Gorgeous.

Great, huh? Don't I look happy and wonderful? Yeah, that's me after 13.1 miles this morning. A very very hard 13.1 miles. The entire saga is on the other blog, but I'll briefly summarize here.

So, as most of my blog readers know by now, today was the Louis and Clark 1/2 Marathon out in St. Charles. A while ago a friend decided she wanted to do a 1/3 marathon so we've been training together over the past few months. I think we started running back in May for it, but then with Germany and a bad bout with shin splints that turned into stress fractures in my shin, we didn't get to run most of June and part of July. In any event, in a cruel twist of fate, she sprained/strained her knee last week playing soccer so couldn't run today. Unfortunately I hadn't really trained to run the race fast, I just wanted to run it to finish with her. I really wasn't concerned about my time or anything, I just wanted to be with her for encouragement, etc. throughout the race. Then when I found out this week she couldn't run it all got turned upside down. I didn't want to do worse then I did back in April (I ran it in 2:09 in April), but I wasn't prepared to run faster.

Long story short: We woke up at 5am, got out to the race a bit after 6am. The race started at 7am and I finished 1 hour, 58 minutes and 40 seconds later!!! YES!! I actually beat my last time and made it under 2 hours!!! I can't even express how excited/stunned/proud I am. I NEVER thought I would beat 2 hours, much less after not training for it. Granted, I feel like I was run over by a very very very large bus and at the end of the race I had to have Cody come into the Finisher's Area because I thought I was having an asthma attack - but I DID IT! I can't really move right now and I can hardly make it up the stairs (Cody had to help me put on my jeans this afternoon) because my hips hurt so bad (all that moving back and forth much faster then I'm used to), but I MADE IT! As you can tell I'm quite excited! Of course, right now I never wnat to run again, much less a marathon, but we'll see how I feel in a few days. :)