So, late last year my sweet-crazy-adorable friend expressed an interest in running a half-marathon. I was thrilled, someone to train with, laugh with, moan about my aching muscles/joints with, why yes please, sign me up! We set about finding a spring race and decided on the Country Music Half Marathon in Nashville. It is a big race, of which I am not usually a fan, but thought would be a good experience for her/me.
We started training in January and I thought we did awesome. We built mileage slowly, avoiding injuries and had a great time learning what worked for us. We even did a decent (or so we thought) amount of hill work.
Well, race day was last weekend and holy smokes, that was by far the hilliest run I have ever done. Literally, at the crest of EVERY SINGLE HILL you could see the valley as well as the crest of the next one.....for 13.1 looooong miles. It was a little disheartening...and challenging but nonetheless we got it done. Seeing our smiling families at mile 7 helped tremendously. A potty break around mile 10 gave us a much needed push to the finish. I cannot say we finished as strong as I would have liked, we DID cross that finish line a little over 2 and a half hours after we started.
The crawl back through the hot, sweaty port-a-potty lined crowd to our shuttle was absolutely BRUTAL, the smell, the exhaustion, the cramping muscles, the smoking (yes people who just ran 13.1 miles were smoking), the puking, it all got to be a bit much and we finally found a softish patch of grass to collapse upon and stretch our very tight muscles. Eventually we limped to the worlds coldest shuttle bus and shivered our way back to our car.
Not a race I am in any hurry to do again but I (we) will 13.1 again in November, God willing.
No comments:
Post a Comment