Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Hospital Hill Half Marathon.....I Did It!

Here we are after the race in our new shirts!

I'm so sorry it's taken me awhile to tell you all about the race....a nasty cold decided to attack all of us last Sunday/Monday (right after the race) so we were rather out of commission last week and spent a lot of time laying around sleeping and watching The Office and Shrek (Abigail's latest favorite). Jacob also missed all week of work, except for Monday, and I didn't run at all...it felt so weird and I felt so out of shape and fat for not running! Funny how that works, but I guess I haven't not run all week since back in February before I started running....seems like a lot longer ago then 4 months ago.

Ok.....THE MARATHON and all that fun stuff! We got to Kansas City early afternoon and met up with my mom and sisters at the hotel...it was definitely a ritzy hotel....the water bottles in the room were $4! Needless to say we didn't use any! :) We all went down to the Crown Center and picked up out packets....bib number, shirt, hat, sample stuff and all that jazz.....then we just checked out all the little stores and got all nervous looking at all the people that had come to pick up packets making the fact that we were going to be racing the very next morning a little more real! My mom and sisters offered to watch the girls so that Jacob and I could go out to dinner, which was really nice of them, especially since Bethany doesn't like it when I leave her so she cries a lot. It was nice for Jacob and I to be able to get away for a little while and we even got to walk around the shops and just hold hands and not have to worry about carrying two kids or keeping track of them. Right before we headed down to the start line!

We all tried to get to bed early since we were getting up around 5:30am.....I don't think anyone had any trouble getting up since we were all a little nervous! We got down to the start line around 6:30am and it was already HOT! It was quite the racing experience....hot, hilly and long! I started out too fast and got dehydrated, but I was able to finish, which for my first half marathon was all that I was wanting. Jacob was holding out his hand for me right before I crossed the finish line!

I had hoped for better time, but with the combination of hills and dehydration my time was slower than when I had run my 14 miles two weeks earlier....so yeah, that stunk, but I would do it again because it felt so good to accomplish something like that! The only disappointing thing, was for the last 3 miles I had been thinking about the chocolate milk at the end of the race....well, I cross the finish line, got my medal and a cold wet towel (which felt AMAZING!) and went down the line of drinks, bananas and snacks to find that there was no REAL chocolate milk! They had some Myoplex chocolate cream, but after trying one drink of that and finding it to be disgusting I threw it away....why would they have something that tasted like that to hand out....I mean really, real chocolate milk taste sooo much better and probably would have been a lot cheaper! So, yes we were all disappointed about the chocolate milk issue, but other people people were too so maybe next year they will fix it and go back to having real chocolate milk. :)

We were all hot, sweaty, stiff and sore, but really happy with ourselves too! The medals were pretty cool looking....makes me want to run more races so I can get medals and t-shirts! :) It really was a lot fun to get to do a race with my mom and two of my sisters and hopefully we can run a lot more together in the future....and at some point have all of us girls running races together!

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