Catching up!

So it has been a week since my half marathon, and almost 2 weeks since my last post! Don't know why writing seems so painstakingly hard right now. Everytime I sit down to write, I find my mind wandering extremely quickly. So before that happens lets get down to business... on sunday I ran in the Rock N Roll Half Marathon. The race started at 630AM, for the week run up to the race I cut my mileage in half and was doing my training at 5/530AM everyday. I was in bed by 830pm on Saturday and woke up at 430AM Sunday. I put down a bagel, a big mug of coffee, and an energy gel before heading down to get a cab at 515AM. I actually ran into a buddy just getting home from the night... I did start questioning what I was doing! The event was HUGE! Much bigger than I expected. There were 18000 participants, just look at the line for the porto-potties in the video below! One thing that pissed me off was all the celebrity cameo's a the event. It is a sad state of our culture when all the "celebrities" were just reality stars, a bunch of "no-talent-ass-clowns" just like Michael Bolton talks about in office space. Seriously, can we please stop promoting these people who don't actually work, that are paid just to go to events! I am constantly getting in arguments with people who talk about watching the Jersey Shore or any of that "Real Housewife" crap. I am happy to say that he biggest cheers from the crowd came for the olympic runner! So anyways, back to the race... I started out with the 1hr 25min pace group. I felt really good for about 5 miles, then I had to make a decision to either kill myself for as long as possible or pull back and let the group go ahead of me. I obviously went with the latter. But because I pulled back I was able to recover after about 2 miles and really crank it in the last 5 miles. As you can tell from the pictures above I was hurting by the end. I tell the story about how we turned the bend and I could see the finish I gunned it trying to catch the 2 guys ahead of me. Lets just say I started sprinting about a full minute too soon! It at least allowed me to die and then sprint again at the end! My time was 1 hour 27 minutes and 36 seconds. My goal was to break 1:30, and I think I left it all out there. It was kinda funny actually going through the finish... they corral you, pass out "finisher" medals (hilarious to somebody who used to get medals for actually winning... very reminiscent of the "participant" awards you would get back in grade school!), banana's, water, damp towel, and photo booths! I ended up sitting on the corner watching people finish for about 10 minutes... it was kinda cool to think i placed 162 out of 18,000, 28th in my division of 1200ish. By that time it was 8AM, and I am not going to lie, I felt pretty awesome about having ran 13.1 miles by that time in the morning! I kinda get why so many people get hooked to this stuff. I was able to find the pace setter for the 125 group, he gave me some good training tips and thinks that 3hrs is definitely doable if I really kill the next 2 months. Overall it was a successful event

This week has been a recovery week for sure. I only ran 4 days and those runs were short and felt like I had cement legs the entire time! Today I did 9 miles in about an hour, so I think I am back into it and next week is going to be my first week of speed work and end with an 18 mile run.

As far as fund raising, we are past $450! Thank you so much to everyone who has donated, and if you haven't yet please follow the link at the top of the blog!

Happy running!