This week has flown by – December has flown by. Figured it was time for a quick update.
Last weekend Jeremy and I headed to Las Vegas so I could run the Rock-n-Roll Half Marathon with my brother Scott and sister-in-law Kim. The course is flat and runs along the strip, so we all figured that we could get personal records there. A big issue with that – I was dumb enough to have not run for the prior six weeks. Good thing stupidity runs in the family, Scott was in the exact same boat. And lucky for Kim, she injured herself so she wasn’t going to run it.
So Jeremy and I headed out without kids for the first time in a year and lived the high life in Vegas. We pretty much were back in our room and asleep by 10pm. Small children who are teething = waking up all night long. No children for parents = uninterrupted sleep. Yeah, we have become those people. *sigh*
Anticipating the race sucked. I pretty much was convinced I was going to need a wheel chair following it. My whole goal was to just run the damn thing, at this point I didn’t care about my time.
And there were 44,000 people running this race. Wait. Let me write that again.
44,000.
We couldn’t even get into our starting corral because there were bodies packed together. An unintentional benefit was that it kept us warm because it was in the upper 30s for the race (which is at night).
Since Scott was as smart as I was, we just stuck together for the majority of the race. It was pretty cool running along the strip and enjoying all the crazy lights of Vegas. Scott broke off from me around mile 7 to use the bathroom (he is worse than a little kid), but I have to give him credit because he caught me at mile 10. I was doing great until mile 9 and then my legs were starting to scream. Basically getting from mile 10 to the finish was a sheer force of will on my part. Scott stayed with me until mile 12 where he said that he wanted to push it through the end, to which I replied, “You have fun with that. I just want to keep putting one foot in front of the other.”
I kept going, kept running, got to the big spotlight at mile 13 where it looked like it was the end. And it wasn’t. I kept going and based on my watch, I ran 13.3 miles. Apparently other people had the same issue, too, so not sure what was up there. But I did it. Not only did I do it, I did it in 2 hours, 17 minutes. Not too shabby!!!
And it only took me four days to walk normally again.