Half Marathon

Well we did it!!

I'm extremely sore today but it was worth it. It was great. For those of you who follow the blog regularly, you know that last time I did a half marathon I trained for it. Like really trained. Stuck to the schedule, and did all my runs. Trained for it.

This time I did not...I made a decision a few months back, that I was going to walk the half marathon with my mom. I figured this would be easy. It's walking, right?? But I was wrong!! They put a time limit on walking it (or it seemed like they did) and I was nervous. My mom had been training, really well, and was doing around a 17-18 minute mile. The time limit seemed like you had to do a 13:44 minute mile or you would get "booted" off the course and not get a medal. That made me nervous. Not for me, but for my mom. She had been training since January 12 for this thing and I wanted her to finish and get her medal.

I asked her a few weeks ago if we could try a walking/jogging combination. We could walk for 3 minutes, and then jog for 30 seconds. She said she was willing to give this a shot. Not trying to sound mean, but I didn't think she could/would keep this up. I thought we would do it for the beginning and then she would want to just walk, which would have been fine, but she proved me wrong.

She was AMAZING!! I even 'cheated' her and had her jogging for more than 30 seconds sometimes and she was awesome. She just did it. No questions asked and she rocked! We did the first mile in 13:44 exactly. We slowed down for the second mile to 14 minutes, but then picked it up for the 3rd and 4th and were up to a 13 minute mile pace - WALKING and some jogging! That's awesome if you ask me.

We did slow down a bit at the end, but not by much. There were stretches where I'd ask my mom to tell me when we'd stop running. We'd jog for as long as she could and I'd count out the seconds and we'd jog for almost 2 minutes! For not training and being 10 miles in, that's almost unbelievable. But she did it. I'm so proud of her.

There ended up not being a time limit, per se, so we could have gone slower, but I'm so glad we pushed ourselves. We finished, side by side, in 3 hours, 12 minutes. That breaks down to about a 14 minute 45 second mile. That's awesome. The fastest I think my mom did a mile during training was around 16 minutes. That's cutting more than a minute off her time for THIRTEEN whole miles!

We finished by running to the finish. We ran for the last minute of the race and crossed the finish line within 1 second of each other and I'm so glad we did it together. So glad.

Nick and my sister also did the half marathon, along with my brother in law Dave, and our friend Dave. A lot more people we know did the half too, but these are the people I rode with or am related to that finished.

They all did awesome. I was really proud of Nick. He's been catching a lot of slack lately from his family and some friends thinking that he is out of shape or too 'big' of a guy to run a half marathon so he wanted to do well. He rocked. I feel bad for him because it bothers him when everyone says this stuff, and he is in great shape. He can run really really well and he did amazing.

Here are our official finish times:

Meg - 3:12:22
Mom - 3:12:23
Ang - 1:58:53
Nick - 2:09:11
Dave (brother-in-law) - 1:54:02
Dave (friend) - 2:41:38

So we all did awesome!! I'm so proud of all of us. We had a great time and who knows, we all might do another one.

Nick had a great idea. We should make a team and do the relay next year. Then we'd only have to do 6.5 miles instead!!

Definitely something to think about...