The finish line...

Well the race is over and we have our finisher’s medals.

The highlights:
~ I finished!

~The last mile was a steep downhill.

~ Hearing cheers from spectators I do not know but now love! What a motivator!

~ Hearing cheers from spectators I do know because it was fun to have your name yelled out.

~ I can walk today relatively free of pain (my thighs are a bit achy but that is all).

~ Realizing how great of an encourager Doug is when I just wanted to take a break and quit crawl walk.

~ Using my girl scouting techniques and adolescent locker room skills successfully to battle my clothes issues. I was wearing one of those tight, spandex-y long sleeve shirts under my t-shirt because I expected the weather to be cooler and realized after the first ½ mile I would need to take it off. Not wanting to stop at that point, I used the techniques mastered in early life to keep my parts private to remove the long-sleeve shirt without showing any extra skin. The guy next to me looked at me in amazement confusion.

~ No rain in spite of the 80% chance of t-storms.

~Winds that didn’t slow my shuffle and felt great against my sweaty skin (worth the tornado warning in my opinion).

~ Seeing so many people of all body shapes and athletic skills come together for a run and a good time.

~ Not feeling guilty about eating sweets the entire rest of the day and a few more today to top it all off.

The low points:
~ Miles 8, 9, & 10 stunk and made me regret not training harder. I irritated myself with my whining but couldn't help it.

~ Scrapping my “walk through the water stations plan” at the beginning of the race. I ended up doing that through the last three and I think it would have helped make miles 8-10 bearable if I had started sooner.

~ The humidity.

~ The heat.

~ Not making my time goal, which I thought was very realistic but obviously was not.

So overall, it was fun experience. While running, and then later while hobbling to the car, I swore I would stick to 10K races from now on, today I decided I would like to run another ½ marathon sometime. While I claim to not be competitive, I am with myself and I really want to try again to reach my goal time. But for now, I am going to cut back on my running and do more cross training for a couple of months until the weather gets warmer again and/or there are more daylight hours.

We came pretty close to my idea of surrounding the marathon winner at the end (the races finish in same spot) and getting in all his pictures... he ran his race 10 minutes faster than we ran ours but that race started 30 minutes later...