Race Day

Thanks for all of your well wishes before the race. I will share some pictures with you in this post but I want to say first that it was AWESOME! What a rush it was to finally race after 10 weeks of training. I look back to my first run where I ran for 60 seconds and I thought I might need medical attention. And here I was yesterday, running in a real live race! Very rewarding.

Thank you to Lynette and Helen who showed up to the race early to look after the kids and help me prepare for the race. Lynette was also my talented photographer who was under SO much pressure to "catch the shots"! She probably had more stress than I did ;)

I had no idea what to do but I registered and they gave me a packet. Number goes on your front, microchip tag thingie gets attached to your shoe. There is a sensor under the finish line that records your time from this tag as you pass over it.



My friend and neighbor, Micah did the run too. Here we are before the race. Micah claims that if I put his picture on my blog, my traffic will increase by 1000%. So here it is, ladies:



They anounced that we needed to start "staging". I was like "What the heck does that mean?". Well, it just means to line up :) So here I am all staged and ready to go:



We had a few minutes to get ready. Here we are in our last few seconds. See me laughing? I think that was the moment that Micah told me about the traffic to my blog:



And we're off!



Micah and I ran together for about, oh, 3 seconds until he took off and left me in the dust. But then, he was all hopped up on supplements and energy drinks and I was running "au naturel", all me, baby!

Here is our cheering section. Do we have the cutest cheering section or what?



The run itself was great. I had been told it would be totally different running on race day and it is certainly true. You get so focused that you really don't feel too much pain, and you push yourself like you never thought you could. Being out there, just you and the road, it causes you to learn about yourself and what you are capable of. I know it sounds very hokey but it is all true. I never thought I would be a running race. If you had asked me a few months ago, I would have laughed.

So, about 24 minutes after I started, I was near the finish line:


And over the line in 24 minutes and 13 seconds!



Victory!
And a wonderful congratulations from the kids:


I need to go now so I can sign myself up for a 10k!