Monday, November 19, 2012

Half Marathon!!

Yep so first off I suck at the whole 30 days of "Thankful" posts.....ummmm...I'll write more about that later!

Sunday I did my half marathon, it was my 3rd half marathon and my 1st one since having Annabel.

This course was actually the same one I did for my first time, my time was 2 hours and 47 minutes.

The second half marathon I did was 5 months after that (Annika was 16 months old) and I did it in 2 hours and 27 minutes.

Yesterday I ran the half marathon in 2 hours and 21 minutes!!!  I was so thrilled with my time!

I woke up at 4:30am to get ready.


Yes I am wearing a skirt. I've had two relatives on Facebook comment on me wearing a skirt.  I buy them from runningskirts.com.  I have two, this chevron one that I have on in the picture and a black and white hounds-tooth one.  They're pricey so I figured if I stuck with black and white prints that I could wear any shirt I want with them.  I like them because they don't ride up like shorts do and since it's so hot here it's better than wearing capris or those little short shorts.  I don't always feel comfortable wearing really short spandex-y shorts.  The skirt is perfect!

I got to St. Pete around 5am and sat in my car for about an hour.  I played on Facebook, ate a banana, filled up my Gatorade in my fuel belt packs and just tried to relax.  Around 6am I decided to go out toward the starting line so I could use the port-o-potty (which I hate using!!) because the lines are always super long for those.

After that I ate another banana, a Wasa toast with sunflower seed butter (I prefer it to peanut butter) and drank a few sips of Gatorade.  I ended up talking to two other girls that came alone to the race and we were freezing!!!  The race starts right on Tampa Bay and it felt like the winds were around 40 degrees and I had a skirt on!

At the starting line I said good-bye to the two girls I was talking to and met up with another girl who came alone and had a Garmin GPS watch like me. It was my first race with the watch and I was excited to keep track of my pace on my own.  I wanted to keep all my miles under 11 minutes in order to beat my previous time.

I felt extremely good the first 8 or so miles.  Around that time I saw my cousin who came out and I had no idea she was coming!

After that I realized that my shoes were a bit warn out and that I should have probably gotten new shoes months ago.  I would figure that $150 shoes would last me longer than 8 months but I've been running so much lately that the cushion by the ball of my feet was just gone.  I ended up with two HUGE blisters on the inside/bottom part of the balls of both my feet.  I also have the 3rd toe on each foot that had the toenails turn totally black.  Sooooo painful!  I ripped my shoes off my feet when I got home and I plan on going to a running store down the street to buy new shoes on Black Friday!

My cousin got a picture of me crossing the finish line!


I look so angry when I run!  The pictures the actual photographers on the course got of me are awful!!  I look like an angry bitch! 

Afterwards my cousin took me out to breakfast which was wonderful because I was starving!!  It was such good food too and I'm still so glad she came out to watch me :-)

Now a day later I'm trying to figure out what to do to my poor toes so that these nails don't hurt in shoes (the actual toe nails are raised because I have blood blisters underneath them, yeah...it's awful).  I've already soaked them in epsom salts like three times and some of the soreness is going away.

I was going to train for the half marathon here in Sarasota but it's going to be right around the time we close on our house and I don't want the stress of both things at the same time.  I'm considering the Rock N Roll half marathon which I think is in February and it's also in St. Pete.  We'll see what I'm feeling up for!!

1 comment:

  1. Congrats on your half marathon!! I'm so envious. I'm a new runner and doing my first 5k on Thanksgiving. I'd love to be able to run a half someday!

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