower pace than usual. Running a 10 minute mile we would have ran 6 miles in 60 minutes, but had we been running a 10 minute mile??
Phil wanted to run again but I refused, until we eventually found our way back into the park. A minute or so after running we thankfully saw my car in the not so far off distance.
We stretched a little & then decided to head home. Phil was feeling disappointed with our run, and his disappointment was starting to rub off on me. Just before we left to go home I decided I wanted to know the exact distance we ran & so drove the course counting the miles. We drove exactly 6 miles!
We were delighted we had drove the course. It instilled our confidence that we had reached our target for the day & rather than underachieving, we had ran 6 miles, a lot of which was uphill, in 58 minutes. Just under a 10 minute mile.
Still, we are well aware now that we have a lot of improving to do to be able to battle the hills on the marathon. Sunday has taught us that & im glad it taught us sooner rather than later. We have 10 full weeks left until race day to improve & though I am aware this is going to be even more hard work, I am confident with a lot of training & will power, we will do it.