DANG you guys. Last weekend I ran 13.1 miles (or per my app, 13.48).
My goal was to do it in 2 hours and 20 minutes. I realized pretty quickly that my app was off by a bit (and every mile it got off a little more), so that was pretty frustrating. I took a screen shot at 13.1 miles just out of curiosity, and that was 2:19:16 – so just under my goal. I’ll take it. 😉
In reality, my final finish time was 2:22:49, so about 13 seconds per mile off my goal pace. Really, my first 10 miles were great, mile 11 was a little tougher, and then mile 12 I absolutely CRASHED AND BURNED. Ha! It was mostly uphill, it was getting a lot hotter at that point, and I just mentally and physically hit a wall. I walked most of that mile, and then for mile 13 I ran/walked in. Unfortunately I totally missed my goal because of that little mental lapse, but honestly, I’m so SO damn proud of myself. 3 months ago I couldn’t run ONE mile without stopping, and I ran the first 10 miles last weekend with only a couple seconds of walking here and there at water stations. That’s pretty darn awesome!
Overall, there were 260 racers, and I finished in the top half of all the women overall (75/160) and in the top half of my age division (27/59) which I am more than happy with. I’m still in shock that I stuck with this training program and actually became a runner for the summer. Ha!
The other IF blog friends I ran this race with did fantastic as well, coming in right around their goal times (which varied from 2:00 to 2:45). I love that we are all very different runners, but we all stuck it out and trained all across the country (from Cali to Colorado to Iowa) and did this together. Fantastic.
Honestly, the entire weekend we had a lot of fun hanging out, catching up (or in one woman’s case, meeting for the first time), relaxing in the sun and walking around town and just connecting with people whose words we have read for years. Three of us were chatting the final morning as we walked back to our cars, and we realized that we had all met 20-30+ bloggers in “real life” at this point. It’s really so, so cool to be able to connect with people all over the world because of our writing. 🙂
So there ya go – it was truly a crazy fun (hard, challenging, rewarding) weekend spent with some really great women, and I am so grateful that I took a leap of faith and decided to do something really outside of my comfort zone in order to be a part of it!