Scratch 13.1 off the bucket list!

About two months ago, I was sitting at one of B's football practices, chatting with one of the ladies I go to church with, and she told me that she was going to run the Baltimore Half-Marathon. with another sister in the ward. Both ladies have 10 years on me, one of them had a baby in May. I figured that I had no excuse not to, and that the motivation to work towards something would get me more physical (also to use the gym more often.) So I went home and paid for the race. (as a side note, it just seems so strange to me that I PAID for this experience... in sweat and blood and some tears and a whole lot of ibuprofen.



Yesterday I had the worst migraine I've had in a long long time. I'll spare you the details, but my bosses were wondering if I was going to make it downstairs for the night much less to the starting line this morning. but I did! Even last night as I was drifting off to sleep all I could think was "I do not want to run 13.1 miles tomorrow.) But I did!

You know when you're a kid and before you go anywhere your mom says "Go potty" and you say "but I don't have to go" and she says "you need to try." This is a principle to apply to running! We walked past the porta-potties and Jill said "anybody need to go" and I said no, but I should have tried. By the time we got to the starting line I kind of had to go, then with the running/jostling I REALLY had to go... Luckily there was a porta-potty about a mile and a half in, but seriously, I was looking for heavily wooded areas. Who said diamonds were a girl's best friend, nope! Today it was a porta-potty.

This is the start for the half marathon, and I am somewhere in this mass of people! Exciting right? There were over 9,000 people who completed the half marathon today, which is really impressive to me. Or maybe scary that there are that many people willing to put themselves through that!




I saw some pretty amazing things while running. Including people tossing their cookies in grass and in the gutter (which I thought was very considerate of him). People running without shirts on, I was passed by LOTS of people, and even one girl who's shirt said that she had lukemia (and was running a marathon, what?!)  There was even a guy running the FULL marathon who was pushing his friend in a wheelchair type thing (one of those sporty ones, you know?) Like this:

That's real love!

I met some really nice people who were super nice, and then there were the spectators. They were so great! They yelled for you, gave you high-fives, and candy (yes I took candy from a stranger, out of a big bowl that they were holding out to me that hundreds of other people had put their nasty hands into... I blessed it before I ate it.) They had live bands (a few of them), and people dressed up in their Halloween costumes
There were some pretty awesome signs too, like these (not actual pictures of MY race, but actual signs I did see):

     

Then there was one that said "It's just like having a baby-- just keep pushing!" and another that said "Will you Marry me?" Cute huh?

And the T-shirts were pretty awesome. Some of them made me sad-- like the people running for charity, cancers and such (especially the babies with cancer), and the wounded warrior project runners, and the people running in memory of... but some made me laugh, like this one:

(If you can't read it, it says "Dear God, Please let there be someone behind me to read this."

So the question is, how did I do? (I know you're all dying to know). Well, I didn't do as good as I wanted to. I missed my goal (of 3 hours) by only 15 minutes. And considering I was close to skipping the whole thing, I did AWESOME. It was my first race and I FINISHED, running. (Kind of out of desperation and sheer will power rather than having any strength left.) Some company took pictures and promised to send me the link so you can see how awesome I looked...
Update, I am putting up this picture, taken with my cell phone a few minutes post race, but if you think I'm sharing the link of me running with you, you're crazy! Suffice it to say that the following picture is a fairly accurate representation of how the other pictures looked (Except where it says what "I'm pretty sure I look like" it should say "what I have photographic proof that I look like"

But here's what I looked like afterwards:

My time was: 3:15:09, I finished 8616th out of all the half marathoners, 4949th out of all the women runners, and 1316th out of all runners between age 25 and 29... not too shabby for my first race (and if you want to see how many there were total, I'm not going to tell you! You can count the people in the picture.)

The sad news: someone had misplaced the medals for the half marathon when I came through the finish line! So they'll mail them to me. I took a picture with my friend's to send to people, but I'll have to have a photo shoot with the shirt and the medal when it gets here (they're going to mail them out this week or sometime...)

But it'll look like this:

Sweet huh?

And the really crazy part... is that I'm already planning on doing it again. I know, I know...

I think I've reached my goal: I've become a little addicted to running. 

YAY! (and eew sick at the same time.)