10k

These pictures are all out of order, I always forget to upload them in backwards order. This is me at the end, they handed me a bottle of water. I felt really good at the end, like maybe I could have kept running, gasp. I wasn't out of breath at all.

Running down the last hill to the finish line. And this hill is not even close to as steep as some of the other hills! I was expecting to finish somewhere around 1 hour 20 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes. But as I ran down the hill, I saw the clock and it said 1 hour 58 minutes! Aaack. Way slower than I'd hoped for. I crossed the finish line at 2 hours.

I fell twice. One time I caught myself and just had muddy hands, the second time I fell flat on my booty as the 1st place half marathon runner lapped me and ran past me! Kind of sad to be lapped. But hey, I didn't come in last place, so there you go. Good enough for me! There were times it was so muddy I kind of surfed down some of the hills.

I was pretty happy to be done.

My white shoes, not so white. My white socks, definitely not even close to being white. Pretty sure they'll never look white again. I had mud all up the side of my legs where I fell, but you can't really see it in this picture.

I arrived at Lynch canyon around 7:30 a.m. yesterday, it was pouring rain, and muddy, and I told Joel, I got my number and my t-shirt, maybe we can just go home and forget this race! But I got up the courage and went for it. I had on a shirt, a sweatshirt, and a windbreaker. I thought the windbreaker would be a little better keeping me somewhat dry underneath, fat chance. We walked down a hill to the starting line. I started off with my dad, but was very quickly shoveled backward and away from him. I thought about running fast to catch up, but then decided that I wanted to take it slow. So glad I did. I had no idea exactly how many hills we would be running up, honestly I didn't even think we'd be running up hills, just kind of assumed we'd be running around them! Wow, was I wrong, we ran straight up at least 4-5 hills. And I'm talking hills, not mounds. It was muddy and slippery, so a lot of the time I was running off the trail in tall grass so I could get some traction. But that made my shoes even worse because I had sloshy water in my shoes.

I ran alone pretty much the entire time. I passed some people, and others (a lot of others) passed me. There were times when I looked behind me and there was nobody in sight, and I looked in front of me and there was no one in sight. Sometimes I wondered if I was even on the right trail! It rained the ENTIRE time, not even a 5 minute break. The rain hurt my face a lot of the time too. And sometimes the wind got so intense it took everything I had to not fall over. My windbreaker didn't seem to help much because the wind made it look like I was a balloon about to fly away!

But despite all of the challenges of this race, I am so glad I did it. I trained for a couple of months, and followed through. Something that I have an extremely hard time doing when it comes to exercising. And I had so much fun that I thought I might even keep running and do another race, maybe even a half marathon. But my ankle is so stinking sore, and probably will be for 2 weeks, that I realized running is just too hard on my already not great joints. So now I'm in the market for a new exercise program, once again.