Running Chick

I suppose it's about time to write my race weekend report.  Okay, here goes.  I ran, my calf muscles didn't fall off and I earned myself a nice little PR along the way. 

Ha ha, just kidding.

Friday.  We arrived at High Cliff State Park around 4:00, set up camp and head to the expo.  We would have arrived earlier in the day, but we got a late start because Josh decided to buy this pimpin' new truck before we left.




We picked up some goodies at the expo.  I got The Stick, a new running top and a cool license plate frame.




Silly, huh?  Oh well.  We runners are.

The rest of Friday was spend killing time at the mall and eating at Texas Roadhouse.  Yummy.

Saturday.  Shop, shop, shop.  That's pretty much all we did for the entire day.  I made out like a serious bandit at TJ Maxx and added a few good pieces to my winter running collection.  Since I only started running in the winter last year, I only had a few things I could wear that could stand up to the cold and sweat.  By the end of the week, those things could go running all by themselves!

We had dinner at Koreana, which was delicious.  We had a sushi plate which consisted of tuna, salmon, squid, red snapper, mackerel, eel, and shrimp and I had Bi Bim Bahb rice bowl.  Yes that is a fried egg on the top.  Deelish!



Sunday.  Race day!  Got up early and had a bagel, then headed out to the starting line.  Silly me, I had a complete brain freeze and sent us to the site of the expo and not the site of the starting line!  WHOOPSIE!  What can I say, I was nervous about my legs falling off.  Since my little snafoo cost us about 30 minutes, the shuttle buses ended up arriving before us and all the indoor bathrooms were packed.  So we stood in the port-a-potty line for 20 minutes before we got to the front of the line.  Note to the race directors for next year:  DO NOT LOCK HALF OF THE PORT-A-POTTYS ON RACE DAY.  Sheesh.

There were a little over 3,000 people participating in this event.  1000-ish in the marathon and the rest in the half.  We were all packed into the start corrall and when the gun took off, it took me 3 minutes to cross the starting mat.

I spent the first few miles dodging and weaving my way through the sea of walkers (seriously people, do you have to walk four or five abreast in the middle of the road?  And, why are you lined up before the runners?  The rules clearly state that you need to be behind us.  Good job and all, but CRIPES.) and slower runners (that was me last year!)  Things cleared out a bit when the marathoners split away from those of us running the half. 

The first five miles was like sensory overload for me.  Tons of spectators, tons of runners, lots of stuff going on.  People were pretty chatty at this point, so I talked to a lot of people.  Crowd support was incredible.  We ran past a local church where the entire congretation was standing by the road singing hymns.  Lots of people had dragged their lawn chairs down close to the road and cheered as we went by.  Some just sat there and looked at us with bewilderment.  Funny.  Anyway, before I knew it, I was at seven miles.

Which is about when things started to fall apart.  My troublesome calves, which were doing okay, decided that they'd had enough and they started to get angry.  I had some stuff called Bio-Freeze with me but I didn't want to put it on myself because I didn't want to risk getting it in my eyes.  Josh, who found me somethere around 7.5 miles along the course, rode his bike up to the 9 mile mark and smeared it all over my lower legs.  That stuff actually worked, for about 2 miles.  Then I basically just gutted it out for the remaining miles.  My pace, which was averaging around 10:40-ish per mile was dropping quickly, but I was determined to finish under an 11-minute mile.  Man, I had to dig deep to keep up that pace.  The last 3/4 miles seemed to go forever and I was so happy to round the corner and see those balloons!!

I ended up with a PR of 2:23:27 and averaged 10:57 miles.  Last year, I ran this race in 2:39:48 and averaged
12:12.  How's that for improvement?

We headed back to the park and changed spots, then headed out for some more shopping and some good Mexican food and margaritas, woo!

We came home on Monday and I promptly got the cold from Hell and missed three days of work.  After running 13.1 miles two days before, on Tuesday, I couldn't walk from the living room to the kitchen without being out of breath.  How retarded is that!

I picked up a cold on the way home and I'm not feeling very bloggy so for now I'll just post my official results from the race on Sunday.