Thirteen Point One

I did it!

I ran a half marathon yesterday and lived to tell the tale! :)

Way back in June, I emailed my friend Courtney about a crazy idea-- I asked her what she thought of training for a half marathon together (in spirit that is-- she lives in San Antonio, I live in Dallas). She enthusiastically replied YES! and we began running.

Yesterday was our true test of stamina. She had injured her leg in September, I had injured mine in October. She hadn't run a "long run" (more than 4 miles) in 2 months. I hadn't run more than 8 miles since the previous weekend. We weren't sure what amount of running we'd be able to do at the race but we ended up doing really well considering all the time we had taken off right before the big day. Of course, we still took some breaks to stretch, get water, walk when we felt our knees act up, but I'm proud of what we accomplished!

It was forcast to be in the 40's with rain, but we lucked out and it was about 54 and cloudy with a slight breeze-- enough to keep us cool once we were warmed up and running.

Below is a video of the course we ran-- it seems LONG (and it's only 6 minutes!). This was the video that made me nervous before the race. ;-)

Race day! This was seconds before we hopped into the sea of people. There were 33,000+ people running the 1/2 and full marathon. In the picture at the bottom left, you can see the people running ahead of us; behind us there were just as many people!

Troy tried really hard to get a good picture of Courtney and I getting to the finish but there was a huge mob of people so he ended up shooting this over his head and hoping for the best. Not bad! Courtney is in red with the white hat and I'm in the purple shirt.

 Heading for the finish!

 We did it!!

Look at the amount of people there were! This is not everybody-- there were still people crossing the finish line as we made our way out. If you think about 33,000 people being there plus each of them having at least 2 people there cheering them on, that's a lot of bodies in one place!

Here are my results. Not bad considering I was running out of practice and worried about my knee injury flaring up (and it didn't! Today I'm walking around fine-- in fact, tomorrow I'll probably be running again!)

Here's my "proof". ;-)