Half Marathon

 

On Saturday, May 1st my dad and I ran our first half marathon.  Were we crazy?… Yes.  What were we thinking?… I don’t know.  We are both glad that we did it, but it sure was painful.  The race was in Sacramento at the American River Parkway.  Our friend Kristina (who is a veteran at these things) ran it too.

Here are some before the race pictures, where we are much happier and better looking.

In this one, my Dad is standing in the insanely long line for the porta-potties and Kristina is the one on the far right in the hot pink shirt.

Just hanging out before we headed for the starting line.  I really don’t want to know what Ethan is doing.

There were about 3,500 people running the race, so it made for a lot of people while we were waiting for it to start.  James was a little picture happy while we were waiting, plus it started 20 minutes late, so we were standing in the crowded area for way too long.

     

Here’s the start/finish line from the other side before it started.  There was so much anticipation in the air, you could cut it with a knife.

We are finally off!  You can see my dad and me on the far side of the path, in the middle of the picture.  We were still happy at this point…  …and here we are at the end of the race.  Yes…that is me wanting to die and feeling like I’m going to.  Not one of my finest moments, but I was still running.

Now, please take note of what you see in this picture.  Here we are, with about .10 miles left to go.  We have just ran 13 miles and up ahead there is a hill!!  In the picture it doesn’t look like that big of a deal, but let me tell you….it was!!  What were they thinking?

 

The after race crash…

      

…it took a couple of days before I could even get up and down without being in severe pain.  I walked like a 90 year old woman.  Looking back, I’m glad I did it and I think it was fun, but those last two miles I swore I would never do this again…We will see :)