It's Over!!!

Well, the race is over - thank goodness!!! It's amazing how long it feels even though I attempted to train for it :) It actually went really well, and I'm not very stiff, and didn't need to down the Advil - which is a plus. The night before the race we went to dinner with our friends Jessica and Mark to carbo-load at Old Spaghetti Factory, which was a lot of fun. The race went really well, except I didn't drink enough prior to the race, and got dehydrated. There is a HUGE difference in the temperature running 2 hours later in the morning than I usually do, so I really wasn't prepared for the heat on top of not drinking enough. Hence, I ended up throwing up after the race which wasn't much fun, but after that I felt fantastic! There was tons of food afterwards: drinks, oranges, sandwiches from Subway, the huge cookies from Costco, but since I wasn't feeling up to par, I didn't touch much of anything. Jeff and Baby Belly came to cheer me on about half way through the race and at the end, which was so much fun. There was actually a big group of us that knew each other running the race, which was a lot of fun.

Here's a picture of the three of us who trained with each other for the past 8 weeks. I will miss getting up at 5:45 AM - 4 days out of the week to run together ......well, sort of :) Seriously, without these girls I don't think I would have ever tackled anything like this.

And finally, the finish line! The last 5 miles seriously killed me. I had a really hard time finding my pace. It's really hard when you are surronded by people all around you running faster and slower than you - it really threw me off. I ended up needing to walk 30-40 seconds of every mile after mile 8 - grrrrr. Staying hydrated kicked my butt. I would have like to have gotten a better time, but at least I ran it in under a 10 minute mile - which was my goal. Overall, I am so glad it's over, but I am also so happy I did it! It was a big accomplishment for me - and seeing it through to the end made me very happy.