Well, I Survived

This past weekend I ran my first half marathon. It was the Colfax Half Marathon in Denver, Colorado. To say I was nervous and a bit unprepared would be putting it lightly. Training for races is hard and time consuming and with vacations, sicknesses, Brian being gone, bad bouts with shin splints, and 2 little kids that don't like to go more than 3 miles, it was tough to train. The furthest I was able to run during training was 9.6 miles. So I was nervous!  But I was determined to do it and so when race day suddenly showed up I went with the mentality "Just CROSS the FINISH line!". 

I was so lucky to run the race with so many friends. Melissa, my good friend here, my good friend Jessica from Omaha, her best friend from Idaho, Jennifer, my good friend Taylor from Omaha, and not pictured, Bobby a good high school friend that now lives in Boulder. It was a early 6:45 am start time.

There were a ton of runners. We're talking 18,000 runners. It was madness!

We were corral O. So needless to say we waited to start 30 minutes after the first group left. It was super nerve-wracking!

Ready to start! I was all about the thumbs up this morning, apparently!

Mile 3 was run through the Denver Zoo which was really neat but there were hardly any animals out which was disappointing!

The sun was bright. And in our eyes most of the run.

I think this was at about mile 5? Trying to stay motivated, haha!

Running through the Aurora Fire Station!

I hit a wall at about mile 8 and my body just wanted to be done. I pushed through and although I walked a lot more than I wanted to those last couple miles I finished all 13.1 miles! 2:35 was my official race time which was way slower than I anticipated but I think all of that walking at mile 9 really slowed down my pace.

SO happy to be done!! You can't really see how much pain I'm in but man oh man did I hurt!

We did it!!

I knew we were near a Caribou coffee so I figured I earned a caramel cooler.

And then a nice big beer at lunch at the Rockyard in Castle Rock.

I'm so glad I set this goal and accomplished it. I definitely didn't do as well as I wanted to but I finished and that was all that mattered. I'm still nursing some pretty sore muscles but I'm excited to get back out there and complete a couple more races this summer. I think I'm sticking to 5k and 10ks though, this half marathon business is tough! :)