October 11th, 2010:

Today has been a super busy day! After getting back into town last night I left all of my stuff in the dining room because I was too exhausted to unpack!

So today that meant I had a lot of straightening up and cleaning to do. Plus we were having small group tonight and needed get the house in order.

There are a couple things I love about small group. One is my friends! I love each and every person that comes to our small group and I love when we get together.

The other thing I love is that it forces me to clean my house My house is by no means “dirty” but it tends to get cluttered up from all of our stuff so it is good to have motivation to de-clutter and dust.

Anyway, because of all the cleaning and the babies never napping at the same time today there was no time for blogging Since I have not done to great in the food department today I am going to reflect a little on yesterdays race.

Regular blogging will resume tomorrow….

For now…RACE DAY!

Sunday morning started off at 5:00 a.m. with Jennifer and I eating breakfast, drinking coffee and catching up before the race. Jennifer is a great friend of mine that I have gotten to know through my husband. Jen and Lew went to high school together and have remained great friends. We have been on two snowboarding vacations together and when I think of pushing myself to do new things she is just the person I think of. I have never been snowboarding without her (what am I going to do this year Jen?). We always push each other to new limits on the mountain and I was so happy to get to experience my first half marathon with her as well!

From the moment I signed up for the race my goal was to finish in less than 3 hours. I knew it was going to be hard to train for the race because of having the twins with me all the time. I found it hard to train on the treadmill at the Y while they were in the childcare and it was impossible to run a long distance with a double jogging stroller so the most of my training was done doing strength training, spin class and working out with my trainer. I probably ran less than 10 times while “training”. I did a five mile run, a 7 mile walk/run, and a 12 miler (ran 10, walked 2). Other than that the only running I did was a few 3 milers and a 4 miler on the treadmill.

My race time was around 2 hr. 57 min.! I was so excited! Considering the week before it took me over 3 hours to do 12 miles I was very pleased!

Here is a quick break down: I ran all of the first 8 minus walking for water breaks.

After mile 8 my ankles, hips and knees were aching and I could feel the blisters coming up on my feet. To make matters worse there was no one around me! The worst part of this race was there were not many people. I would think less than 200 hundred participants so for the second half of the race I could only see 2-3 people around (at sometimes no one). This was hard for me because I was on a greenway surrounded by tress and couldn’t see anyone! I think if I ever run another race it will have to be a large race.

After mile 8 I developed a run/walk strategy. I would walk for a couple minutes at each mile marker and then ran to the next mile marker. That lasted until around mile 10. I then walked the majority of miles 10-12. The last mile I probably ran half and walked half.

The worst part was my feet! The shoes I have are awesome but I bought them when the babies were just a couple months old and apparently my feet have shrunk ALOT recently! My shoes are very big and I could feel my feet slipping the whole way. I wore the same shoes and socks last Saturday for my long run and had no problem and have a feeling my feet got smaller in the last week. (I know that sounds crazy but when I lost weight in high school my feet did the same thing. I went down a whole shoe size! It was like one day I woke up and my shoes didn’t fit! Crazy, I know!) After the tenth mile every time I ran the bottoms of my feet would burn. It was terrible!

But by the 12th mile I felt so awesome! (not physically but mentally) I knew I was accomplishing something amazing and all I could think about was Lew and LB and Daisy! I thought about how proud they would be of me and how one day I would get to tell them what I had done! When I saw the 13th mile marker tears filled my eyes and I was so proud of what I had done. All the pain was worth it!

I was also so very thankful for my friends Lindsay and Lindsay for being at the finish line waiting on me! It was so awesome to have someone from home cheering me on at the finish line!

I had to sit down!!!

All in all it was an awesome experience and I think I did pretty awesome to have had twins 7 months ago!