My first race!

So I know many of you have been patiently awaiting me to tell you all about how my race went on Saturday. I've been meaning to blog about it, but it just seems as one thing after another has kept me too busy to take the time to make an entry! When I started this blog I was hoping to keep it as a daily thing and now it is becoming more like a weekly thing. I really don't want to give up on this though and am going to try harder to at least do a couple posts each week!

Anyways... my race went great! I was very nervous and excited and a million other emotions leading up to it the few days before, and especially the few hours. I found out that it was supposed to rain on race day and began to worry immediately that this would affect my time or that I would slip and break something or any number of other things. I knew right away though that I was going to have to prepare myself to run anyways because a little water wasn't about to stop me. The night before my race, my mom said that since her and my dad were asked to watch my sister's kids this weekend that they were just going to stay home with the boys and my son to keep them out of the bad weather and let them play here together. I was a little sad about that but I just said okay and left it at that. I really wanted my son to be there cheering me on and it would have meant a lot to have my mom and dad there, too. I picked up my friend Ashley and brought her with me and my brother who lived in the same city the race was held in just drove over and met us there so luckily I did have some support.

As I stated recently, my only real goal for this race was to run it in under 40 minutes since that's what my time seemed to be here jogging around my neighborhood. Well when I ran across the finish line I saw 37:26 and knew I had blown my time out of the water! Of course I didn't start at the starting line when the timer went off to begin the race I was way in the back of the pack, so once I got home and checked my official chip time, I saw that I actually did it in 36:17!!! :) I cam in 165th place out of 310 who were timed (over 4,000 ran that day) and was 72nd out of the 175 females. Not too shabby for my first race I don't think!

There was a health and fitness expo going on nearby after the race and so of course I stopped by there and got to check out lots of cool gear and other neat information, etc. I'm glad I'm broke, otherwise I would have spent a lot of money there. lol. I did find out about another race there though and am really excited to check it out. It's some sort of 5k Color run where you start out wearing a white shirt and every k you get a certain color of powder thrown at you! By the end of the race you are so colorful and at the finish line there are tons of people there throwing all of the colors at you! lol. The video they showed me of it looked like so much fun. It's in February so not too far from now! Here is the website... they have it in all different cities so maybe there is one near you soon! http://thecolorrun.com/

Anyways here are some pictures from just before my race...

These are of course proofs I stole off the internet of me actually crossing the finish line! :D

and this is a video taken moments after I finished running by my brother, lol. He was trying to get me to advertise the water i was drinking. haha. You may notice I give my friend Ashley a high 5, too. :D

and pictures from after finishing and then checking out the expo...

Yeah so it was all in all a great run and I'm so glad I did it. I did far better than I expected and after announcing my times I found out that some of the people who were part of the reasons I wanted to try running in the first place did their first 5k in quite a bit longer time frame. Not to say "haha I did better than you did at first" but wow I am really impressed with myself after learning that! lol.