Saturday, Part 1

So there wasn't much posting going on here last week, mostly because I spent my waking hours freaking out about Saturday. Well, I didn't freak out 24/7, but it was close.

Saturday was the big day--the St. Jude Half Marathon! Saturday was also Satchel's first basketball game! Saturday was the last Rock-n-Romp of the season! Oh, and Saturday was the last eaTABLE of the year!

Now, I pride myself on being a multi-tasker, but dang! In my defense, I hadn't planned to run the half again when I scheduled Rock-n-Romp. I'd never imagined Satchel would be playing basketball, and I tried really, really hard to find another Saturday in December for our fun dinner party.

But! I survived! It was actually a really fun day. I'm not going to squeeze it all in one blog post, so I'll just start with the half marathon.

Mile 9 in Overton Park. Ashley saw the photographers on the forklift and grabbed my hand.

Having actually trained this year, I went into the race about a million times more confident than I did last year. Also having Ashley running with me this year made it a much more pleasurable experience. Not just because I actually had someone to talk to, but because she was having the best time ever and it made me happy.

We were a tad nervous about actually achieving our goal of 2:16 for the race since we'd been training at a much slower speed. Since Ashley gets a little more competitive than me during races, I was also worried about her leaving me in her dust. However, by the time we lined up we had agreed to have fun, stick together, and really push ourselves.

Photo by Jamie Harmon. Captures the spirit of our race perfectly!

Ashley also warned me that she was going to high five every person that offered their hand. I told her it was fine, and in the end she was true to her word. It was really cute. (I gave a few high fives but then I started to feel weird about germs!)

This year I also insisted that Warren and the boys come to the park to cheer me on at mile 9. It really gave me something to look forward to and nothing beat seeing their smiling faces. I thought it was really funny when Satchel said, "We've been waiting FOREVER!"

After our strong finish!

We finished at 2:26, which was about ten minutes off of our goal, but just fine by us. We ran hard the entire 13.1 miles, and actually picked up our speed for the last three! It was about 14-15 minutes better than my time last year, so I was happy about that too.